CHAPTER TWO

“I Must Have Nothing But the Very Best”

LIKE MILWAUKEE, St. Louis began life as a frontier settlement, and, also like Milwaukee, it thrived in the heady go-go atmosphere that permeated mid-nineteenth century America. Its growth, too, boggled the imagination: 20,000 people in 1840; nearly 160,000 in 1857.

St. Louis shared another property with its Wisconsin cousin: Germans, thousands of them, arrived during the 1840s and 1850s. The city was “inundated with breweries, beer houses, sausage shops, Apollo gardens, Sunday concerts, Swiss cheese, and Holland herrings.” And, too, as in Milwaukee, lager flowed free. Nor, by the late 1850s, did most regret that fact. Nowhere, claimed one observer, had “the German influence been more . . . beneficially felt, than in the introduction of beer,” a beverage “well nigh universally adopted by the English speaking population; and the spacious bier halles and extensive gardens nightly show that the Americans are as fond of the Gambrinian liquid as are those who have introduced it.”

This was the city where eighteen-year-old Adolphus Busch decided to make his fortune. The beer baron later claimed that he loafed his way through the first few weeks after his arrival in St. Louis in 1857. In truth, Busch likely never idled a day in his life. Educated, multilingual, charming, and intelligent, he was an attractive asset to any employer, and he immediately found sales work at a commission house. But the young man had not come so far to work for another. In 1859, a scant two years after arriving in the United States, he and a partner opened their own brewing supply company, a shrewd move in a German-rich city whose forty breweries produced 200,000 barrels of beer each year and consumed a half million dollars’ worth of barley, hops, and other materials.

Busch’s foray into sales and supplies provided him with an opportunity to learn the business of brewing. Presumably he called on the men who operated the city’s smallest outfits—shops like Fortuna and Hickory, Pacific and Laclede, where the owners counted production in hundreds rather than thousands of barrels. But he focused his charm and salesmanship on the city’s success stories. On Second Street was St. Louis’s oldest lager brewhouse, Western Brewery, owned by Adam Lemp and his son William. Lemp had opened his doors in the early 1840s with a tiny twelve-barrel vat. During the next decade he purchased an otherwise undistinguished parcel of land whose main virtue was an extensive natural cave that eased the storage burden at his cramped facility. By the 1850s, the Lemps were making about five thousand barrels a year.

But Lemp’s operation was dwarfed by that of Julius Winkelmeyer, whose Union Brewery ranked as one of the nation’s largest. Winkelmeyer’s twenty employees brewed about fifteen thousand barrels of beer each year. His brick buildings filled much of Market Street between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets. Beneath lay an extensive series of lagering caves. A mile or so south on Eighteenth stood the Phoenix Brewery, the city’s second-largest operation, where twenty-five employees crafted thirteen thousand barrels of lager a year.

A short stroll across Market Street from Winkelmeyer’s took Busch to Joseph Uhrig’s Camp Spring Brewery. Uhrig’s fifteen hands and forty-horsepower steam engine made only about twelve thousand barrels, but the operation included a popular beerhall and a dance room. Uhrig’s profits had already purchased nine acres and a palatial summer home in Milwaukee, as well as regular visits to Germany.

Busch also met Eberhard Anheuser, owner of the much-troubled Bavarian Brewery on the city’s far south side. Anheuser acquired the Bavarian in 1859 as payment for debts owed him by its previous owners. It is not clear why he decided to hang on to the place. It’s not as if, at age fifty-four, he needed the headache of a failed brewery, not when the soap factory that he had coowned for nearly two decades had made him rich. Perhaps soap had lost its charms and he longed for a new challenge. Perhaps he yearned for the security of diversity. Or perhaps he was simply swept up in the spirit of the times, when new factories sprouted as if by magic and fortunes hung ripe for the picking. Whatever the reason, Anheuser took charge of the Bavarian. Presumably he possessed what the previous owners lacked: enough cash to keep the place going.

In 1860, he and a partner sold some three thousand barrels of beer. Whether, in the normal course of events, Anheuser would have survived the still shaky economy and the dominance of Winkelmeyer and Uhrig, is an unanswerable question. And a moot one, because in November of that year, “normal” fell by the wayside. Americans elected Abraham Lincoln president. A few weeks later, a convention of South Carolinians voted to secede from the Union.

Tension rattled St. Louis, a city divided against itself in a state wracked with conflict. Missouri had entered the Union as a slave state, and many residents owned slaves and identified with the Confederate cause. The core of Union support centered on the Germans living in and around St. Louis; they abhorred slavery as a threat to individual rights. President Lincoln understood that if Missouri fell to the Confederacy, he and his army would lose control of the Mississippi River, the main highway running deep into Confederate territory. He and his generals had to hold Missouri, and that meant keeping a grip on St. Louis with its wharves, warehouses, and vital rail links to the eastern United States.

Over the next few months, Union officials struggled to maintain order in a city riven by loathing and hatred. “I see nothing but ruin and starvation,” lamented one Confederate sympathizer, “and when it will end God only knows, our City is encompass’d with armed Goths and Vandels [sic], for they are Dutch [Deutsch, or Germans] or Poles that cannot speak our language and they are searching every carriage as it passes, and every house in the environs of the City for arms and ammunition . . . ” Eberhard Anheuser surely sighed with relief when federal troops seized control of the arsenal, a hulking structure filled with gunpowder and weapons that sat just two blocks from his brewery.

Amidst the turmoil, Adolphus Busch played the kind of hand that Joseph Schlitz and Valentin Blatz would have recognized: In March, he married Anheuser’s daughter Lilly (Adolphus’s older brother Ulrich, who also lived in St. Louis, married another Anheuser daughter on the same day). With that union, Busch committed himself to his adopted home.

He made a good choice at a good time. The war proved a godsend to the city’s beermakers: St. Louis swarmed with troops headed into or out of enemy territory, and with an endless stream of prisoners, wounded soldiers, refugees, escaped and freed slaves, and other bits of human flotsam and jetsam. Military clerks trudged from warehouse to wharf, from butcher shop to bakery, in search of supplies. Bricklayers, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and carpenters arrived. Soldiers guarded wharves, warehouses, and the arsenal, as well as the ring of fortifications that dotted the city’s western fringes. Everyone needed beer. “I never saw a city where there is as much drinking of liquor as here,” marveled a physician stationed with the Union army. “Everybody—almost—drinks. Beer shops and gardens are numerous.” No fan of drink, drinkers, or Catholics, the good doctor blamed the city’s sorry state on the Germans, who, he reported, clung “to their meerschaums & beer, and their miserable faith . . . ”

His disdain was lost on the multitudes. This was a war fought with beer. Military commanders banned intoxicants from camp and field, leaving lager—officially nonintoxicating—as the troops’ choice of drink. Military supply clerks contracted with hundreds of brewers to supply men with lager, which traveled better and lasted longer than ale. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers forged friendships and built camaraderie over tin cups of lager, an experience they carried home when the war ended.

Lager even received a stamp of approval from the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization that monitored the troops’ health. A USSC physician who studied camp diets reported that lager drinkers suffered less from diarrhea than did non—beer drinkers. Lager, he noted, “regulates the bowels, prevents constipation, and becomes in this way a valuable substitute for vegetables” (a food in short supply). “I encourage all the men,” added the doctor, to drink lager.

Good news for the nation’s brewers, another thousand of whom set up shop during the war. But old or new, they all paid a price for their success. In the summer of 1862, the cash-strapped Union Congress began taxing “luxury” items: billiard tables and playing cards, yachts and carriages, and liquor and beer. The legislation levied a tax of one dollar per barrel and required brewers to purchase a federal manufacturer’s license (one hundred dollars annually for those who produced more than five hundred barrels; half that for smaller makers). Over the next three years, the new Internal Revenue Department collected $369 million in taxes, nearly eight million of it from beer.

The German lager brewers, anxious to affirm their loyalty and patriotism (and to defeat the hated Slave Power, as it was called by Union supporters), paid. But they recognized that once imposed, the levy would never go away. Less than a month after Lincoln signed the tax law, a few dozen eastern brewers convened in New York City to ponder the new regulations. The group persuaded Congress to lower the rate to sixty cents a barrel. As the war dragged on, lawmakers hiked the tax back to a dollar; still, the brewers learned a valuable lesson: better to cooperate than to resist; to educate the nation’s lawmakers than to ignore them. That meeting in New York inspired the formation of the nation’s first trade and lobby organization of any kind, the United States Brewers’ Association.

In April 1865, Union and Confederate generals and their troops played out the final scene of the nation’s sad drama in the woods and fields near Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. In St. Louis, the lager-hungry supply clerks vanished and the troops mustered out. Refugees began the long journey south; masons and carpenters packed their tools and headed home.

Eberhard Anheuser’s brewery might not have survived the downturn. His partner had jumped ship in 1864, leaving the old man to manage the place alone. Therein lay the problem: No one would ever accuse Anheuser of being a master brewer; he knew soap, but the mysteries of beer presented an entirely different challenge. Yankee troops and laborers had been willing to drink his beer, but the discriminating Germans of St. Louis turned up their noses at his brew. And rightly so; why settle for the mediocre when any one of a dozen other brewers in the same neighborhood turned out fine lager for the same price?

