It’s only about an hour’s drive from Pottsville to Hershey, so you have wonder why it took so long for America’s oldest brewery and one of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturers to team up. In 2019, the two Pennsylvania powerhouses come together to create Yuengling Hershey’s Chocolate Porter.
That first batch of beer saw very limited distribution, but the 2020 batch was available across Yuengling’s entire 22-state footprint starting in late September. We grabbed a six-pack over the holidays and have just one left to tell you about.
We really expected to get slapped across the mouth with a Hershey’s bar. We thought the smell and taste of chocolate to dominate like Day of the Dead Chocolatl Stout by Cerveceria Mexicana, the most chocolatey beer we’ve sampled here at BeerWhere. We were wrong.
Yuengling Hershey’s Chocolate Porter is light, lively and oh-so smooth. It’s base is Yuengling’s Dark Brewed Porter, but the brewery doesn’t say how Hershey’s contribution makes it into the mix. Whatever the partners have done, it’s subtle, but it does add 20 more calories to the beer compared to the base-model porter.
This beer pours a deep chocolate brown and forms a head of fairly large bubbles that vanishes quickly. Sniffing the beer is like smelling the outer wrapper of a Hershey’s bar, not the bar itself. The taste is similar with chocolate coming through lightly on the finish instead of rushing to the front and filling your nose. Overall, it’s a very smooth, malty porter with just a light touch of chocolate. It’s easy to drink more than one.