CHAPTER SIX

“You Have to Think About Growth”

THEIR BREWERY on State Street—Plank Road, once upon a time—was a dilapidated shadow of its former self, but their bank accounts were fat, and so the Millers of Milwaukee—Frederick A., Clara, and Elise (brother Ernest, who had “stolen” Budweiser, had died in 1925)—made the only logical choice: Spend money to make money. In the summer of 1933, the siblings began overhauling the aged plant built by their father.

The place needed it. During the 1920s, the Millers had kept the doors open by making near beer, soft drinks, and malt syrup. But none of those ventures paid well enough to justify refurbishing their nineteenth-century brewhouse. Instead, the family had focused on their other investments, which were many and profitable. Their real-estate holdings stretched from storefronts—former saloons, for the most part—in downtown Milwaukee to apartment buildings in Chicago to hotels in Miami, with gas stations, shops, and offices scattered hither and yon in between. They’d invested heavily in municipal bonds, a good choice during the 1920s when most cities were redesigning their landscapes to accommodate automobiles, with a major holding in Canadian bonds “so that if the US should go Bolsheviki, like Russia,” Ernest Miller once explained, they would not lose their entire fortune. But for reasons best known to themselves, they skirted one category of investment: stocks. As a result, they also avoided the bloodbath of 1929, and sailed into repeal with cash in hand.

But their father, company founder Frederick J. Miller, had taught his children to put the brewery first. That in turn nurtured in all of them an uncanny ability to measure their actions and decisions in terms of whether those injured or aided the enterprise that lay at the center of the family’s life. In many nineteenth-century brewing families, fathers and sons regarded daughters and sisters as accessories rather than partners. Not so the Millers, who cultivated in both Elise and Clara a ferocious devotion to the brick buildings on State Street. When beer returned, the siblings knew where both their duty and their self-interest lay.

Over a period of three years, they dumped more than $1.5 million into the plant. They modernized the cooler room, adding giant suction fans, an air-filtering system, glazed tile floors and walls, and stainless steel catwalks. They rebuilt the cellar, as brewers still called them, although this one stood five stories above ground. They bought new keg washers and upgraded the generators in the powerhouse. A newly hired chemist presided over a state-of-the-art laboratory.

But where the heart of the original facility had been the brewhouse, in the 1930s it was the plant’s bottling line and, after 1936, its canning equipment, which filled two hundred cans with beer each minute. Here, the Millers recognized, lay the future. Fred A. Miller said as much in 1930, when, recognizing that beer was likely to return, he warned Clara that they needed to start thinking about their aging bottling line. Employees had repaired and refurbished the equipment, which dated to the 1890s, but if “beer should come back . . . the present machinery could not stand the strain, because [their sales] would be mostly bottled beer.”

He was right. If the home market and long-distance shipping represented the path to brewing’s future, containers, or “packages” as the industry called them, served as the bricks that paved the way. Bottled beer had been around for years, of course, but a bottle was relatively fragile and heavy, and expensive to ship. Customers paid a deposit on each one, and brewers spent small fortunes recovering their empties, shipping them back to the brewery, sorting them, hunting for those that were chipped or cracked, and sterilizing those that could be reused. That system worked well when a brewery bottled only a small fraction of its beer. But in post-repeal America, no brewer could bottle, say, 75 percent, or even just 50 percent, of his output and expect to earn a profit if he had to pay freight to ship the empties back home.

What the new industry needed were lightweight, inexpensive containers that held up under the stress of shipping, fit into a refrigerator, and could be thrown away when empty. A sturdy, disposable can would eliminate most of the bottle’s shortcomings. But it presented two stumbling blocks: The container had to withstand the high temperatures required for pasteurization, and, more problematic, it couldn’t foul the beer, which is highly sensitive to metal.

Researchers at the American Can Company had begun working on a suitable metal container in 1909, a project they shelved when Volstead became law. But in the late 1920s, company executives dragged their files out of storage and began a new search for the perfect can. Fred Pabst and August Busch, attuned to market changes thanks to their Prohibition experience, also tackled the matter. Pabst was particularly interested in metal packaging. In the months leading up to repeal, he worked closely with a Milwaukee manufacturer to develop a metal replacement for the wooden barrel. He regarded his staff’s research into the can as an extension of that task, since, after all, a can was nothing more than a miniature barrel.

Sometime in 1931 or 1932, American’s researchers found the answer: Vinylite, a moldable plastic developed by Union Carbide that the can manufacturer used to line the container’s interior. Initial tests by Pabst-Premier were positive, but Perlstein and Pabst refused to commit until American had tried the new package in real-market conditions. William Krueger, president of Krueger Brewing of Newark, volunteered his company as a guinea pig. He, like most brewers, understood that the realities of postrepeal brewing dictate that he ship his beer well beyond his hometown. He had already waded into urban markets along the eastern seaboard as far south as Richmond, Virginia. He would test canned beer there.

Richmond provided an ideal laboratory. First, about 75 percent of the city’s beer was sold in bottles, the reverse of what was true nationally but the ratio predicted to become the norm in another decade or so. Second, Krueger already owned a chunk of the Richmond market. Third, it shared the city with a handful of local and East Coast brewers as well as the three major shipping brewers, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz, which meant that the Krueger cans would face limited but varied competition: national brewers supported by hefty advertising and regionals and locals backed by hometown loyalty and name recognition.

In June 1934, a crew of messengers hand-delivered four cans of beer and a questionnaire to one thousand households, chosen because they’d been identified as Krueger customers. The questionnaire cut to the chase: Did you like the beer? Would you drink it again? Is the no-deposit, no-return package worth the extra money?