Eberhard Anheuser had not succeeded in the rambunctious American economy because he was stupid. He knew that he needed help and he needed it now. And he knew just what form that help ought to take: his talented and charismatic son-in-law, who could charm the skin off a snake and sell it back to its owner. In 1865, Adolphus Busch purchased a share of the company. Nobody knew it then, but the changing of the guard had begun. One of the giants of American brewing had just stepped into place. Together, he and a handful of other titans were about to reinvent the industry.

 

ADOLPHUS BUSCH grew up in Mainz, Germany, on the Rhine River, where his wealthy father, Ulrich, owned thousands of acres of vineyards and forests. The second-youngest of twenty-two children, he received a fine formal education at several prestigious schools. But Busch preferred action to theory. He left school in his early teens for two apprenticeships, first working as a poleman helping move timber downriver for his father and then as a helper at an uncle’s brewery.

He was a quick study and forgot nothing, a fact that he would still demonstrate late in life. One evening during a visit to Frankfurt, Germany, in 1895, Busch hosted a dinner for two St. Louis friends who were also vacationing there. Afterward the three men set out for a tour of the city. When they reached the banks of the Main, Busch noticed that a raft-jam had halted river traffic. He jumped out of the carriage and leapt onto the nearest raft. As his startled companions watched, the sixty-two-year-old brewer strode from craft to craft until he reached the one that he had identified as the source of the clog. He poled it free, broke the jam, and then returned to his guests. “I spent my early life in rafting on the Rhine and Main,” he explained to them, “and I am familiar with the ways of rafts and raftsmen.”

That episode summed up the man. Busch was a natural leader, thanks to what one friend described as “assertiveness and good-natured aggressiveness” and an optimistic arrogance rooted in intelligence, self-confidence, and charisma. He stood but midheight—about five feet, five inches—but his stocky frame, ramrod posture, and elegant dress commanded attention. So did his voice, booming and articulate. When he spoke, he hypnotized his audience with sweeping gestures. “He wills and does,” a reporter for a brewing trade paper once observed. “His power over men is great, yet he does not seem to know or realize it.” He competed relentlessly, and assumed and believed that winners deserved their success. “I love work,” he said, “[and] find much pleasure and agreeable recreation in it, especially when I see that my efforts are crowned with success.”

In a lesser man, these qualities might have spawned resentment, jealousy, and enemies. But Busch tempered his dominance with kindness, an abiding passion for fair play, and generous respect for those who earned it. “I am an eternal optimist,” he once said, “[and] never lean in the least to the other side, and I am always coming out right.” He believed in “the ultimate good of man,” and he enjoyed nothing so much as identifying the deserving and nurturing their careers. At the brewery he captained for nearly fifty years, he expected everyone, including family, to start at the bottom—as he had—and work their way up. All of his supervisory and managerial employees, he once boasted, had started as laborers because men of modest beginnings were “more ambitious and industrious” than those from privileged backgrounds. His advice for any employer was to promote employees “according to their merits,” a tactic that he believed inspired and nurtured ambition.

 

AS BUSCH settled into one St. Louis brewery, August Uihlein prepared to leave another. Uihlein, a quiet man of stocky build and cherubic face, had left Milwaukee and his uncle Schlitz’s brewhouse in 1860, moving to St. Louis to work at Joseph Uhrig’s Camp Spring Brewery. Uhrig was lucky to get him. Uihlein had studied bookkeeping at a Milwaukee business school, earned room and board by keeping the books at Schlitz’s brewery, and supplemented his education with a year’s unpaid apprenticeship at the mostly German-owned Second Ward Bank, whose directors included Phillip Best and other brewers. The young man, a “delightful companion and a lovable character” whose “word was as good as gold,” impressed his supervisors with his industry and honesty. Uihlein worked his way up to general manager at Uhrig’s in only two years.

But Uihlein’s talents were not enough to trump ties by marriage. When the war ended, Uhrig offered a partnership to his new son-in-law, twenty-four-year-old Otto Lademan. Lademan had emigrated to the United States from Prussia in 1856, landing at New Orleans and then heading to St. Louis, where he worked as a clerk and salesman for a number of merchants. After four years fighting for the Union cause, he returned to St. Louis and married Joseph Uhrig’s daughter. Uihlein stuck it out in St. Louis for another three years and then wrote to his uncle Schlitz: Was there room at the brewery for himself and brothers Henry, Alfred, and Edward, all of whom had also emigrated to the United States? There was. And so the Uihlein brothers returned to Milwaukee and Walnut Street. August became company secretary, and Henry, who possessed practical brewing experience, took charge of the brewhouse.

A quarter century later, Schlitz Brewing would be the third largest brewery in the world, and August and his brothers among the nation’s wealthiest citizens, so rich that they made money faster than they could give it away. Just after the turn of the century, Henry Uihlein attempted to shrug off his wealth, with the goal of living on $75,000 a year ($1.5 million in today’s dollars). He gave his stock to his children and set up a million-dollar trust fund for each. It was not enough. A few years later, his remaining holdings had so increased in value that he doled out another $2.5 million. The Uihleins earned such riches in part because, unlike the flamboyant and equally wealthy Adolphus Busch, they practiced a “deep seated . . . modesty” and disdained overt displays of wealth or success. They were also more reclusive than the gregarious Busch, preferring the company of but a few close friends and their own families, whose members numbered well into the dozens. As a result, we know less about them than about the other two major nineteenth-century beer barons—except for the salient fact of their astounding success.

But the wealth came from more than just beer: The brothers believed in property, and August and Edward, the family’s chief land scouts, steered the company into hundreds of real-estate investments, especially in Chicago. August also profited from his foray into horse breeding, and at century’s end he would own one of the country’s largest, most respected, and most profitable stud farms. But all that lay in the future. For now, the brothers headed to Milwaukee to join their equally driven uncle Schlitz at the brewery on Walnut Street.

 

THE UIHLEINS arrived back in Milwaukee not long after Phillip Best launched his retirement by leaving for a long vacation in Germany. The years at the brewery had broken his health, and he lacked the energy to keep pace with his competition. But he was leaving his empire in the hands of his capable son-in-law: twenty-nine-year-old Frederick Pabst, former waiter, cabin boy, and sea captain, and as of early 1864, partner in Best and Company.

Pabst, born in 1836, grew up in Saxony in what is now eastern Germany. His father, Gottlieb Pabst, managed a sizable estate near a small village. It’s not clear why he abandoned that position for the uncertainty of America, but in August of 1848, Gottlieb, wife Frederika, and twelve-year-old Frederick landed in New York. From there the family headed first to Milwaukee, where some friends lived, and then to Chicago. Pabst’s mother died the following year in the great mid-century cholera epidemic, and father and son found employment at the Mansion House hotel, the father as a cook and the son as a waiter.

Young Frederick’s restless ambition drove him toward the water. He found work as a cabin boy on one of the many steamers that plied the waters of Lake Michigan; by 1857 he commanded and owned shares in his own vessel. At some point in the 1850s, he moved back to Milwaukee. There he made the acquaintance of August Uihlein, who described Pabst as an “open hearted, congenial man” who was “the most popular man sailing the west shore of Lake Michigan.” Another lifelong friend described the “Captain,” as he was known to all, as “a hale fellow well met, genial and popular among all his associates.” Albert Blatz, Valentin’s son, pronounced his competitor “one of nature’s noblemen. Generous, kind hearted, with a good word for every one he met.”

Affable. Likable. Kind. Generous. Frederick Pabst routinely inspired such accolades. Just over six feet in height, he had heavy-lidded, lively eyes balanced by a prominent nose and full lips. Like Adolphus Busch, Pabst commanded any room he entered. But if Busch’s charisma issued from his flamboyant self-assurance, Pabst’s flowed from a quieter self-confidence, although he, like Busch, possessed a kind nature and generous warmth. Unlike Busch, Frederick Pabst had little if any formal education. He more than compensated for that, however, with an astonishing intellect and what one Milwaukee businessman and longtime friend described as a “remarkable genius for organization.”

Where and when Frederick Pabst met Phillip Best is not known. Their German heritage would have brought them together socially, but Best may have encountered the Captain during one of the brewer’s trips to Chicago. In any case, three days before his twenty-sixth birthday, in March 1862, Frederick Pabst married Best’s oldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Maria.

The union benefited both men. Just three of Best’s seven children had survived infancy, and his only son, Henry, was but ten years old. Presumably Phillip and Frederick discussed the possibility of Pabst leaving the water for beer. Bad luck forced the issue. On December 16, 1863, a ferocious storm pounded Lake Michigan. Pabst was on a regular run, his beloved Sea Bird filled with passengers and crew. Faced with the possibility that vessel and passengers might not survive the onslaught of waves and wind, Pabst beached the steamer, a maneuver that damaged it but saved everyone’s life. It would cost $20,000 to repair the Sea Bird’s broken hull. A few weeks later, Frederick Pabst reported for work at the brewery on Chestnut Street.

Another of Phillip’s sons-in-law, Emil Schandein, soon joined Pabst at the helm. Schandein had trained as an engineer before he emigrated to Philadelphia in 1856, at age sixteen. There he tended bar, a position that surely disappointed him intellectually and financially. A year or two later, he headed west to Illinois for the life of a traveling salesman. That work carried him to Watertown, Wisconsin, where he met the Best family. He married Phillip’s daughter Lisette in the spring of 1866 and went to work for his father-in-law soon after. As vice-president of Best Brewing, he complemented Pabst’s lack of education with his own scientific and technical expertise. But Schandein suffered from frail health—induced, perhaps, by the heavy drinking that provided an escape from an unhappy marriage (Lisette conducted a long affair with their son-in-law). He spent much of his time in restorative travel, during which he visited the company’s branch offices and spied on the competition.

