A growing number of local bars have announced a boycott of Yuengling after one of the beer company’s chief executives endorsed Donald Trump for president.

“Our guys are behind your father,” owner Dick Yuengling Jr., told Eric Trump during a tour of the Yuengling brewery last week, according to The Reading Eagle. “We need him in there.”

The reaction was swift. The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage in the U.S., Jim Obergefell, took to social media and proclaimed he would no longer be drinking the beer. Dito’s Bar manager and Hillary Clinton campaign volunteer Dito Sevilla began sending out the message.

“I started at the gay bars because it was easiest—I know all of the managers,” Sevilla says, though he’s since branched out to other establishments.

JR’s Bar manager David Perruzza posted a video of himself removing the Yuengling beer tap. It has since been viewed nearly 110,000 times and shared more than 1,500 times on Facebook since last Thursday.

“This is a gay bar and I am a gay bar manager, and we do serve Yuengling,” Perruzza says in the video, before calling Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, “one of the biggest idiots ever and very anti-gay.” He then unscrews the Yuengling tap. “We’re saying goodbye to Yuengling at JR’s. Just so you know, when people support things that don’t support us, then we don’t support them.”


Since then, other bars on 17th Street NW and elsewhere in the city and Virginia have joined in the boycott. “I was amazed at the speed at which people jumped on board,” says Sevilla. He calls using their spending power “the fastest, most efficient way for us to express ourselves.”

The current establishments boycotting the beer company include JR’s, Level One, Dupont Italian Kitchen, Floriana, Dito’s Bar, Green Lantern, Annie’s Paramount Steakhouse, Cobalt, Town, Town Patio, Number 9, Trade, 18th and U Duplex Diner, The Dirty Goose, Kangaroo Boxing Club, Freddy’s Beach Bar, D.C. Eagle, Nelly’s, Larry’s Lounge, and Ziegfeld’s, according to Sevilla.

The movement isn’t limited to the D.C. metro area, either. Brian Sims, a Pennsylvania state representative and the first openly gay legislator, called for his city of Philadelphia to stop selling the beer in a Facebook post.

Sevilla says that the bars are handling their current stock of Yuengling in a variety of ways. Town, for instance, dumped its supply, while “bars that are less apt to write it off sold the Yuengling and then donated from every beer to the Hillary campaign,” he says. Annie’s sent back their order as it was delivered.

“It’s so easy to pick another beer. We have 1,000 products to choose from,” says Sevilla. “It creates a mini business for people who aren’t giving out kooky endorsements.”

Indeed, local brewery DC Brau is one manufacturer that has seen an uptick in sales since the boycott began. “We are seeing that if they are dropping Yuengling, we are getting calls,” says a DC Brau spokesperson. “It’s very nice, we’re flattered.”

Update: Stoney’s was originally on the list of bars boycotting Yuengling. The bar clarified that, while it has not carried the beer for about five years, the decision is not a political one.

Filed Under: donald trump, election 2016, jr's, town,