The results surprised even Krueger: Eighty-nine percent liked the beer enough to drink it again. That was more than good enough to go ahead. Krueger and American created an advertising campaign complete with streamers, signs, window cards, and plenty of newspaper ads (“KRUEGER’S . . . in the amazing new KEG-LINED CAN.” “HAVEN’T TRIED IT YET? . . . you’re missing something”), and on January 24, 1935, the beer went on sale citywide. Within a month, more than 80 percent of Richmond’s beer distributors were handling Krueger’s brew—and canceling orders for beer from Pabst, Schlitz, and Anheuser-Busch.

By late 1935, brewers could choose from two kinds of cans—the flat-top still familiar today and a short-lived version shaped like a bottle—as well as several sizes and shapes of thick-walled, lightweight disposable bottles. The new packages accelerated the trend toward shipping. Prior to Prohibition, the vast majority of brewers shipped no beer at all or limited their reach to perhaps fifty miles from their home base. By the late 1930s, three-quarters of brewers were transporting at least part of their brew over state lines. True, much of the interstate beer ended up in adjoining markets: a Brooklyn beermaker sending trucks of beer across the Hudson to Newark, a Milwaukee brewer shipping to Chicago, Philadelphia beer being sold in Baltimore. But every day more and more beer traveled farther and farther, and brewers who could afford to began thinking of their markets in national, rather than regional or local, terms.

The Miller siblings, who introduced their canned beer in March 1936, recognized that brewing’s future lay far from home. Pre-Prohibition, the brewery’s beer rarely traveled beyond Wisconsin and a half dozen other northern midwestern states. But in 1936 and 1937, the family made its first strike to push Miller Brewing into the industry’s top ranks, spending a half million dollars on radio and newspaper advertising. In 1937, Fred and Clara both retired, a move that injected new energy into the company in the form of Clara’s son, thirty-one-year-old Frederick C. Miller, who joined the board of directors and replaced his mother as vicepresident. In 1938, Elise, now company president, and her young nephew accelerated their campaign, advertising Miller High Life in forty states. The following year they made a run for the other eight when they purchased advertising, much of it full-page and in color, in a host of national magazines. By that time, they’d moved out of the crowded bottom tier of small, local brewers and into the top twenty nationwide. The Millers had grasped the essential dynamic of beer-selling in post-repeal America: The race would be won by he and she who moved quickly and decisively.

Building a shipping market required money most of all, and not every brewer could afford to make the same choice as the Millers. Nor did every brewer try to do so. A handful of small, family-owned breweries survived the rambunctious post-repeal period by sticking to their pre-Prohibition game plan: cultivate local markets and local loyalty. Small beermakers like Yuengling in Pennsylvania, Leinenkugel in western Wisconsin, and the Matt family’s West End Brewing in upstate New York endured in part because of hard work, careful management, and fine beer. But they were also protected by their location in rural areas characterized by sparse population and limited highway access. For many years, the largest brewers—Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, and Pabst—simply ignored these isolated pockets in favor of the swelling urban centers that proliferated alongside increasingly congested highways. The Matts, Yuenglings, and Leinenkugels took advantage of that fact, and, rather than gamble on risky expansion and shipping, chose instead to pour all their resources into building customer loyalty in their own backyards.

As a result, it was small urban brewers who bore the brunt of the assault from shipping brewers and were the most likely to crumple when the Millers, or an even bigger gun like Anheuser-Busch, already experienced in the complexities of retailing and distribution, released a barrage of advertising. Nor could the urban locals rely on low price to keep their customers. Thanks to Prohibition’s alley beer and the Wall Streeters’ tainted brew, shoppers shied away from bargains, fearing that low price indicated low quality. One grocery owner explained to a brewing trade journal that the women who frequented his store preferred quality over price, which was another way of saying that they preferred the consistently high-quality brews from old-line nationals like Schlitz and Pabst. This was more than one man’s anecdote. A survey in the spring of 1935 showed that, nationwide, half of all beers sold were in the medium price range ($1.60 to $2.00 a case), while the cheap brews (priced at less than $1.60 a case) captured only about 17 percent of the market. Premium beers like those from Pabst, Schlitz, and Anheuser-Busch snagged a full third. And those were only national averages. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, the lowest-priced beers accounted for only about 3 percent of sales, while the most expensive brands hogged a whopping 68 percent of the market.

The nature of post-repeal distribution exacerbated small brewers’ woes and inadvertently fueled the dynamic that favored giant breweries. Prior to Prohibition brewers sold their beer directly to saloon owners, but after repeal they handed it over to a middleman, the distributor, who resold the beer to grocery stores and taverns. In a perfect world, a distributor’s trucks left the warehouse loaded with cans, bottles, and kegs from a half dozen or more breweries. The more cases of Brand X that the driver unloaded at Sam’s Corner Grocery, the more money the distributor earned. If Sam’s Corner Grocery closed, or if Sam stopped carrying Brand X, or, worse, if Brand X Brewing closed its doors, the distributor’s income dropped and his employees drove half-empty trucks.

From the brewer’s point of view, the distributor owned the key that unlocked the door to Sam’s Grocery. If Brewer A wanted to break into the market in, say, El Paso, he had to find a distributor who was willing to carry his brand and place it on grocery store shelves.

But the biggest brewers’ command of larger and larger shares of the market enabled them to exercise an informal but lethal power over wholesalers. A giant could pressure his distributors to truck his beer and only his beer; to drop competing brands; or to drop soft drinks, liquor, and wine. If the wholesaler refused, a brewery representative would show up at the warehouse and threaten to cancel the carrier’s contract.

Most distributors caved to the pressure. How could they refuse? Not with fleets of trucks and warehouses to pay for. And so the wholesaler informed his weaker, smaller customer—usually a local brewer—that he could no longer carry that brand of beer, leaving the beermaker with a brewhouse of woes in the form of unsold kegs, bottles, and cans.