 

IN THE MID-1860s, Pabst and Schandein, Busch, and the Uihleins were just a few brewers among many, their brewhouses barely distinguishable from thousands of others. Each boasted a dozen or so employees, a steam engine, some wagons, and a few teams. Each served up about four thousand barrels of beer, or one-third of the output of what were then the country’s biggest brewhouses. Forty years later, these men helmed the three largest breweries in the world, sprawling factories whose output topped or neared the million-barrel mark.

Historians today generally scorn the idea of the “great man,” but these émigrés who became the giants of the American brewing industry were made of rare and precious materials; were, in their own way, great men who ranged through their days oblivious to indecision or failure, dismissive of doubt and human frailty. Where some men edged their way toward change, Frederick Pabst dived headfirst. What some condemned as recklessness, Adolphus Busch embraced as lifeblood. August Uihlein seized the chance from which other men shrank. Their personalities differed, but circumstances and a passion for competition linked their futures.

So did another fact, one so obvious that it’s easy to overlook: Each fell into the industry by accident rather than design. True, Adolphus Busch worked briefly—less than a year—at an uncle’s brewery, but his real training in the business, and that of the other great brewers, only began after he had sealed a partnership with a relative. Like the nation they adopted as home, these men were wedded to the future, not the past, and so entered their careers unburdened by stone-etched ideas about how a brewery ought to run and who its customers should be. Nor were they brewmasters, and so came to the brewhouse without any firm ideas about how the beer ought to look or taste. Their breweries sat before them as lumps of clay, raw potential on which each man’s ambition could work its will.

In that respect these four matched the times. In the thirty-five years after Appomattox, Americans masterminded one of the greatest economic and social transformations in history, and theirs became the leading industrial nation in the world. The heady 1840s and 1850s proved a mere appetizer for the main course, a late-century feast of automated production and gargantuan factories. Ravenous manufacturing operations devoured the labor of nearly twelve million new immigrants, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who migrated to town and factory, refugees from farms where McCormick’s reapers and Deere’s plows rendered their labor obsolete. The owners of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts, the world’s largest textile mill, required the services of seventeen thousand people to manage and operate their clanking bobbins and looms. Cyrus McCormick’s fifteen hundred hands built fifty thousand reapers a year.

Other manufacturers cranked out typewriters and copper tubing, railroad tracks and ready-made clothes. Mechanical rocking chairs and porcelain toilets. Thousands of miles of electrical wire to carry millions of telegraphic messages. Gears and bolts and nails and drills tumbled out of factories large and small. Saddles and whips and machine-made doilies. Canned soups and bottled condiments—fifty-seven varieties from the Heinz Company alone. Boxes of crunchy Uneeda Biscuits to replace barrels of anonymous general-store crackers. Enough velvet upholstery and drapery fabric to reach the moon. Machine-rolled cigarettes and two-story Corliss steam engines. The American landscape would never be the same, and Americans would wait a hundred years before they negotiated another such moment of transformation.

When the nation celebrated the hundredth anniversary of independence in 1876, the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition was Machinery Hall, a massive structure filled with fourteen acres of every kind of labor-saving and automated device then known to man. The building’s “tremendous iron heart” was a 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engine that stood forty feet tall, weighed six hundred tons, boasted a three-hundred-foot driveshaft, and drove the full mile of shafting that powered exhibits such as mechanical icemakers and refrigerators, presses, lathes, and looms. So important was the Corliss engine that President Ulysses Grant formally opened the Exhibition by cranking the handle that set into motion this “athlete of steel and iron.”

But the products of the factories and the sweatshops were useless without buyers. They were there, too, thanks to investors like Jay Gould and Jay Cooke—manipulators, some called them—who transformed what had been single, scattered rail lines into vast railroad empires that linked coast with coast and carried goods over vast distances. Between 1865 and 1893, crews of Irish and Chinese laborers laid 150,000 miles of railroad tracks. Unlike the rails of an earlier age, these were steel, the core of the new economy. In 1870, Americans produced just 850,000 tons of steel, at that time a revelatory new material—an inexpensive process for making large batches was developed only in the late 1850s. By 1900, with steel-manufacture technology perfected, more than ten million tons of the magic material rolled out of enormous fiery altars tended by thousands of men sweating through the brutality of ten- and twelve-hour shifts.

The era’s potential sprawled ripe and full at Americans’ feet, ready for the picking by men of vision and energy. That some were corrupt or rapacious—Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller come to mind—was never the point. What mattered was that J. P. Morgan and Charles Schwab, Thomas Edison and John Roebling, Peter Cooper and Gustavus Swift understood how to transform incandescent potential into substance and heft. Could turn a split second of inspiration—the light bulb—into a vast network of dynamo and wire and alter night’s landscape. Could fashion a skein of steel into that majestic ribbon of grandeur, the Brooklyn Bridge. Could weave ambition and daring (and greed and deceit) into personal fortunes, as Jay Gould would do time and again. Could extract billions of gallons of petroleum from the Pennsylvania hills and enrich men like Rockefeller and his partner Henry Flagler beyond imagination.

 

BUSCH, PABST, AND the Uihleins belong in that pantheon. They dived into the age, gambling on new and untested technologies: artificial refrigeration, pressurized carbon injection, pasteurization, and automated bottling machines. They built state-of-the-art laboratories and staffed them with European scientists who explored the manufacture and manipulation of yeasts and bacteria. Henry Ford usually gets credit for pioneering the concept of assembly-line production, but his factories came nearly forty years after these brewers transformed what had been small-batch, labor-intensive workshops into sprawling factories devoted to automation, efficiency, and profit.

They also enjoyed the luck of good timing: All of them entered brewing at a heady moment for the industry. In the five years after the Civil War, another thousand brewers set up shop nationwide, testimony to returning soldiers’ fondness for lager and to the steady westward movement of population. San Francisco, offspring of the great gold rush of the early 1850s, boasted a dozen or so breweries. A fistful of others lay scattered across the plains and mountains, from Montana to Texas, where men dreamed of another gold rush or herded cattle toward eastern markets.

Over all these towered New York City. The combined output of Milwaukee and St. Louis was a mere drop in the ocean of beer that poured out of Manhattan’s brewvats in the nineteenth century. Brewers there benefited from relentless population growth that transformed Manhattan’s rocky, wooded terrain into a tidy grid of paving and brick, each block crammed with buildings, each of those stuffed to suffocation with humanity. The city’s half million people in 1850 swelled to 814,000 by 1860 and 1.2 million in 1880.

In the 1870s, one of those New Yorkers, George Ehret, reigned as the king of American brewing. Ehret, a trained brewer, emigrated in 1857, the same year as Adolphus Busch. He found work at an established brewery, but like so many of his fellow emigres, he chafed under another man’s lead. In 1866 he opened the doors at his own brewhouse, situated on what was then a rural area north of the city but is today the northern reaches of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Eight years later his Hell Gate Brewery, named after a particularly vicious stretch of the East River, surpassed the 100,000-barrel mark. Like the Uihleins, Ehret believed in diversifying his assets. When he died in 1927, he was the city’s second-largest landowner (bested only by the John Jacob Astor estate), claiming title to a Fifth Avenue mansion, large holdings in the Wall Street area, a corner lot abutting Columbus Circle, and chunks of Harlem, in the late nineteenth century a posh neighborhood for the city’s upper middle class.

Just south of Ehret’s brewery stood the outfit belonging to Jacob Ruppert, Sr. In 1867, Ruppert cleared the timber on a lot on what is now Third Avenue between Ninety-first and Ninety-second streets and brewed his first beer. He lagged behind Ehret by some fifteen thousand barrels, but even at that pace he was forced to build a new plant in 1874. So, too, a mile or so to the south at East Fiftieth Street and Fourth Avenue (today’s Park Avenue), the Schaefer brothers, Frederick and Maximilian, struggled to keep pace with demand. They’d built a four-story building in 1848, grand and imposing for its day, but outgrew it almost as soon as the last brick was laid. By the time Ehret and Ruppert opened shop, the Schaefer brewery had devoured several blocks, and that despite the fact that the Schaefers produced only about 44,000 barrels a year.

Although none of the New York brewers knew it at the time, the city’s teeming multitudes would prove both a boon and a burden: No matter how many brewvats Ehret or Ruppert added, no matter how large the Schaefers’ malthouse, New Yorkers devoured every drop. As a result, brewers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Newark, New Jersey, never had to seek new markets; never tested the treacherous waters of long-distance shipping; never built networks of salesmen and agents, warehouses and depots. The ready market fostered a complacency that would eventually prove near-fatal.

Pabst and Schandein faced different challenges on their march toward greatness. They demonstrated their intent—and their mettle—in those first few years after the war when Phillip Best, trusting their judgment, retired to Germany to nurse his poor health. The pair apprised their father-in-law of their efforts in letters detailing purchases of malt and hops and the progress of employees new and old. “Dear father, last Saturday we burnt coal and noticed that this is cheaper for us than purchasing wood,” Pabst told Best in the summer of 1867. He calculated that they could save three dollars a day by switching from wood to coal, and reported that Blatz had surrendered most of his Chicago trade to Schlitz, and Pabst knew why: “His beer is bad.”

