This bums me out to no end… I recently moved to upstate NY, and though facetious I often said a good half of the reason for the move was a steady supply of Yuengling. Dang.
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Yuengling is basically a gateway beer to better tasting craft beer. A stepping stone from Bud/Miller if you will…
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It’s so hard be consistent and socially conscious.
Fk society - I’m all for saving a buck immediately, dn the consequences!
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Once again, my hometown shows it is a total basket of deplorable and stupid. God, I grew up about 5 blocks away from the brewery. No more hometown brew for me!
Thanks for the link, @baker2gs; I’ve sent it to my sibs. No more Yuengling’s at family gatherings for us!
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You misspelled “impossible”.
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Alcohol is the cause of destruction of countless lives and families and directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in the US per year, and a contributor to tens of thousands more due to health issues.
But hey, don’t let that get in the way of feeling morally superior for refusing one brand of alcohol because they support a despised politician. 
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I’m pretty upset, this brand is my drug of choice. I wonder what to switch to?
Weird, I’ve never heard of this beer. Guess its not in California?
But I’m thoroughly not prepared to boycott a product based on the owner’s endorsement of Donald Trump, for a couple of reasons. One is that an endorsement for Trump isn’t a singularly ideological position like endorsing, say, David Duke. David Duke campaigns specifically on a platform of racism, so endorsing him is specifically endorsing racism. Donald Trump is probably a sexual predator, but most of his platform has nothing to do with it. You can argue that his “build a wall” silliness puts him on a par with David Duke, but personally I don’t buy that and no one was calling for punishing Trump supporters before pussygate. The reasons this brewery owner wants Trump to win is probably that he feels that his industry is over-regulated and over-taxed, and that the economy isn’t getting the stimulation he thinks it should. I’m not necessarily saying I agree with him, but he has very good reasons to vote for Trump, who has a much better chance of being transformative in those areas than does Hillary Clinton. He’s no more endorsing sexual predation by voting for Trump than I’m endorsing bribery when I vote for Hillary Clinton.
And another reason I’m not going to boycott a product based solely on an endorsement for Trump is that the partisan divide has gotten pretty out of hand in this country. I’ve mostly gotten used to the public discourse being poisoned to the point where people can’t talk about political differences without shouting, but it looks like we’re flirting with entering an era where one side actively wants to punish the other. The Trump supporters want to put Hillary Clinton in jail, and the Clinton supporters want to treat all Trump supporters as racist sexual predators. We’re flirting with making the political divide even more extreme, where Clinton supporters aren’t welcome in certain stores or restaurants and the two sides don’t speak to each other at all. Maybe some people wouldn’t mind that? But I sure would, and I’m not prepared to make things worse, especially since at this point Hillary Clinton is pretty much guaranteed to win the election anyway.
And I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the people calling for a boycott here don’t actually know anyone who’s voting for Trump. If you live in the city that’s pretty easy to do. But I know lots of people who are voting for Trump, and news flash: they can be good, super intelligent people. Of course I’m not saying all of them are, but neither are all of Clinton’s supporters.
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I fixed that for you.
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You used to write an awful lot about the workingman…He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something is his right, not as your gift! Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy! That’s going to add up to something bigger than your privileges! Then I don’t know what you’ll do! Sail away to a desert island probably and lord it over the monkeys!
-Jedediah Leland, Citizen Kane.
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#OK, it looks like there is more than one thing going on here.
The environmental thing appears to be a typical case of an old-school business doing their thang, the government finds out they are violating regs that did not exist when the business started, the EPA makes the business clean up their act - all systems are acting as designed and desired. Yuengling did not even take this to court, they just fixed it. Michael Kiser presents this as Yuengling “[d]umping pollution into the Schuylkill and leaving it for someone else to clean up” which sure looks like politically motivated misrepresentation. Yuengling paid $10 million in cleanup costs (which I sincerely doubt the state used for pollution cleanup of course) and then spent even more retrofitting modern pollution controls into their Old Brewery and second PA brewery.
The union thing is different, and more likely to be an issue - although I’ll add my own spin, here, let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about the PA Teamsters, OK? We’re not talking garment workers or cigar makers or even brewery workers - we’re talking truck drivers with a long history of violent organized crime and worker intimidation. I see no evidence that Teamsters Local 830 (who began the dispute with Yuengling) is in any way currently engaged in illegal activities, but I don’t think it’s reasonable for people to assume that they are all about sweetness and light and that Dick Yuengling is automatically in the wrong here because union magic word. This needs more investigation but I will call this a real issue, with the caveat that it’s being spun pretty hard and I see no evidence (yet) that anyone took any real harm.
The tax thing is apparently like this: Philadelphia has something called Business Income and Receipts Tax, formerly known as the Business Privilege Tax, which is imposed on any person who engages in taxable activity inside or attributable to Philadelphia. (Just one of the many “extra” taxes they have - when I worked there, PA taxed my income three separate times with income tax, city wage tax, and special district tax because I worked in center city.) Yuengling has no activities and employs no staff in Philadelphia, but the Philly tax collectors found a beer distributor inside the city had records showing that they carried Yuengling. The city demanded to audit Yuengling’s books, and Dick Yuengling told them to go pound sand, he’s a wholly family owned enterprise with nothing to do with Philly, so Philly has no right to tax him or audit him. So the city guesstimated total sales based on the records of the one distributor, and came up with a $6.6 million dollar tax bill. I’m still not seeing where this is a case of Dick Yuengling being the problem. Philadelphia beer distributors buy beer from Pottstown and resell it to customers in Philly. Philadelphia says this gives them the right to tax the business in Pottstown, which is nonsense, and the original article seriously misrepresents what is going on.
So - what I see, given my present state of knowledge, is that Dick Yuengling is head of a family business that is gainfully employing lots of people doing healthy honorable work, but is also the kind of a reactionary right-winger you often find running PA businesses, and Michael Kiser is a left-wing political hatchetman who doesn’t employ anyone but instead drags people down by spinning the news.
I give the environmental thing a rating of “Good job, Yuengling”, the union thing a warning flag and a possible cause of concern, and the tax thing a rating of “Philly trying to finance their corrupt and inefficient government by extorting non-citizens.”
I give Dick Yuengling a rating of “typical deplorable PA voter” and Michael Kiser (goodbeerhunting) a rating of “propaganda pushing spinweasel”. No heroes here. Wayne Night (dailykos) writes a more balanced article, that is not actually about Yuengling, but about the decline of unions and the US regulatory environment that makes this possible. Still, he presents the statements of two mysterious workers who decline to be identified as having more weight than all the other employees of Yuengling, so it’s a little bit spinny too. Nonetheless I give him a “fair and balanced” rating, which is almost unheard of for dailykos.
OK, @baker2gs, @nungesser, @Malarkey, @wysinwyg, I’m done editing this thing now.
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I fixed it back for you. I’m nice like that.
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I suspect it’s evidence of a leadership style which isn’t going to be great for the brewery’s bottom line, in the long run.
So, we should all stop patronizing Home Depot as well as their CoFounder has endorsed Trump too. Orange is as Orange does.
Who shops at Home Depot? Lots of people.
Who drinks Yuengling beer? Hardly anybody.
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I have been working through a mixed six pack a friend gave me. Good stuff!
May those who love us love us.
And those that don’t love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn’t turn their hearts,
May he turn their ankles,
So we’ll know them by their limping.
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Lancaster milk stout is another underrated beer! Good stuff!
I drink so little Yuengling, even the good stuff, that my boycott would be useless. And a lot of other people I disagree with politically make things I consume. You have to be really bad to turn me off.
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