Those who played the distribution card wisely created a buffer that sheltered them from hard times and other competitors. But no one could control the weather or the economy, and drought in 1936 and a recession in 1937 put even more pressure on the smaller players. When the drought began in the summer of 1936, there were 739 brewers in operation; by late 1938, that number had plunged to 625.

World War II proved another matter. Early in the conflict, federal officials ordered distillers to convert their plants to military production of industrial alcohol, but protected brewing as a vital component of the war effort. With spirits in short supply, beer consumption soared—or at least as much as rationing would allow.

Tin was rationed, so beer cans were banned except for sales to the military. Schlitz transformed shortages of glass and bottle caps into an advertising campaign. “When you share a quart of Schlitz and make one cap do the work of three it isn’t a question of patriotism,” the company’s advertisements announced. “You are just helping the other fellow get his share of the beer that made Milwaukee famous. That’s the friendly, American way.” When gasoline and tires ran short, Rudolph Schaefer bought one hundred draft horses and rented dozens more; it was the only way he could deliver his beer. Rainier Brewing of San Francisco hired teams of Clydesdales to haul wagons of lager through the city’s hilly streets.

In 1943, the Food Distribution Administration ordered brewers to hand over 15 percent of their production to the troops, a seemingly innocuous mandate that inadvertently exacerbated small beermakers’ woes. Fifteen percent of production from Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz was almost enough to meet demand, which meant that many small beermakers missed the opportunity to introduce their lagers to the people most likely to drink it: young men. Cut off from the front lines, the small fry focused on selling their beer to civilians at home, but they often ran short of bottles or kegs, or the gas needed to make deliveries.

Pinned down by rationing and ambitious national shippers on one side and a fusillade of federal regulations on the other, small beermakers joined forces in a Small Brewers Committee (later the Brewers Association of America). The twenty-five men who gathered in Detroit in the spring of 1942 appointed as secretary William O’Shea, a hot-tempered, loose-tongued wheeler-dealer whose Chicago printing company made labels for a number of breweries. He lobbied Congress for a graduated tax system based on barrelage and devoted the war years to railing against big brewers, whom he accused of ignoring the small guy’s plight. His members, he warned in what would not be the last of his hyperbolic pronouncements, would rather be put out of business by what was left of the enfeebled Anti-Saloon League than by rapacious cutthroats like the Busch brothers. “The big brewers are going to destroy the opportunity of young men who someplace, this very day, are giving their lives for one purpose; preserving the American way of life.” He demanded that the “paternal government . . . protect the weak like the police protect us from thugs.”

Others begged to differ. A man who had directed a brewing trade group during the dry years argued that too many small brewers clung to outdated business methods, content to coast along trolling for tavern trade and equating salesmanship with throwing a few bucks on the bar and buying a round for the house. Where were the small brewers during the push to conquer the home market? he asked. Nowhere to be found, and so the largest brewers had commandeered new territory around the country, filling grocery shelves from coast to coast with their beer, while the small boys whined about their poor sales and low profits. Another critic blamed the small beermakers’ woes on carelessness and ineptitude. Too often they hired an inexperienced friend or relative to manage the plant, and then exacerbated that mistake by refusing to pay good wages for a trained brewmaster. The beer went bad, sales plunged, and the brewery landed in bankruptcy.

Harsh words, but in many cases accurate ones. As one beermaker pointed out, anyone who failed during the war surely only had himself to blame. With distilling off-limits for the duration, most brewers were selling as much beer as they could make. Sales rose 10 percent in 1941, 12 percent in 1942, and another 12 in 1943.

Still, the shortages of brewing materials forced every brewer, large or small, to make a difficult choice: brew as much beer as possible using inferior substitute grains, or stick to high-quality but scarce barley, corn, and rice and reduce output accordingly. Many brewers took the path of least resistance and experimented with rye, oats, or potatoes. But rye produced a doughy wort, and oats resulted in a tongue-curling swill. One brewing chemist pleaded with brewers to avoid the potato, which produced beer that tasted as foul as it smelled. In the end, the brewers who created rationing-inspired recipes stuck with either yellow corn (oilier than the white corn that brewers typically employed) or unmalted barley. It was mostly marginal beermakers who tampered with their recipes; those with long histories and solid reputations didn’t dare.

Among them were the Millers. Back in 1937 when drought and recession had sent materials costs into the stratosphere, Elise, Clara, and Frederick had ordered their brewmaster to keep paying top dollar for the same fine materials that the family had been using for eighty years. In 1944, when the brewery turned out a record 730,000 barrels of beer, Elise made the same decision, but this time it forced her to curtail production. She slashed the advertising budget, pulled Miller beer out of seventeen states, and eliminated every label except the company’s flagship brand, Miller High Life, most of which was sold in slender bottles adorned with a gold-foil neck wrapper and Miller’s famous “Girl in the Moon” logo. The results were not as disastrous as they might have been: Because the family had positioned it as a national beer, Americans, back at work now and with hefty paychecks, passed up ten-cent bottles of lesser-known brews in favor of the fifteen-cent Girl in the Moon. The brewery earned a profit of $2.2 million in 1945, more than twice the amount of 1940, while selling in far fewer markets.

The war ended in 1945, but rationing did not. President Truman told Americans that Europe needed their help. Brutal weather there was killing both people and livestock. There was flooding in Italy and food shortages in Holland. Worse yet, the specter of communism lurked in every bleak street and dark alley of every European city. Better to endure Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Tuesdays here at home, Truman told the nation, than to allow the red menace to wrap its loathsome arms around the starving millions of Belgium or France.