Pabst and Schandein tracked their pennies because they needed each one in order to finance their plans for growth. Phillip Best died in the summer of 1869, so he did not live to see his sons-in-law launch their journey toward brewing history. A year later, Pabst and Schandein borrowed $100,000 to buy the South Side Brewery, a large, well-equipped plant left idle by the death of its owner. The acquisition offered a feast of opportunities: Besides its brewkettles, maltkilns, cellars, and steam engines, the property included a substantial dock on the Menomonee River, pathway to Lake Michigan and points south and east, as well as rail sidings whose tracks fed into two major lines. Together with the original plant on Chestnut, the new property provided the men with a capacity of about ninety thousand barrels a year, a universe of production away from the five or six thousand barrels their father-in-law had brewed in a good year.

The maneuver also represented a gamble of the first order, because the burden of debt would crush them unless they filled the vats at both plants. Luck paid a visit. The Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed two million dollars’ worth of brewing real estate. Reconstruction would take months.

Pabst and Schandein moved in for the kill. Running the Empire and South Side breweries at capacity, they ordered new vats, boilers, and engines, and tripled the number of employees and teams dedicated to filling Chicago’s lager vacuum. Day and night, hot wort streamed into flat cooling pans and then into fermenting tubs.

The production outstripped the capacity of the old brick-lined lagering caves. Construction crews built a new kind of “refrigerator”: a windowless, vertical brick shell divided horizontally by iron floors. Racks stacked with puncheons of beer filled the first and second floors, or “cellars,” as the brewers still called them, even though the chambers stood above ground. Chilled air streamed down to the beer through vented sidewalls thanks to a twenty-foot heap of ice that covered the top floor.

The company consumed some fifteen thousand tons of ice annually. Icehouses lined riverbanks and the shores of upstate lakes and ponds. In January, February, and March, dozens of harvesting teams guided horse-drawn cutters back and forth over the surface, slicing a grid of six- to ten-inch trenches into the glistening white expanse. After scoring the ice, the harvesters pried huge sheets free from the larger mass, and then sawed and hacked those into blocks about twenty-two inches square and ten to thirty inches thick. Winch arms swung some of the blocks to a loading chute for storage in the icehouse. Workers loaded part of the frigid cargo directly onto wagons headed to the brewery; waiting rail cars devoured the rest, transforming the cars into crude refrigerators.

Problems could slow the progress. In February 1872, a fire at the Chestnut Street facility destroyed the cooper house and everything in it. Two weeks later, a boiler exploded at the South Side plant. The vessel, five feet in diameter and eighteen feet long, blasted through the roof. The detonation ripped the eighty-horsepower steam engine from its bed, blew out windows and gaslights, and unleashed a downpour of brick, plaster, and metal on the neighborhood.

All in a day’s work for the bold and ambitious. Pabst and Schandein rebuilt the cooper house and ordered a new boiler and engine. In early 1873, Best Brewing’s output topped 100,000 barrels. Six years later, the upstarts temporarily toppled George Ehret from his throne, a stunning achievement for two men who had entered the industry with little business experience and even less knowledge of brewing. In between, they built a ninety-thousand-bushel malt elevator at South Side as well as a third set of tracks from that plant to the city’s main rail yards; began shipping to Colorado; and established a branch operation in New York City that included a capacious icehouse, several teams, and two agents.

The move to New York was particularly bold. But it was prompted by need as much as by ambition: In order to make their investment pay, the men had to brew at capacity. Milwaukee could not begin to drink all the beer they produced; hence the decision to try to grab a slice of the huge market in the fast-growing urban Northeast. Still, much of the company’s business centered on Chicago, where customers consumed about one thousand kegs of Best lager each day, so Pabst and Schandein enlarged their depot there; the new building held three thousand barrels and six hundred tons of ice. The company’s officers—Pabst, Schandein, and Charles Best (son of Carl and nephew of Phillip)—tracked the movement of materials, shipments, and agents by means of telegraph lines that ran from each of the breweries to the Western Union office downtown.

The men drove the fact of their success home in the spring of 1875 when they staged an elaborate procession through the streets of Milwaukee. Early May marked the unofficial opening of the new beer season in the United States, the moment when brewers tapped their first kegs of winter-brewed lager and unleashed the pleasures of malt-rich bock. On this occasion, Best employees decorated their horses with ribbons and their wagons with bunting and flags. Cockades sprouted from the teamsters’ hats. Poles lashed to the wagons’ sides anchored banners that flapped in the breeze, the company’s name emblazoned on each. As jolly Gambrinus, who still sat on his perch atop the archway leading to the loading yard, watched, twenty teams and wagons paraded along Chestnut Street toward the rail yards downtown, each bearing a small pyramid of lager-filled kegs destined for Chicago, a jubilant celebration of success and a blatant challenge to the rest of the city’s brewers.

 

TEN DAYS EARLIER, Joseph Schlitz had headed for Stuttgart and a sharpshooting tournament aboard the steamer Schiller. Just off the coast of England, the vessel’s captain lost his way in dense fog and heavy seas. As Best Brewing’s teamsters paraded toward the rail yard, the Schiller smashed into the Retarriere ledge near Bishop’s Rock, a jagged mass southeast of Land’s End, England. Only a handful of the nearly four hundred on board survived.

Schlitz would have enjoyed the challenge posed by the colorful cavalcade. After running a consistent fourth among the city’s brewers during the 1860s, he and the Uihleins greeted the new decade by setting sail on the hazardous seas of large-scale brewing. In 1870, the men razed what was left of the old Krug brewhouse, purchased the rest of the block at Third and Walnut, and launched themselves toward fame with a new brewhouse and 125-barrel kettle. A 64,000-square-foot icehouse cooled two storage racks and expanded cellars. All told, they could lager seven thousand barrels.

The storage capacity lasted a mere two years. In 1873, Schlitz built a second, larger icehouse; a year later, laborers excavated a new six-thousand-keg cellar. “Schlitz has loomed into prominence . . . within the past year,” commented a reporter for the local newspaper. Indeed, and not just in Milwaukee. Schlitz and the Uihleins had been shipping to Chicago for several years, but that market no longer satisfied their ambitions. By the time Schlitz’s body drifted to the floor of the Celtic Sea, he had shipped small quantities of his beer throughout the Midwest and Deep South, and to California, Tennessee, New York, Mexico, Brazil, and parts of South America. The beer traveled in corked bottles and only small quantities made any one trip—as much as could be packed into a wooden, ice-filled cask. But as for Pabst and Schandein, it was these first few forays into long-distance shipping, more than any of the new buildings and larger vats in which Schlitz invested, that laid the foundation for the brewery’s growth.

 

DOWN IN ST. LOUIS, Adolphus Busch embraced his new venture with equal parts fervor and imagination. When he joined Anheuser & Co. in 1865, the brewery contained one twenty-five-horsepower engine and produced, in a good year, about four thousand barrels of mediocre lager. But Busch knew that even if he improved the beer, St. Louis represented a small market. To satisfy his ambition, he had no choice but to develop a clientele far beyond that city. Milwaukee’s brewers already controlled Chicago, its hinterlands, and the shores of Lakes Michigan and Erie. Rather than muscle his way into that crowded pack, Busch cast his canny eye in another direction: He would conquer the Southwest.

The decision was at once both daring and logical, and typical of the man. During the Civil War, the demands of conflict had hindered ready access to the Mississippi River and routes south to New Orleans, as well as the rail lines that carried beer to Chicago and other eastern locations. Forced to adapt to these closed doors, St. Louis merchants and manufacturers had developed new relationships in the growing Southwest as an alternative market for their goods. By the late 1860s, they controlled lucrative routes that stretched from St. Louis to Nebraska and down into Texas. In the early 1870s, a group of businessmen pooled their funds and laid a rail line across Missouri and through the sparsely populated hills and plains of Kansas and Oklahoma to a terminus in Texas.

Adolphus Busch, as brilliant an entrepreneur as brewing or any other industry would ever know, recognized the opportunity immediately. There were already small breweries in Texas, thanks to German settlements founded there back in the 1840s. But the state was vast and the breweries were small. Here was an opportunity to capture and hold a wide-open market.

Striking into that distant territory posed considerable risk. It was one thing for, say, Pabst to ship beer to Chicago, a short day’s trip away, or for Joseph Schlitz to supplement his local sales with a few bottles sent hither and yon. It was another matter to gamble a brewery’s future and reputation on regular, large-scale shipping and to send beer, a fragile product with a relatively short life, on a thousand-mile journey.

That didn’t faze Busch, who never met a challenge, scientific innovation, or labor-saving device he didn’t like. He also never lost his passion for learning, and his curiosity led him far afield from brewing. He co-founded a Crop Improvement Bureau in Chicago, monitored developments in agricultural science and farming, and bred a particularly fine strain of chicken. He read scientific literature in English, French, and German, and could provide any listener with detailed assessments of the latest inventions, patents, and technologies. He would conquer the risk with technology and science.

