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Friday, January 23, 2009

A SITE TO SEE (Part 2)

Part 2: The numbers don’t lie!

The next stop on our blogger’s tour of America’s Oldest Brewery is the bottle shop at the Pottsville plant. The fillers in this department typically run for 9.5 hours Monday-Friday. This means, when you come and visit the brewery on a weekday, the bottle shop is in full operation for both the 10 am and the 1:30 pm tours. The bottles arrive at the brewery already in their cases. There is a conveyer belt system that sends the empty bottles to the shop and brings the full cases back to the warehouse. The bottles are unpacked, washed, filled, pasteurized, labeled, and repacked in this department.

The bottle shop runs either cans or bottles everyday. The machinery shares a line that leads to the pasteurizer, making it impossible to run both cans and bottles at the same time. When you think about the time you spend enjoying your Yuengling after you open it; the speed at which that same bottle is filled is amazing. The bottle filler fills 452 twelve ounce bottles in one minute! At this rate the bottle shop is able to produce 10,735 cases in a 9.5 hour shift. In 2006 Yuengling built a new room adjacent to the bottle shop and installed a new can filler. The can filler is even faster than the bottle filler! Filling 775 cans per minute, the shop can produce over 18,000 cases of cans in a 9.5 hour shift.

To come see this machinery in operation and get the full story on the bottle shop, visit the brewery for a free tour. Pottsville tour times are 10am and 1:30pm Monday thru Friday. Saturday hours begin in April and run through December. All visitors are required to wear completely closed footwear, no exceptions.

Please visit Yuengling.com for complete tour information before you plan your visit.

Below - Cases awaiting the return of full Lager bottles.

Below - Bottle Filler

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