No one knew when rationing would end, but Elise and her nephew Fred C. decided that, scarcities be damned, it was time to get busy. Job one: Replace the brewery’s nearly prehistoric 700,000-barrel capacity. In March 1946, company officers broke ground on a new stockhouse, phase one of a grand plan to rebuild the plant from the ground up.

Having launched that effort, Elise stepped down as president. She was in her late sixties and in poor health. Her side of the family held the majority interest and she insisted on passing the post to her untrained, uninterested, unkempt son Harry John, Jr., known to all as Buddy.

Her reasons had less to do with the brewery than with Buddy himself. Like all of the Millers, a devoutly religious family, he practiced Catholicism. But during his years as a student at the University of Notre Dame, he had fallen under the spell of a priest who promoted an extreme, mystical version of the religion. By the time he graduated in 1941, Buddy had become convinced that his wealth, which was considerable, stood between him and salvation. He moved to a farm outside Milwaukee, but continued to visit his mystical mentor at Notre Dame. In the mid-1940s, he began a lifelong campaign to hand over his fortune, which then amounted to $2.5 million (about $20 million in today’s dollars), to Catholic charities, monasteries, and convents. Elise was none too pleased about the plan, but became nearly apoplectic when she realized that he intended to scatter his Miller stock, too, which amounted to a quarter share of the brewery.

Work, she decided, would set him free of what she regarded as an irresponsible-bordering-on-insane project. She installed Buddy in the president’s post. But Elise Miller John was no fool: She gave her son exactly one year to prove himself. If he failed, she warned, the job would go to his cousin, Fred C. Miller.

Buddy showed up at the office and attended board meetings, but he spent most of his time trying to separate himself from his assets. He emerged from that project on occasion in order to join his father, Harry Senior, Elise’s estranged husband, in an attempt to sell the brewery. Father and son kept their intentions secret until Harry Senior was discovered escorting executives from other breweries on guided tours through the plant.

Fred C. chastised his uncle and scrambled to assure his employees that the company was not for sale. And sighed with relief when, in May 1947, his aunt Elise kept her word. Buddy was out. Fred C. was in.

The second time, Elise made a wise choice. Her nephew was born to lead. He’d played three seasons of football under Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, serving as team captain and being named All-American (tackle) not once but twice. Fred had graduated cum laude in 1929, and returned to Milwaukee to run his parents’ sprawling lumber and real-estate interests. He was a big man—six feet tall—with big shoulders and an even bigger personality. He thrived on risk, danger, and Notre Dame football. Every week during football season in the 1940s and 1950s, he traveled to South Bend to serve as an assistant line coach to head coach Frank Leahy. Usually he flew, sometimes piloting the plane himself (by the early 1950s he’d survived three plane crashes).

One weekend he and a few friends headed for Philadelphia, where Notre Dame was to play Penn. Bad weather forced the plane down in Pittsburgh, so the group piled into a car, Fred navigating, another man driving. When the travelers discovered that the highway patrol had closed the road to Philadelphia, Fred hopped out of the car and shoved the barricade aside. The reluctant driver forged onward, but soon wearied of maneuvering around the stalled and snow-bound cars that clogged the road. He called it quits. “What do you mean we can’t get through,” Fred demanded. “Get out of there, I’ll drive.” He seized the wheel and plowed on, steering and veering his way through the maze of snow-covered mounds, rolling down the windows when fog clouded the windshield. His passengers froze and no doubt aged several years during the drive, but Miller got what he wanted: He arrived in time for mass and breakfast with the team.

As far as Miller was concerned, his appointment as president of Miller Brewing came not a minute too soon. His competitors were busy expanding into multiple breweries around the country—the next logical move in an industry where national markets had become the great prize each brewer sought. Multiple plants increased a brewer’s vat capacity, of course, but, more important, a second or third plant mitigated the costs associated with long-distance shipping. The Busch brothers, for example, had purchased fifty acres in Newark, where they planned to spend $20 million building a new, state-of-the-art brewery. Nothing said more about brewing’s future than this announcement; nothing did more to enable the industry’s largest beermaker to grow still larger.

Not surprisingly, those who could do so matched the maneuver. Perlstein and Pabst parried with the purchase of Hoffman Beverage in Newark. In June 1946, the first Pabst beer rolled off that line and onto grocery store shelves in the New York metropolitan area. The New Yorkers fought back: Rudy Schaefer spent $2 million enlarging his Brooklyn plant, and the Liebmann family, makers of Rheingold, purchased a local competitor’s 500,000-barrel facility.

Erwin Uihlein pondered the scene. Since war’s end, he had managed to push Schlitz Brewing into the number-one spot, a rare blow to Anheuser-Busch. He’d done so by expanding the brewery and spending millions on advertising. But if he wanted to stay on top, he had to keep moving, keep buying. In early 1949, Uihlein bought the old Ehret brewery in Brooklyn and spent $6 million modernizing the plant.

Fred Miller would not be left behind. Bulldozers and wrecking balls demolished large chunks of his grandfather’s nineteenth-century plant. Construction workers swarmed the newly cleared land and raised a brewhouse outfitted with three five-hundred-barrel vats, as well as a new bottling facility that could handle two million containers a day.

By the time the Miller family hosted Milwaukee dignitaries and press at the official dedication in July 1949, Fred had added a new warehouse, a second brewhouse, and a grain storage building. Gone were the dark brick, the turrets and castellation of his grandfather’s day. Gone the statue of Gambrinus, the Gothic windows and arched entryways. The new buildings loomed over the city’s western edge, a hulking, monolithic, anonymous mass of pale brick and blank facades, softened by rounded corners but not much else. Sleek. Streamlined. Modern.