Busch planned to ship some of the beer in wooden kegs, as was standard for brewers at the time, but he calculated that bottled beer would provide greater profit and enhance his reputation as well. As he knew, one glass of beer looked like any other, so unscrupulous saloonkeepers routinely purchased barrels of cheap draft swill and passed it off to unwitting customers as the more expensive lager of a superior brewhouse. They could not do that with a bottle, whose label announced the brewer’s name in bold lettering, simultaneously advertising and protecting the brewery’s good name. He decided to embark on large-scale, assembly-line bottling (and was first among American beermakers to do so), and nothing says more about the man’s ambition, entrepreneurial genius, and passion for gambling than this foray into the unknown.

But between idea and reality lay obstacles. Brewers had bottled some of their stock for years, using primitive equipment: a hand-held siphon tube and a hand-operated cork tamper. Busch had to hire an engineer to design and build automated equipment that would permit large-scale bottling. He had to find a manufacturer willing and able to produce enough glass, a feat in itself given the limitations of manufacturing technology.

And large-scale, long-distance shipping depended on more than bottling. Busch also had to protect the beer during its long journey south, through frigid temperatures in winter and blistering heat in summer. He turned to science, and Louis Pasteur’s discovery that heat killed bacteria. Busch, fluent in French, had read Pasteur’s work in the late 1860s, and so knew of the Frenchman’s discovery. He tackled the task of translating that theory into practice, systematizing the task of heating the beer and bottles so that he could process enormous quantities each day.

By 1872, Busch and Anheuser were shipping pasteurized bottled beer to the Southwest, making them the first Americans to exploit the commercial possibilities of Pasteur’s ideas. It’s not clear who designed and built their first bottling equipment, or “line,” as brewers called it, but it was a pioneering piece of machinery. Thanks to it, eighty employees and two stories of automated equipment cranked out forty thousand bottles of beer a day, an unprecedented achievement in brewing. Keg beer traveled with the bottles, thanks to another Busch innovation: refrigerated rail cars, which he introduced to the company sometime around 1874 or 1875, shortly before meatpacker Gustavus Swift, typically credited as the godfather of refrigerated rail shipping, began using them.

In between, Busch equipped his father-in-law’s brewery with the latest, newest, and most efficient machinery. In his first few years, he installed a mechanized barley cleaner, a 450-bushel malt hopper, new brewvats, and above-ground cold storage. By 1879, the newly renamed Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association was shipping its products to every state in the union and in small quantities to India, Japan, Central and South America, Mexico, the West Indies, Hawaii, Germany, England, and France. Anheuser-Busch beer had won competitions in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Texas, and Paris. The brewery filled seven acres of south St. Louis, and forty-year-old Busch, his mostly-retired father-in-law, and 250 employees produced more than 100,000 barrels of a half dozen or so styles of lager.

 

THE TITANS’ AMBITIONS exacted a toll on those around them, as Charles Best discovered in early 1884, when his nervous disposition and frail health collided with the weight of his responsibilities as secretary of Phillip Best Brewing Company. His employer and cousin-by-marriage, Frederick Pabst, had glanced at a piece of his correspondence on its way to the out-box and, finding some sentence, some word, or some bit of punctuation out of order, had grabbed the letter and scrawled on it comments of a “humiliating nature.” Furious at this assault on his competence and the intrusion into his realm, Best penned an angry letter of his own: “To Fred Pabst President Phillip Best Brewing Company: I do not know whether it was your intention to humiliate me like a schoolboy before my subordinates in the office, . . . but whether intentional or not, you surely have done it and in the most remarkable manner.” Charles reminded Pabst that his duties as secretary left him “pushed & rushed” to that point that many days he simply could not find the time to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” “[M]any a night I have left here with a burning head glad only to have the letters go away . . . If . . . you desire to sign the mail hereafter & to permanently assume the management of this office, be kind enough to say so in plain & direct words . . . ”

Best, the nephew of brewery founder Phillip Best, had worked for Pabst and Schandein since 1872, first as cashier, now as secretary. In the early years, he arrived at work at four A.M. to tally beer kegs as the drivers hoisted them onto delivery wagons. These days he settled in at the office at eight and remained there until at least six o’clock, six days a week, keeping the brewery’s complicated books and managing its voluminous correspondence. He took “an extraordinary interest” in the company’s affairs, dithering over every dot and comma, fretting over every unaccounted-for penny, and agonizing over every expensive new machine. It is not surprising that the self-imposed pressure created “a worried, vexed & troubled state of mind.”

Pabst routinely urged Best to avoid seeing only “the dark side of everything.” “You make nothing better with it,” he scolded, “and only make yourself unhappy.” He, too, worked long hours, but somehow the weight of the grind lay lighter on his shoulders. When the company needed an infusion of cash, for example, he simply wrote overdrafts at his bank (of which he was also a director) and paid the interest when it was convenient. “Don’t worry Charles,” he would say with his typical flourish of underlinings, “it will not help you a bit. Take matters as they come.”

On this occasion, Pabst, no master of grammar, spelling, or punctuation, scrawled a fast reply: “My dear Sir! I think you was a little excited when you wrote that letter[.] Tomorrow morning when you are cooled of [sic] a little I will talk with you. But of one thing I can assure you: The Remarks in the Letter were not intented [sic] to hurt anybodys [sic] Feelings particularly not yours . . . .  Very Respectfully Yours Fred Pabst without the President.”

Whatever the two men said the next day is lost to us, but it was not enough. Three months later, Best wrote Pabst another letter, this one a measured but devastating attack on his old friend. “What I desire to say to you,” Charles began, “has been worrying me for a long time, and in connection with the unceasing trouble in our business has caused me to become so nervous that I am often almost unable to attend to my daily duties.” For many years, he had devoted all his “heart and will” to the company’s interests, but he could no longer ignore the consequences of Pabst’s “false ambition to be the greatest brewer in the land . . . ”

Best charged that Pabst had endangered the brewery’s health by “investing and accumulating all the profits in the plant of the Company and by increasing its capacity far beyond [its] legitimate earnings, on borrowed money, causing us to be more and more involved in debt from year to year.” Many times Best had pointed out the “danger” of Pabst’s policies, but for the most part, Pabst merely “laughed,” pronounced Best a “black see-er,” and continued his march down the path to ruin. “Had you . . . followed my well meant and oft repeated advice,” Charles added, the company might be smaller but at least it would be debt-free and “running to its full capacity.” Instead, Best found himself nearly ill from the “continual embarrassment and worry.”

And then the harried secretary unleashed the full measure of his grievances: “We have a large overgrown establishment on our hands, the capacity of which exceeds sales by nearly 150,000 Bbls. per annum, are carrying an enormous load of debts, and our manufacturing expenses are greater than those of our competitors . . . ” Best had hoped that his employers “would entirely drop the idea of investing any more money” in the brewery, but alas, Pabst’s recent “movements and remarks” had led Charles to the sad conclusion that the brewer planned to “follow the examples” of his competitors, “a very dangerous, even suicidal policy” as long as Best Brewing Company was “so heavily indebted.” Not being in a “position to offer any objection to such a course,” Charles concluded, “I desire to sever my connection with the Brewing Company at the earliest possible moment . . . ”

Again, what happened next is long lost to us, but we can assume that Pabst wooed rather than raged, shining the full light of his charm and good humor on his fretful cousin. Charles retracted his resignation and stayed another five and a half years, finally leaving in December 1889, one year after Emil Schandein’s death and ten months after Frederick Pabst replaced the word “Best” with “Pabst” on the brewery letterhead.

One fact is undeniable: During his twelve years with the company, Charles Best had watched Pabst and Schandein engineer a series of maneuvers that transformed a small brewhouse of ten thousand barrels into a behemoth that produced more than 374,000 the year of Best’s outburst. The age demanded such devil-may-care daring, and if the Charles Bests developed headaches, the Frederick Pabsts prospered beyond imagination. By the turn of the decade, the breweries of Pabst and Schandein, the Uihleins, and Adolphus Busch dwarfed most others. In 1880, half of the nation’s 2,271 beermakers produced fewer than one thousand barrels a year, and 75 percent sold fewer than four thousand, disposing of most of it at saloons within a mile or so of their brewhouses. Best Brewing Company’s 200,000 barrels in that year, an output surpassed only by George Ehret in New York City, appeared nearly grotesque in comparison. Bergner & Engel of Philadelphia ranked third, and behind them stood the Uihleins with 195,000 barrels and Adolphus Busch with 141,000.

As Charles Best rightly observed, the foray into large-scale brewing was freighted with uncertainty: Expansion necessitated not just debt, but risk of another sort. In order to make the debt pay, the brewery had to produce at capacity. But Milwaukee and St. Louis could not begin to absorb the vast swell of lager that poured from Best Brewing or Anheuser-Busch. The men had no choice but to push their beer into distant markets, and therein lies the brilliance behind the mechanical innovations and investments of Pabst and Schandein, the Uihleins, and Busch: They grew not by trundling their brew down the street and around the corner to neighborhood taverns, as did Ehret, Bergner & Engel, and other mammoth brewing houses in New York City and Philadelphia, but by taking their beer on the road, creating vast networks of markets that ranged from their own backyards to the Deep South, from tony company-owned hotels in New York and Dallas to dozens of foreign countries, and consisted of agglomerations of storage depots, agencies, salesmen, managers, and saloons. Nowadays, of course, manufacturers assume the existence of a national or even international market, but in the 1870s and 1880s, the notion of selling Milwaukee beer in, say, San Francisco was still new and untested. It is a measure of the genius of Adolphus Busch and the others that they not only envisioned such a market but created and succeeded in it.

