The Lion Brewery

The Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania was once one of the great brewing regions in America. At its peak in the late eighteen hundreds, this stretch of the Susquehanna River corridor was home to twenty-eight separate breweries, fed by immigrant communities, German, Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, who arrived to work the anthracite mines and brought their brewing traditions with them.

Of all of them, only one is still making beer. The Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre has survived Prohibition, the Depression, the collapse of the coal industry, and the national consolidation that wiped out hundreds of regional breweries in the mid-twentieth century.

The brewery traces its origins to nineteen oh five, when the Luzerne County Brewing Company built a brewhouse on land purchased from the Delaware and Hudson Railroad for one dollar. It renamed itself the Lion Brewery in nineteen eleven. When Prohibition hit in nineteen twenty, it shut down. When repeal came in nineteen thirty-three, new ownership relaunched it as The Lion Inc. and began brewing under the Gibbons name, honoring a local figure named Charles Gibbons. Through the nineteen forties the brewery was producing two hundred thousand barrels a year.

The critical moment came in nineteen seventy-four. Its larger local rival, the Stegmaier Brewing Company, which had been founded in eighteen fifty-seven by a German immigrant named Charles Stegmaier and had grown to half a million barrels annually before its decline, went out of business. Lion absorbed the Stegmaier brands. It was now the last brewery standing in a region that had once supported twenty-eight of them.

Today the Lion operates as a contract brewery, producing craft brands for regional clients while maintaining its own Stegmaier and Gibbons lines. The Stegmaier Porter has won gold medals at national competitions. The building itself dates to eighteen ninety-four, a Victorian brick industrial structure that has outlasted almost everything around it.