{"id":903,"date":"2013-06-10T08:03:05","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T13:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=903"},"modified":"2013-06-10T08:03:05","modified_gmt":"2013-06-10T13:03:05","slug":"a-tale-of-two-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/?p=903","title":{"rendered":"A tale of two cities………"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Iron<\/a>Two of the countries greatest golf courses are located in Pennsylvania: \u00a0Oakmont, which is just outside of Pittsburgh hosts the US Open in 2016; the other course, located in Philadelphia, hosts\u00a0this month\u2019s US Open.\u00a0 While both cities are different in design, both are historic, traditional and highly regarded.<\/p>\n

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Near Pittsburgh, and\u00a0not far from Philadelphia, are two of America’s oldest breweries:\u00a0 Iron City Brewing Co. (Pittsburgh Brewing) and Yuengling.<\/p>\n

Like many distributors, I once wrote to David Casinelli at Yuengling, hoping to establish an interest level while working at Glazer’s.\u00a0 Dave was kind enough to write back and explained that Yuengling had no plans to expand west.\u00a0 I responded to Dave\u2019s letter informing him that it was the other way around,\u00a0Glazer’s was expand east and would eventually be buying distributorships in their<\/i> markets.\u00a0 This, by the way, has transpired.<\/p>\n

Later, I was contacted by Tony Ferraro from Pittsburgh Brewing, asking if Glazer’s had any interest in representing their products.\u00a0 We certainly did, and several of us were invited to spend a weekend at the brewery.\u00a0 We took a tour of the facility and learned the history of Pittsburgh Brewing. We had the opportunity to attend the annual “Dapper Dan” dinner honoring a local sports celebrity, and visited with golfing legend Arnold Palmer.\u00a0 Quite a treat for us.\u00a0 At the time of our visit, the brewery was packaging their beer in aluminum bottles.\u00a0 This was exciting as no one else at the time was\u00a0marketing this package.<\/p>\n

Pittsburgh Brewing had been struggling when Allen Bond bought the company in the early 1980’s. Once he purchased G. Heileman, Bond\u00a0combined the two\u00a0together.\u00a0 Out of the bankruptcy of G. Heileman, Pittsburgh then was purchased by Michael Carlow, who was eventually convicted of bank fraud and other felonies.\u00a0 When Glazer\u2019s came along, Joe Piccirilli, had control of the brewery.\u00a0 He too, ended up filing for bankruptcy as sales continued to fall.\u00a0 Twenty\u00a0years ago,\u00a0Pittsburgh’s volume was around 1 million bbls., by the mid 2000, it was less than\u00a0400K bbls.<\/p>\n

Recently, an investment company out of New York, United Growth Partners, purchased the Pittsburg Brewing, and\u00a0moved the production of the beer to\u00a0Latrobe, home of the old Rolling Rock Brewery now owned by City Brewing.\u00a0 Sales continue to decline. Today the brewery sells less than\u00a0100K bbls\u00a0annually, and given the issues over the last 20 years, it’s local support has mostly disappeared.<\/p>\n

Yuengling, family owned and controlled since its founding, is now the fourth largest brewing company in the US.\u00a0 It never put itself in financial trouble, moved to craft-style products years ago, and positioned its price points giving the consumer value and quality.\u00a0 As a beer distributor, Yuengling is one of the countries most desirable brands and it is only in a hand full of states.<\/p>\n

Somehow, I expect that if one were attending the US Open at Merion, you would be able to buy a Yuengling, but one wonders, if you go to the 2016 US Open at Oakmont, if\u00a0Iron City will\u00a0even be around.\u00a0 A tale of two cities…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Yuengling_logo\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two of the countries greatest golf courses are located in Pennsylvania: \u00a0Oakmont, which is just outside of Pittsburgh hosts the US Open in 2016; the other course, located in Philadelphia, hosts\u00a0this month\u2019s US Open.\u00a0 While both cities are different in design, both are historic, traditional and highly regarded. Near Pittsburgh, and\u00a0not far from Philadelphia, are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2xRTi-ez","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":922,"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions\/922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beerbusinessunplugged.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}