But the brewers’ success also rested on what is too often overlooked by those eager to condemn the era’s industrialists: Captains of industry like Busch and Uihlein amassed their wealth during decades of hard work. Pabst “knew more about the details” of his company, claimed one of his agents, “than any other [brewer] in the business.” The brewer earned that knowledge. He left the house, which stood on the same grounds as the brewery until the early 1890s, each day before breakfast to tour the plant and check on the day’s work. That round completed, he returned home for a quick meal and then hustled back to the office, where, except for a lunch break, he stayed until six o’clock. “He knew the different bottling machines just as well as the men operating them,” an employee once said, “and he took a pride in making a personal inspection” daily.

Adolphus Busch never claimed to be a “practical brewer”—indeed, almost none of the century’s titans possessed formal training as a brewmaster—but few men in the business knew as much as he did about making lager, and he deserves recognition as one of the great American brewmasters. He analyzed and mastered every detail of the work, including “the various ways of brewing and the manipulation of the material, the boiling of the beer, fermenting and storing and especially the preparation of the malt,” which he regarded as “one of the most significant factors in making fine beers.” Study inspired confidence. “I am the maltster [and] superintendent of the malt-house,” he once explained, “ . . . and I am the buyer of the barley and the hops and I keep a general superintendence of the brewing process, fermenting process and stirring process.” Each day, he said, “I examine the barley” and visit “the malt houses with my various foremen and give them orders how I want everything done; . . . ”

He also became a superb judge of hops and personally selected those needed for the brewery. Woe to the dealer who submitted “mouldy” or “watery” samples, or ones “miserably picked, full of leaves and stems” that would taint beer with “a disagreeable and bitter taste.” “You hop men,” he told his brother August, a German hops merchant, “do not consider what harm you do if a brewer wants a certain fine hop and is willing to pay for it, and does not get it.” “I wish it understood,” he informed one dealer, “that I must have nothing but the very best and finest picks.” To another, he wrote: “What I said about stems and vines, I meant in dead earnest. . . . Why should I pay duty and freight on an article that is absolutely worthless and injures our product besides?” It’s not likely the agent made that mistake again.

Nor was the man surprised to hear from Busch himself. Corporations today are managed by layers of specialized bureaucrats and university-credentialed “experts,” but late-nineteenth-century Americans were just learning how to construct managerial flowcharts and chains of command. Busch and Pabst captained enormous enterprises, but they relied largely on tiny in-house staffs, often consisting mostly of members of their own families. Charles Best, to name one beleaguered example, shouldered a burden of detail and tasks that would be shared among several dozen employees in one of today’s corporations. The owners pitched in, corresponding regularly with their salesmen out on the road and making personnel decisions that a modern CEO would dismiss as trivial.

 

THE ATTENTION the men paid to their beer was particularly critical, and in the late 1860s and early 1870s, they realized that they needed to modernize it as they had modernized their breweries. In part, that decision was based on supply and demand. Lager’s growing popularity strained farmers’ ability to produce enough barley for the nation’s three thousand beermakers, shortages exacerbated in the early 1870s by several years of bad weather. But there was another reason to rethink traditional all-malt beer. American six-row barley, which was what most brewers used to make their malt, was exceptionally rich in protein. Lagering precipitated much of it, but dregs remained as unsightly globs that formed haze, soured the beer, and shortened the lager’s life. Put another way, the decision to brew traditional all-malt Bavarian beer using American six-row barley produced an unstable beer with a relatively short life. If brewers could eliminate excess proteins, the beer would be more stable and durable; they could ship it even longer distances and so expand their markets. And if they could brew with some grain other than barley, they would ease the stranglehold of high prices caused by crop shortages.

In the late 1860s, many American brewers began experimenting with corn in their mashing tuns. Like barley, corn is rich in starch that can be converted to sugar, but unlike barley, it contains little protein. Mixing corn into the mash added an extra helping of starch that absorbed barley’s excess proteins and, as a bonus, “stretched” the grain, much the way a cook might add pasta to a pound of hamburger to make it go farther. And thanks to mechanical reapers and better plows, corn yields were high and bushel prices low.

What sounded good on paper turned sour in practice. Corn oil infused the lager with an unctuous, rancid flavor. Brewery employees could eliminate much of the oil by grinding the corn to remove the husk and kernel, but doing so added another layer of expense to the process. And that was just one of the many puzzles of what beermakers called “adjunct” brewing, or making beer using grains other than barley. What was the best ratio of corn to barley? Should the corn be cooked separately and then added to the mash, or added at the outset and cooked with the barley? How long should it be boiled, and at what temperature? Only time and trial taught brewers how to incorporate corn into the mashing tun. Every move cost money—and when something went wrong, the entire mess had to be dumped. Put another way, the effort to keep pace with production when barley was scarce cost plenty.

Given the difficulties, adjunct-based brewing might have limped along for years before it became an integral part of the American brewery. Only some compelling reason, some irresistible benefit, could have induced brewers to expend the time and money necessary to overcome its liabilities.

In the early 1870s, the irresistible presented itself in the form of growing resistance to all-malt beer on the part of Americans themselves, as more non-Germans among them embraced lager as a nonintoxicating beverage. Brewers noticed what had not been obvious back in the 1850s, when lager’s audience consisted almost entirely of German-speaking immigrants: When it came to beer, an enormous divide separated Europeans and Americans. Germans, deck of cards or chess set in one hand and pipe in another, plunked themselves in front of a frothy mug and nursed it for hours. Americans wanted to drink—and they didn’t want to imbibe a brown broth that hit the stomach like a seven-course meal any more than they had wanted English ale.

Perhaps the difference stemmed from nothing more than scarcity and abundance: German beer culture was born and raised in a place that was overcrowded and where food was often in short supply. For centuries, Germans and other Europeans had prized beer as food—liquid bread. But the American experience relegated that idea to antiquity’s dustbin. The United States was the land of liberty, high crop yields, and protein-rich diets. No one need drink beer for food. No surprise, then, that Americans preferred a beer that sat light on the stomach, a beer more suited to the American way of life.

John E. Siebel, the science editor for one of the first brewing trade journals, Western Brewer, and founder of the first American brewing school, understood this point. The old-world crowd would always prefer the “nourishing qualities” of full-bodied Bavarian lager, he reminded his readers, but Americans drank in order “to pass time pleasantly in jovial society.” They disdained old-world lager as too heavy, too filling, and entirely too brown, and demanded instead a light sipping beer, one that fell somewhere between “light wine and the heavy Bavarian lager.” Brewers who planned to stay in business had to adjust to the times and the place.

Thus the great wave of experimentation with beer styles. Improvement-minded inventors obtained patents on new methods of brewing with corn and other cereals in hopes of creating a lager that allowed brewers to cope with chronic shortages of grain and satisfy the tastes of non-German Americans. But in the early 1870s, the nation’s brewers encountered the answer to both problems: Bohemian lager, a light-bodied, low-alcohol, lemon-colored, translucent brew. On the tongue, it tasted and felt as different from Bavarian lager as lager did from English ale. Many brewers recognized that this style of beer would appeal to an American audience.

The brew originated in the early 1840s in Pils, a city in the Bohemia region of the Austrian Empire, and spread across the Empire and Europe. Because most German-American brewers hailed from and trained in the brewing traditions of Bavaria and Prussia, Bohemian-style lagers took longer to arrive in the United States. A handful of New York liquor wholesalers imported some of it in the 1850s, though few people noticed, thanks to its high price.

But Bohemian lager’s stars aligned in 1873 at the Vienna International Exposition, one of many such events in the second half of the nineteenth century. Starting with the Crystal Palace Exhibition at London in 1851 and culminating in the spectacular World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, millions of people toured these grand fairs. Part sideshow, part trade show, 100 percent entertainment, the expositions spotlighted national progress through displays of food, crops, clothing, machinery, engineering, art, and architecture.

The expositions also featured brewing exhibitions and contests where brewers competed for medals and trophies. At the 1873 Vienna Exposition, Bohemian beers stole the show and captured top prizes. There is limited evidence that Adolphus Busch was there, but if he missed the event, he heard about it from Otto Lademan, who traveled to Vienna as the state of Missouri’s official representative. There Lademan tasted Pilsener and another lemony yellow Bohemian lager from Budweis (Ceské Budejovice), an ancient Bohemian city where an “official” court brewery produced the “Beer of Kings” (a slogan Adolphus Busch would later invert). Like Pilsener, Budweis contained Saaz hops and Moravian barley. But a slightly different mashing method and the unique local water resulted in a lager that was a shade lighter in color and slightly more effervescent than its Pils counterpart.

Lademan, Busch, and other brewing entrepreneurs had seen the future and it was Bohemian. They began fiddling with recipes and tinkering with malts and mashes in an effort to replicate this sparkling lager. Almost immediately, however, every brewer who attempted to duplicate Pilsener or Budweis collided with an incontrovertible truth: It was impossible. Or, more accurately, it was impossible using protein-rich American six-row barley. Bavarian lager’s amber, almost opaque, color and heavy body hid six-row’s deficiencies. A glass of sparkling, translucent Bohemian lager, however, functioned as a klieg light that illuminated every blob of unprecipitated protein, every tendril of undissolved yeast. Every flaw, every jot of unidentifiable stuff, hung there for all the world to see.