The brewery exemplified the dynamic future that Miller and other beermakers saw before them. The top four—Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, Ballantine (an old Newark brewery reopened after repeal by two engineers), and Pabst—and those angling for a spot to dislodge them had expanded into a country flush with full employment, more than $100 billion Americans had socked away in savings during rationing, and a belief that war and depression were behind them. In 1948, Americans drank 86.9 million barrels of beer and their per capita consumption hit 18.5 gallons, the highest numbers since repeal. Surely a blissful era of nonstop growth and profits had arrived.

 

IN ONE WAY IT HAD: Between 1950 and 1960, the volume of American industry as a whole increased 54 percent. In the fifteen years after the war’s end, the gross national product rose 250 percent and per capita income a whopping 35 percent. Beer, however, would not keep pace. In 1949, beer sales dropped by more than a million barrels. In 1950 they plummeted another two million, and they slid again in 1951. Per capita consumption dropped to 16.8 gallons. For the rest of the decade, sales barely budged from the 84-million-barrel mark and per capita consumption drifted downward, falling below fifteen gallons in 1961. As the rest of New America roared into the future, brewing’s engine sputtered and stalled right out of the gate.

Thus began the era that many people now see as the age of corporate beer, during which, they argue, a handful of giants, Anheuser-Busch chief among them, elbowed their way into domination of the industry. A time when those same giants diluted their beer with cheap corn and rice, reducing once fine lagers to little more than yellow water. A time when, coupling that low-cost beer with millions spent on advertising to promote the swill, they systematically destroyed smaller beermakers who clung to honest traditions and pure barley malts.

The truth is more complex, and the era itself both short-lived and anomalous. The dynamics created by post-repeal laws and the switch to the home market favored brewers with deep pockets. Only they could afford the investment in multiple plants, the high-speed bottling and canning equipment, and the advertising campaigns in magazines and on television that allowed them to fully exploit a national market. But even the largest, healthiest beermakers struggled to make sense of a nation that had turned its back on beer.

One factor that haunted brewhouses large and small was demographics. The birth rate had plunged from twenty-eight births per thousand people in the 1920s to twenty-one in 1930 and a mere eighteen in 1936. In the 1950s, that demographic chicken came home to roost, as the number of Americans between the ages of twenty and forty—the prime beer-drinking ages—slid to historic lows.

Worse yet, those few adults turned their noses up at beer. They might have been willing to drink it during the war, when liquor was in short supply, but not any longer. Many drinkers celebrated the post-war return of spirits with martinis or the syrupy sweetness of Manhattans, Rob Roys, and Singapore Slings. Others had never given up their Prohibition-ingrained preference for sugary soft drinks. By 1960, consumption of spirits had risen by nearly a quarter of a gallon per capita, even as that of beer declined by nearly two gallons. Over the next decade, spirits consumption doubled but beer inched up a modest two gallons, thanks mostly to the first wave of baby boomers hitting the drinking age. But that jump in sales was too late for smaller, marginal players. During the 1950s, the environment for brewing was, in a word, brutal. If it is true that only the strongest survived, make no mistake: They earned their victories.

Beer suffered another blow as the diet craze of the 1920s and 1930s blossomed into full-blown mania in the fifties. Magazine editors stuffed their pages with weight-loss plans and publishers grew rich on mountains of diet books. The food industry crammed grocery shelves with low-calorie jams and peanut butters, frozen dinners and salad dressings. The easy-pour artificial sweetener Sucaryl adorned kitchen tables from coast to coast. Dieters dumped money and time into programs like Slenderella and TOPS (“Take Off Pounds Sensibly”). Beer had never lost its reputation as a fattening beverage favored by beefy men; the contest between dieting and beer was no contest at all.

But beer also fell victim to a national palate that, since the 1920s, had gravitated toward the sugary and the bland, both of which can be seen as hallmarks of a modernizing society. Historians mark the decade of the 1920s as the true beginning of the twentieth century. It was then that Americans shrugged off the values and ideas that had characterized the nineteenth century in favor of those that can be regarded as “modern.” Americans embraced a more casual attitude toward sex, to name one example. Thanks in part to the automobile, they expanded once small boundaries of sociability—islands, one historian has called them—and abandoned a local outlook in favor of a more national view. Advertising became more ubiquitous, and its content changed. Nineteenth-century advertising focused on the object itself and its qualities: This is fine soap. This is a well-made chair. But in the early twentieth century, advertising targeted not the object but the person buying it: This soap will make you beautiful. This mouthwash will make you popular. This car will enhance your virility.

One of the most important changes of the first half of the twentieth century was the way in which Americans associated modernity with convenience, most especially in food. Adults living in the 1920s remembered watching mothers and grandmothers spending hours preparing food—and they rejected that hard labor, which had devoured women’s energy, in favor of convenience: soups, vegetables, and fruits from cans; factory-made bread; store-bought mayonnaise. Washing machines. Detergents in boxes. These modern conveniences evoked a new age a universe away from the old days when women had worn skirts to their ankles and had hands scuffed by harsh soaps.

But the more processing that food endures, the more flavor it loses, so the generations born in the 1920s and 1930s grew up eating a blander diet than their parents had and a more limited one as well. It was also a sweeter diet, as processed foods tend to contain more added sugar than unprocessed. In the 1970s, Americans would rebel against soft, tasteless breads, “instant” coffee, and even corporate beer, but in the early and mid-twentieth century, the American palate favored the light, the bland, and the flavorless. Consider cigarettes: Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the percentage of rich, full-flavored Turkish leaf tobacco in cigarettes dropped from about 20 percent to less than 6 percent. Distillers diluted their liquors with neutral spirits in an effort to please customers on the hunt for a light liquor. Vodka, virtually unknown in the United States before the 1950s, became one of importer Heublein’s best sellers, thanks to the spirit’s lack of color and flavor.

