America's oldest brewery

This past August, as part of the motorcycle road trip, b and I went to the Yuengling Brewery. Our tour guide was very proud that Yuengling recently won a lawsuit with Molson, for the right to be called America's oldest continuously running brewery. Molson has been going longer, but Yuengling is the oldest in the US, so they just can't say "North America's oldest brewery". In spite of this silliness, the tour was the best I have ever been on (better than New Glarus, Capital, Heineken, Miller, and Kronenbourg^†). What made the tour better was the history. As with all the others, they tell you how they brew beer. I already knew this on all the tours except Heineken. Although I am still interested in how pasteurization interacts with carbonation, none of the tour guides could answer any question about this except New Glarus. The Yuengling tour was full of information on how the brewing industry evolved over the last 200 years. For example, what did a brewery do during prohibition (actually they still brewed porters and sold them to pharmacies for their medicinal quality). Also how did they keep beer cold (both in transit and to brew a lager - at approx 40 degrees F). The answer here was caves, which were part of the tour:

In addition, the brewery was actively canning. I have never seen the line running at a brewery. Apparently it is unsanitary to have random visitors around the canning machinery. Yuengling let us in (so maybe a skunked lager is the fault of some tourist with dirty shoes). Below is a picture of the can roller coaster. Notice that the cans don't have tops, which they add after filling and then laser seal the top on.

Another highlight was the keg filling part of the caves, where the guide told us about the big German men throwing kegs around, and how they used to seal them by hammering a bung^‡ into the full keg. They no longer do this, but had a supply of a few thousand bungs left from the old days, and give them out on the tour. A great souvenir.

^† I didn't actually go on the Kronenbourg tour, they only had one a day and I got there too late. So I can only really say the Yuengling tour has better hours.

^‡ Yes, the place the bung goes in is called the bung hole, pervert.