Anton Schwarz to the rescue. Bohemian-born Schwarz studied brewing at the Polytechnic Institute in Prague. His mentor there, Karl Balling, an influential nineteenth-century brewing chemist, recognized that Bohemia’s brewers labored under two handicaps: scarce land and low crop yields, both of which forced up the price of brewing materials. Balling thus focused his research on the use of adjuncts, which he believed would enable brewers to maximize their resources. Under Balling’s tutelage, Schwarz received solid technical training in the science and practice of adjunct-based brewing.

In late 1868, twenty-nine-year-old Schwarz emigrated to the United States and took a position writing technical and scientific papers for American Brewer, the nation’s first brewing trade journal, including ones that provided explicit instruction in how to create mashes using adjuncts. From Schwarz, American brewers learned how to fashion an American version of Bohemian beer by mixing either white corn (less oily than the yellow varieties) or rice into the barley mash. Rice worked particularly well: Like corn, it is rich in starch and low in protein, but unlike corn, it contains almost no oil.

But whether made from corn or rice, the result was a new and, because it contained adjuncts, a uniquely American beer and a triumph of brewing technique: The new lagers were yellow in color with a brilliant sheen, light-bodied with a foamy head, and a rich, almost creamy flavor. They cost more to make than conventional Bavarian all-malt beers, but as brewers soon learned, the new creations pleased American palates.

Some brewers, German themselves and fond of heavy all-malt lagers, scorned the new brew as a fad, but Adolphus Busch recognized that he was now an American brewer, and that in his adopted country, the era of heavy amber Bavarian beer had ended. He tackled this new opportunity with his usual thorough enthusiasm, studying the matter in books and the trade press and consulting with men who had worked in Bohemian breweries. He and his brewmaster, Irwin Sproule, created a new beer that they called “St. Louis Lager.” Sproule modeled the brew after the “highly esteemed” beer from Pils, using rice instead of corn. Then he and Busch created a second Bohemian beer, this one for Busch’s friend Carl Conrad, a St. Louis dealer of imported wines and liquors. Conrad knew nothing about making beer, but he knew a market trend when he saw one and asked Busch to create a “very pale, fine beer.” Busch would develop the recipe and brew the lager; Conrad would bottle and sell it under his own label.

By the mid-1870s, many brewers had succumbed to Pilsener fever, so Conrad, hunting for a way to make his product stand out in an increasingly crowded field, decided to model it after the style of Bohemian beer brewed in Budweis, a lager of which he was particularly fond. Neither Busch nor Conrad had visited Budweis, but they had toured Bohemia during trips to Europe in the late 1860s and early 1870s and tasted Budweis beer in other German and Austrian cities, including Mainz and Geisenheim. Conrad asked Busch to use imported barley if possible. He also wanted Busch to use hops from Saaz, a region of Bohemia known for the fine character and quality of its hop plants, which imbued the beer with an “exquisite aroma” and “special . . . bouquet.” But, he added, if those were not available, well, Busch was to make do. Conrad mainly cared that the final result look, taste, and feel on the tongue like the lovely lager he had drunk in Europe.

After some months of experimentation, Busch and brewmaster Sproule settled on a combination of technique and ingredients. They began with a mixture of high-grade North American barleys, germinating the grain for six days at temperatures ranging from 55 to 60 degrees and then roasting it for forty-two hours at 144 degrees Fahrenheit. To make the wort, brewery employees soaked the grain for about an hour in hot water. Then they transferred the mash to a second tub, boiled it, and returned it to the first vat. The mash contained about eight pounds of rice to every five bushels of barley, but it’s not clear when they added the rice or how long it cooked. Nor were Busch and Conrad inclined to reveal the details of what they regarded as a priceless trade secret. When questioned, Busch would only say that after the initial soak, “we take the malt & water out of the first mash & put it into a tank & boil it for a certain time—the length of time depends upon the malt[;] then we let it go back to the first mash.” He was less reluctant to explain his reasoning: “Taking [the grain] out of the water mash & boiling it & putting it back in the water mash again makes a much better mash, & gives the Beer a better flavor.” When the wort was ready, the brewmaster added Saaz hops, about twenty to twenty-four ounces of hops per barrel—less than the thirty or so ounces used in the company’s other beers—and pitched the lager with another import, a Bohemian yeast that gave the beer “a peculiar, fine flavor.” Beechwood strips lined the bottoms of the aging vats, rough-textured traps for impurities and bits of flock or yeast that drifted their way. Then workers transferred the beer to special kegs coated with an “aromatic” pitch made from fitchen pine; this, claimed Busch, endowed the beer with yet another “special characteristic.”

The result, which Conrad named after its place of origin, was a masterpiece of brewing prowess. Budweiser “is . . . very fine and elegant,” he once boasted. “It has a very pretty flavor, it sparkles better [than other lagers] & [is] not so heavy.” He also decided to bottle the beer rather than sell it in barrels. The label would advertise the beer and protect its reputation and his from crooked tavern owners who might otherwise try to sell another brewer’s inferior lager under the Conrad Budweiser name. It’s not clear what the original label looked like, but the man who created and printed Conrad’s second label claimed that the first version included the word “champagne.” That would not be surprising, because effervescent Budweiser looked more like Champagne than it looked like other beers. At least Conrad thought so, because he fostered the comparison by corking the lager in Champagne bottles. Alas, the point was lost on customers: The glass was so dark that they could not see and enjoy the beer’s sheen and brilliance. About a year after Budweiser’s 1876 debut, Conrad switched to a translucent green bottle.

Whether Budweiser, St. Louis Lager, or some other brand, the new brew changed the face of American brewing for all time and did so almost overnight. Pabst and Schandein learned that lesson the hard way. Their brewmaster, Phillip Jung, launched the brewery’s experiments with rice and corn in late 1873 and early 1874, mixing the adjunct grains with barley imported from Italy. But Jung’s considerable skill and ambition outweighed his loyalty to the company, and in late 1879 he left to open his own brewery. His first replacement lasted less than a year. The next man, August Olinger, knew how to make old-style, dark Bavarian, but floundered when it came to lighter Bohemian lager. Olinger slashed the amount of corn and added more barley, with disastrous results. In Chicago, customers deserted Best’s too-dark beer in favor of competitors’ offerings. “Can’t you give us a paler, purer beer,” pleaded the branch manager. “Our customer Shaughnessy out on Graceland Road, sent us word he could not use our beer any longer, it being so dark.”

Pabst penned a note of his own to Olinger and his assistant. “There is no doubt in my mind if that kind of beer keeps on, we will lose a great deal of trade which had cost us a great deal of trouble and money to get . . . We surely furnish everything necessary to make good beer,” he pointed out, “and I can only look at this as either carelessness or not the necessary knowledge of the business.” “I want to be understood,” he added, in case his employees had missed the point, “that we cannot afford to have anything of this kind repeated . . . ”

Olinger either ignored the warning or, more likely, lost his footing under pressure. In March 1882, the manager at Best Brewing’s Kansas City branch received a shipment of Bohemian-style beer that had turned hazy in transit. He refused to send it out with his salesman and complained to Pabst. “Now Charley, I believe you are wrong!,” Pabst replied. “The Beer is undoubtedly all right . . . .  Take your Beer give it the right Temperature & I’m satisfied you will find it all right . . . .  I never felt so confident of good Beer as I do now. We have the best we ever had, we use the best Material we could buy, & we have taken every Precaution to make good Beer and you will find it so.”

Pabst’s soothing words belied the turmoil back home. Olinger had left, although whether for the firmer footing of greener pastures or because fired is not clear, and his replacement, John Metzler, would not start until April. Metzler brought European training and considerable skill to the brewhouse, but two years later, he, too, departed Milwaukee.

This time Pabst and Schandein asked for help. Charles Best penned one of his meticulous letters to Anton Schwarz in New York, requesting recommendations. Schwarz dispatched salvation in the form of J. F. “Fritz” Theurer, one of the most important names in late-century American brewing, a skilled and imaginative man who created superb beer and invented a string of money- and time-saving technologies. These included a yeast-pitching machine, filters, various beer coolers, and a barley washer. His most important contribution to brewing, however, was the creation of a new way to krausen beer. When brewers krausen, they add fresh, still-fermenting wort to already fermented lager. The young wort generates a secondary fermentation and enlivens the lager with natural carbonation. Unfortunately, the fresh wort often contained impurities that contaminated the beer. Theurer developed a method of capturing the carbon dioxide that generates during the initial fermentation, scouring it to remove impurities, and then injecting it under pressure into the beer in cask.

Two years later, Pabst and Schandein supplemented Theurer’s talent with the addition of Otto Mittenzwey, a German-trained chemist hired to explore the possibilities of hard science, and especially the cultivation of “pure” yeast strains developed in a laboratory specifically for beer. Pabst also ensured that his successors, sons Gustav and Fred Junior, would enjoy what he and Schandein had not: formal training in the art and science of brewing. He sent both boys off to New York to study with Schwarz. It was decisions like these that separated Pabst—and Busch and the Uihleins—from most other brewery owners, who relied on brewmasters schooled in trial-and-error rather than science.

Carl Conrad fared better with his new beer, thanks to the meticulous care and skill of Anheuser Brewing’s Irwin Sproule. Conrad sold 250,000 bottles of the lager in just twelve months, and two years after its debut on the market, Busch and Sproule had brewed six thousand barrels of Budweiser. “I never found a business so easy as this Budweiser,” raved one of Conrad’s agents, and that despite its being “sold at a higher price than any other Beer in the country.”