But nothing exemplified Bland America like TV dinners and canned soups, instant coffee and packaged pudding, dehydrated potatoes and instant rice—all flew off grocery store shelves and into the nation’s kitchens. Americans liked it that way. They scorned homemade breads in favor of light-as-air, textureless Wonder Bread. When the kitchen at a posh Boston restaurant switched from fresh beans to frozen, customers raved about their flavor.

Beer? Too bitter. Too hoppy. Too flavorful.

Brewers struggled to adjust to these unexpected and confusing developments. Some gambled on new recipes. They had to if they wanted to please a bland-happy public. Back in the 1870s, Americans had demanded a less malty, less hoppy version of European lager, and brewmasters had accommodated their new countrymen’s tastes by developing a unique American version of Bohemian-style lagers. Now a new generation asked for—and received—an even less demanding version of American lager: a sexy, vibrant beer that went down as easily as instant mashed potatoes or pudding and never asked much of its recipient. The president of the Master Brewers Association of America urged his membership to brew “streamlined,” “modernized” beers with a pale color, “an agreeable, mild hop flavor,” and no “bitter aftertaste.” The president of the Wahl-Henius Institute, one of the nation’s leading beer schools, warned brewmasters to pay heed: They might prefer full-bodied, hoppy brews, but they weren’t the ones buying the beer. The public preferred “blandness,” and so blandness it must have.

Some critics denounced what a business reporter in 1952 described as “the dethronement of the old-time brewmaster,” but they missed the point: For nearly a century, American brewers had been accommodating the demands of the public’s palate. They’d done so in the 1860s and 1870s. Now a new generation of brewmasters heeded the insights gleaned from sophisticated consumer research that showed that the average American beer drinker disliked overtly malty or hoppy beers. The importance of the style of American beer at mid-century is that it was a response to demand.

Consider events that unfolded at Renner Brewing in Youngstown, Ohio, where sales had drifted downward from the moment of repeal. The company survived its first post-repeal decade largely because of the demand induced by war. But when peace returned, red ink again nudged black out of the company’s ledgers. In 1949, the board of directors hired new management and created a new beer, but to no avail. Renner’s executives turned to a market research firm for help. Its surveys revealed that people rejected Renner lager because it was “too bitter and strong.” Out went the old and in came a light brew, along with a new sales pitch and slogan. Renner’s sales soared.

Much the same thing happened at Fort Pitt Brewing in suburban Pittsburgh. In early 1952, that company responded to the demand for light lagers by introducing Fort Pitt Pilsener, a “pale, dry, less filling” beer. So, too, at Red Top Brewing in Cincinnati, where executives ordered their brewmaster to dump his old recipe in favor of an “extra-dry” light lager. The new beer went on the market in 1951 and sales rose 100,000 barrels over the previous year.

Lighter beer saved Ruppert Brewing. The company had drifted aimlessly since the death of Jake Ruppert in 1939. George Ruppert, Jake’s brother, stuck with dark, heavy beer sold mostly in barrels for the draft market. Sales plunged. When George died in 1948, the new management dumped the old brew and the emphasis on tap beer in favor of a light lager sold in bottles and cans. “The full flavor remains but the bulk is gone,” announced the company’s advertisements. Knickerbocker, “sparkling-clear” and “extra light,” was a “modern, low-calorie beer that’s far less ‘filling’ than beer of the past.” Ruppert would never regain its place at the top of the heap: During its years of drift, it had suffered fatal wounds at the hands of Anheuser-Busch and Pabst. Still, the decision to alter the beer in order to accommodate changing tastes staved off the inevitable and kept the company alive for another fifteen years.

Fred Miller was ahead of the game: He didn’t need to tinker with his recipe. Grandfather Frederick J. Miller had brewed a modern beer before Americans knew that they wanted one. Miller High Life, the “Champagne of Bottle Beer,” was light, pale, and dry. Very light. Very pale. Very dry. A beer best suited, sneered one competitor, for “women and beginners.” Fred C. knew better. High Life, he reckoned, was the perfect beer for a new, modern America, just as his sleek brewery and its high-speed, high-tech equipment was the right design for the times. Together the beer and the brewery would propel his company into the industry’s top rank.

So would the exquisitely fine-tuned business acumen that seemed to be imprinted in Miller’s DNA. Consider the way he averted what might have been a disaster of bad timing: The new brewery with its capacity of three million barrels had gone online in late 1948, the worst possible time of year in an industry where the average brewer sold about 80 percent of his beer during warm-weather months. Miller knew he had to sell beer and sell it now, not later, so he did what few of his competitors had ever tried: He unleashed a new sales campaign in the dead of winter. It paid off, and Miller Brewing could boast that it sold half its beer in what had been the “off season.” One reason was advertising, about $7 million worth a year (a breathtaking $54 million today), far more than most brewers spent. But the way he advertised the beer made more difference than the money he spent doing it. Yes, he geared some of his ads toward men, sponsoring sporting events on radio and television. But the family had long touted Miller High Life as the “Champagne of Bottle Beer,” so Miller carried that idea directly to a group of people most brewers overlooked: women. He ran full-page color ads in women’s magazines like McCall’s and Vogue. He hired Brooks Stevens, one of the most important industrial designers in the country, to create in-store displays aimed specifically at the women who spent their family’s food dollars. Miller even sold his beer in six-ounce splits, a dainty package aimed at women’s appetites.