Easy to sell and easy to steal. It is a measure of Budweiser’s superb flavor and character that, almost immediately, someone tried to capitalize on Conrad’s investment. In April 1878, Conrad received disturbing news from a brother who lived in New Orleans: Another version of Budweiser had arrived in town bearing a label virtually identical to the one Conrad used on his beers. The mock-Budweiser label was blue and white rather than red, but, like Conrad’s original, consisted of two parts: a rectangular main label and a bow tie around the bottle’s neck. The latter featured a diamond-shaped knot, crowns in the neckbands, an oblong laid over the bow, and the words “The World Renowned Budweiser Lager Beer.” Diamond and rectangle both sported a manufacturer’s trademark: “B. B. B.,” a near-duplicate of the “C. C. C.” on Conrad’s label. By that time Conrad had identified the perpetrator of the insult: Otto Lademan, president of Joseph Uhrig Brewing Company.

Lademan had been brewing the new style beer for several years, but he had discovered the power of Budweiser in particular a year or so earlier during a trip to Denison, Texas, where he maintained an agent and a sales outlet. A bartender there tried to pass off Conrad’s brew as an imported Budweiser to the tune of a dollar a bottle, a shockingly high price at a time when customers paid a nickel for a schooner (and more shocking still when translated into today’s money: seventeen dollars). Lademan handed over his dollar, examined the label, took a sip, and informed the bartender that the stuff was a fake, an imitation of the foreign brew. Imitation or not, Otto Lademan recognized a good idea when he saw one.

Back in St. Louis, other reports trickled in. An Anheuser salesman working the Galveston territory ran into one of Lademan’s travelers, a Mr. Lippenberg. When the conversation turned to Budweiser, Lippenberg boasted that he was the brains behind the Uhrig imitation. He had spotted Budweiser in California and promptly telegraphed his boss, urging him “to put up a similar label to Conrad’s and make it look like Budweiser Beer.”

More news, none of it good: V. H. Stum, Conrad’s San Francisco agent, complained that his trade was being stolen by Uhrig’s people, who promised barkeepers Budweiser at cheaper prices than Stum offered. Stum slashed his price by fifty cents, ran newspaper advertisements warning of the fraud, and devoted the rest of his time to trying to persuade beer drinkers that only his Budweiser was the real thing. The clientele at one bar also insisted on Conrad Budweiser, but when the owner tried to replenish his supply, he ended up with a case of triple-B. A customer took a sip, pronounced it a fraud, and refused to drink the rest of it.

Matters came to a head on a fine day in early May as Conrad and Adolphus Busch enjoyed a buggy ride through downtown St. Louis. Not far from the Union Depot (then located at Eleventh Street and Chouteau), they spotted Lademan in his buggy. Conrad hailed the man. “We stopped,” Conrad reported later, “and commenced talking about his imitation Budweiser Lager Beer. I told him that he was doing very wrong in making his imitation . . . ” Lademan “indignantly repelled the accusation,” pointing out that his triple-B trademark was “entirely different” from his rival’s triple-C and that Conrad was not entitled to “claim the whole alphabet.” Whereupon Conrad warned that Lademan “would have to stand the consequences” of a lawsuit. Lademan told him to “go ahead and crack the whip.” He, Lademan, “had as good right to manufacture Budweiser Beer as anybody in America.” Conrad’s was nothing more than a “counterfeit,” he added, and his own Uhrig brand “was not any better.”

On May 15, 1878, Carl Conrad filed suit, charging Joseph Uhrig Brewing Company with “pirating” the Budweiser label and name in order to defraud the public. Joseph Uhrig Brewing, in the person of Otto Lademan, denied the charge. The word “Budweiser” could not be trademarked, he argued, and if anyone was defrauding the public, it was Carl Conrad: His beer contained not one ounce of Saaz hops or Bohemian barley; it was not brewed “according to the Budweiser process”; and the beer’s label perpetrated those falsehoods for the sole and “fraudulent purpose of deceiving the public.”

The parties met in court in late October. Today, such a case would drag on for months and require the services of a horde of lawyers and expert witnesses, but Conrad and Lademan were in and out of the courtroom in two days. Conrad marched to the witness stand first and bumbled his way through an explanation of why he chose the name “Budweiser”—“the Budweiser process makes the finest beer”—and why his beer differed from all others—its unique qualities rested on a bottling method known only to himself and his foreman. Adolphus Busch and Irwin Sproule followed him to the stand; both insisted that the Budweiser brewing process—based on double vats and mixed mash—was unique. Over a dozen of Conrad’s dealers and salesmen testified, too, each claiming that Lademan’s inferior imitation damaged Conrad’s business and reputation.

Lademan’s lawyer called Lademan, William Lemp, and several other St. Louis brewers to the stand. One, the brewmaster for Wainwright and Co., summarized their collective testimony: “I don’t know anything about any process called the Budweiser process of brewing—never heard of such a process until I heard of this case.” Lademan was even more dismissive: “I know the process that was described by Mr. Busch this morning called the Budweiser process. It is a process used by everyone who uses rice in brewing. We make a water mash first, then a thick mash, & afterwards a water mash. It is no particular process at all.”

Lademan should have tried harder. The jury ordered him to pay Conrad $4,175 in damages (approximately $73,000 today). Lademan appealed, but the new judge concurred with the original jury: Lademan, he said, intended to deceive, and did deceive; he ordered the brewer to stop using the copycat labels.

 

THAT LADEMAN WAS willing to risk so much speaks well not just of Budweiser, but of the new lager, which threatened to elbow allmalt lagers right out of existence. Beer aficionados today scorn lagers made with corn or rice as inferior to all-malt products, believing that brewers adopted the use of other grains only to save money. That was not true: It cost Adolphus Busch more to make his adjunct-based beers than his all-malt brews, and those lagers sold for higher prices than did their conventional Bavarian-style counterparts.

Nor were the beers inferior. If any one fact lies at the heart of the stunning success of Busch, Pabst, and the Uihleins, it is that by the 1880s, they were brewing some of the finest beers in the world, beers that stood up against competition with anything made in Europe. The Uihleins knew that: In the fall of 1880, they shipped some of their bottled Bohemian to relatives of a Schlitz employee in Zeitz, a city in north central Germany. The recipients took the beer to a local chemist for analysis. The man expressed astonishment at its purity. Its flavor and character, he reported, compared with the finest Bohemian lagers.

While that might be dismissed as salesmanship on the part of the Uihleins, it’s not so easy to dismiss the grand gold prize that Anheuser Brewing won at Paris in 1878, where its beer faced off against one hundred other lagers and ales from France, Britain, Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia. The brewery’s St. Louis Lager generated an “immense sensation” among the competition’s jurors, reported a correspondent for the New York Times, especially after the supervising chemist reported that the beer contained rice.

But the three great brewing concerns also succeeded where others failed because they recognized what is fundamental to any brewer’s success: the need for consistency. Pabst and Schandein invested in a laboratory and a European-trained chemist because they knew that they could not afford to sell a single batch of bad beer. They employed prime ingredients, hired the finest brewmaster they could find, and spared no effort in creating fine malt and yeast, all for one end: so that each glass of their beer tasted the same every time, whether on tap or in a bottle; whether sold in Milwaukee, Chicago, or San Francisco.

Not all the other American brewers cared as much or understood brewing fundamentals. The fact is that much of the local beer sold in the nineteenth century was of poor quality, inconsistent, sour, or flavorless. And many of those other brewers never grasped the care, time, and money that stood behind the beers coming out of the titans’ breweries. One of those lesser brewers inadvertently admitted as much, when in 1881 he wrote to the editor of Western Brewer to ask a question. How, he wondered, did Best Brewing give its beer such a sturdy, long-lived head? “We use bi-carbonate,” he wrote, “but the beer won’t carry like the Milwaukee.” The editor’s reply was a masterpiece of tact and restraint. Foamy head, he replied, “depends not so much on addition of foreign substances as on the quality of the malt, the mode of mashing,” and a long, slow, secondary fermentation. Best Brewing’s “superior article is due to the superior facilities which they enjoy in their manufacture.”

But whether it was made in Milwaukee or St. Louis, New York or Cincinnati, nineteenth-century Americans embraced the new beer with open hearts—and mouths—because, explained a reporter for the New York Times, they disliked the “‘sour’ and ‘bitter’” taste of all-malt beer, preferring instead the “sweeter” taste of light-bodied Bohemian brews. The nation’s brewers, “recognizing the fact that one American beer-drinker consumes more, on an average, than three Germans look out to please the greatest number—particularly when it pays them the best.” And as long as the “greater part” of the nation’s beer “flow[ed] down American gullets,” the mostly German-born and bred brewers had no choice but to “modify the flavor of their beer to suit American palates” rather than those of their fellow émigrés.

So the Schaefer brothers of New York discovered in 1875 when they “tried the experiment of sending out to their customers genuine old lager.” Their effort to turn back the clock produced “a general growl over the hard, bitter, hoppy taste, and the absence of the rich, creamy broth” found in pale Bohemian beers. Americans had become “so accustomed to a light colored beer that a beer colored somewhat darkly is considered of inferior or indeed bad quality.” One hundred years later, another group of innovators would turn back time with greater success. But the late nineteenth century belonged to pale, adjunct-based lager. The barons built their fortunes on the foundation of its golden broth.