Everything Miller touched turned to profit. In the space of just five years, the brewery’s sales soared 275 percent in an industry whose overall increase amounted to 2 percent in a good year. By 1951, he’d spent $25 million on his new brewery; he was selling High Life in all forty-eight states and Hawaii; and he’d pushed Miller Brewing into the number-eight spot. In late 1952, his employees bunged their three-millionth barrel of the year, a new company record and enough to push it from sixth place to fifth nationwide behind Schlitz, A-B, Pabst, Ballantine, and Schaefer.

But that was not enough for Fred Miller. Barrel three million had no sooner been packed off for sale than he announced another $20 million worth of expansion. “Our goal,” he told reporters, “is to be the largest producer of the best beer.”

He faced a steep climb. Impressive as those three million barrels were, they amounted to only half the annual output across town at Schlitz or down in St. Louis at Anheuser-Busch. Still, for a guy who’d been number twenty just a few years back, he was doing fine. And no, he told reporters and employees who asked, he did not plan to buy or build outside of Milwaukee. That likely struck many observers as an odd decision. After all, Milwaukee almost seemed too small for a man of such oversized ambition and energy. But Miller insisted: One plant had been good enough for his grandfather, and it was good enough for him. He would stay right where he was.

Among the major players, he was alone in that decision. In the early 1950s, it had become clear to ambitious brewers that a stronghold in the eastern United States was not enough to guarantee brewing supremacy. The future of New America lay in the other direction, in the golden West in general and in California in particular.

In the fifteen years after the war, a combination of Cold War politics and warm sunshine enriched California to the tune of millions of people—five million new residents between 1950 and 1960—and billions of dollars. Gigantic aircraft factories sprawled out into the desert, along with thousands of new housing and shopping developments, all of it embroidered with ribbons of interstate and freeway. Magazines and newspapers raved about the California lifestyle with its backyard swimming pools (40 percent of the nation’s total), lush lawns, and year-round sunshine. The Dodgers and Giants exchanged creaky, bleak New York for youthful California, and in the space of a year, The Mickey Mouse Club, a California production populated by wholesome California kids, forced the New York-based Howdy Doody Show out of its Monday-through-Friday slot. A reporter for Life magazine was not far off the mark when he predicted that California would “radically influence the pattern of life” in post-war America.

Twenty years later, California would “radically influence” American beer culture, but in those first years after the war, Big Brewing knew only that the Golden State was the place to be. In 1948, just three years after his Newark purchase, Harris Perlstein negotiated to buy the 600,000-barrel Los Angeles Brewing Company. A few months later Tivoli Brewing of Detroit bought Aztec of San Diego, a purchase that promised to push tiny Tivoli, ranked thirty-fourth, up into the top fifteen. In the summer of 1952, Erwin Uihlein announced a California acquisition of his own: thirty-five acres in the rapidly growing Van Nuys section of the San Fernando Valley not far from Los Angeles.

Uihlein’s news release came just days after a similar bulletin out of Anheuser-Busch headquarters in St. Louis: Gus Busch had purchased sixty-five acres in Van Nuys; there he would spend $15 million to build a 750,000-barrel brewery.

It was the shrewd move of a man with Busch blood in his veins. For the last five years, he and Anheuser-Busch had suffered the ignominy of sitting in second place, having been ousted from first by the Uihleins. Busch was determined to regain the throne. No one doubted that he would succeed. “Being second,” he once said, “isn’t worth anything.”

August A. Busch, Jr., began working at the brewery in 1922 and was promoted to general superintendent in 1924, when he was just twenty-five years old. After his father’s suicide in 1934, he became second vice-president and the brewery’s general manager. He’d been the number-one man since the death of older brother Adolphus III in August 1946.

Gus was every bit as flamboyant as his grandfather Adolphus, perhaps even more so. Like Adolphus, he oozed self-confidence. He was any situation’s center of attention, just as Adolphus had been, and exuded the same irresistible charisma. There, perhaps, the comparisons peter out. Gus, an “almost defiantly uninhibited” man, was a bit more crude, a bit more blunt than Adolphus. He was less educated than his multilingual grandfather, but he compensated for a lack of book learning with a universe-worth of street smarts that were unexpected in a man born into unbridled wealth.

“He rarely talks in a normal voice,” a reporter once observed. He “sounds more like a hoarse lion” and “lopes in a half-walk, halftrot, arms pumping like a sprinter,” all the while shouting orders to the flunkies racing to keep up with their full-speed-ahead boss. He indulged in frequent fits of rage, especially when encountering fools, a species he did not suffer gladly—or, for that matter, at all. In short, Gus was the right Busch for the moment. If he couldn’t bring Anheuser-Busch out of its slump, no one could.

In 1953, Gus regained the number-one slot during a lengthy brewery strike that shut down his Milwaukee competitors. For decades, brewing had been one of the most unionized of American industries, and prior to World War II, relations between employers and employees had been friendlier than most, perhaps because labor and management shared the same burden of persecution by a dark force that was always trying to put the brewer out of business and the worker out of his job. But in the decade after the end of the war, union workers nationwide, sniffing the opportunities of a go-go economy, embraced a new militancy that resulted in tens of thousands of strikes and affected nearly every industry. Brewery workers and owners squared off repeatedly in contests over working conditions and pay scales.

Most walkouts ended within a week or two, but the Milwaukee strike that began in the spring of 1953 dragged on for seventy-six days. All told, the city’s residents lost $100 million in income and the breweries three million barrels of beer during the peak selling season. Pabst and Schlitz both owned other plants and could keep making beer. Fred Miller could not, and for the first time, brewing’s Golden Boy conceded that his one-brewery, one-city strategy might be a mistake. He put plans for another $20 million expansion at State Street on hold and told reporters that he was thinking of spending the money on a new facility elsewhere.

When the picketers returned to work, Miller and Milwaukee’s other major brewers, Schlitz and Pabst, raised their prices in an attempt to recapture lost profits. Down in St. Louis, Gus Busch had escaped the labor bloodbath, but he joined them in raising prices anyway, presumably because he thought he could get away with it.

Customers balked. No one knew why. Perhaps it was because brewers had done such a good job of accommodating the nation’s taste buds. One pale, light lager tasted much like another, so why pay more? Whatever the reason, for the first time since repeal, consumers deserted the premiums for cheaper regional brands like Falstaff and Hamm’s. Gus Busch missed the point and raised his prices again in 1954. Disaster ensued: Anheuser-Busch sales plunged 15 percent, and A-B handed the number-one slot back to Schlitz. Gus apologized to stockholders, calling it the “worst mistake” he’d ever made. Then he took off on a cross-country tour, visiting every wholesaler who handled Anheuser-Busch products, explaining his error and urging them to fight the good fight. Back home, he invited eleven thousand wholesalers, retailers, and tavern owners to his home, a thousand each night, greeting each one at the door with a welcoming handshake. “When midnight came,” he said later, “my hand would be so swollen I couldn’t move my fingers.”

All told, 1954 was not a particularly good year for Gus Busch, and not just because of his pricing blunder. He had acquired the St. Louis Cardinals a year earlier, and winced at the attacks the purchase earned him. A Colorado senator who was also president of a minor-league baseball association introduced a resolution that would have banned A-B from owning the team and added insult to injury by holding hearings on the matter. Gus showed up and defended himself, but the assault was humiliating. He shrugged off criticism that he’d bought the team only for its salespitch potential, but he and everyone else knew that it wouldn’t hurt to have Anheuser-Busch signs plastered all over the infield and scoreboard. Nor did it hurt that baseball fans were choosing to stay home and watch on television rather than take themselves out to the ballpark; Gus’s advertising would reach them there, too. The new owner knew little about baseball, but he dived into this new adventure with the same gusto with which he grabbed everything else in life. “We hope to make the Cardinals one of the greatest baseball teams of all time,” he announced.

A few weeks later he traveled to Milwaukee, where Fred Miller had just persuaded the Boston Braves to move to Wisconsin. A bemused Gus posed for pictures at a celebratory luncheon, standing behind the seated Fred with his hands on Miller’s shoulders, as if to say “Down, boy, down!” In the center of the table sat a cake decorated with small figures of two baseball players, one in a Cards’ uniform, another dressed as a Brave, foreheads touching, leaning into an imaginary shouting match as a tiny plastic umpire stood nearby.

 

BUT IF MILLER BREWING and Anheuser-Busch represented one face of the brewing industry in the 1950s, Pabst exemplified another—one that was, although few recognized it at the time, more emblematic of Big Brewing’s coming fate. Pabst Brewing had ridden high and fast into the post-war era under the leadership of president Perlstein and board chairman Fred Pabst Junior. The brewery, ranked number three in the nation, owned a plant in Newark, and in 1953 opened a high-efficiency, ultramodern brewery in Los Angeles months before Gus Busch and Erwin Uihlein.

But in 1954, Fred Junior retired, an event that marked the first time since 1864 that no company officer bore the name “Pabst.” With him went the Pabst magic that had once made Chestnut Street in Milwaukee home of the world’s leading brewery. He had given up a role in daily management some years earlier, but his place on the board had rooted the company in its past. After all, Fred had joined the company back in the 1880s, and learned the business under his father’s tutelage. No one else could or would replace that connection to the past, and it’s not likely anyone cared. Since repeal, most of the company’s officers had been chosen from the ranks of superior salesmen, or from the cadres of college-educated young men interested in making a career in booming corporate America. Now a parade of presidents, vice-presidents, and marketing directors could not reverse the flow of red ink; they could not figure out how to market a beer in a world where beer drinkers proved few and fickle. By 1956 the company had slid to seventh place in the brewers’ ranks, and the stock had plunged from its post-repeal high of $32 to a mere $6. In 1957, the board of directors replaced Perlstein with a marketing executive from Colgate-Palmolive, who stanched the wounds with a combination of lower prices and gimmicks like coupons redeemable for salt shakers and barbecue tools.

It was too little, too late. Frederick Pabst’s beloved brewery, with its turrets, Gothic windows, and lanterns emblazoned with “P,” lay near death. A proxy fight erupted in early 1958, when one group of stockholders tried to sell the brewery to Pepsi-Cola and another group resisted, determined to resuscitate what was left of the company. In the end, the combatants reached a weird compromise: Pabst bought Blatz Brewing from its owner, spirits maker Schenley, not because it needed more brewing capacity—it most assuredly did not—but because it needed Blatz’s president, a whiz-kid accountant who had doubled Blatz’s sales and prodded the company from its position at number twenty-four up to number eighteen. Whether he could save Pabst remained to be seen.

If Pabst hoped to survive, someone needed to get cracking. A pack of aggressive mid-sized regional brewers were grabbing bankrupt breweries and using those and space on wholesalers’ trucks to bully their way up the ranks. They got a boost from consumers’ disenchantment with high-priced brews. No one worked this game better than the men at Hamm Brewing in St. Paul, Minnesota. They modernized the company’s one plant, then purchased Rainier’s San Francisco facility, which opened doors to wholesalers in coveted California. They dumped their old ad campaign and replaced it with one built around the phrase “the land of sky blue waters.” It was not particularly fresh, but it was transformed into sheer genius when paired with an irresistible animated bear and a jingle inspired by “voodoo rhythm” and pounded out on an empty Star-Kist tuna carton. Sales climbed 36 percent in 1955. The company rose to seventh place that year and to number five in 1956. After that, nothing seemed impossible. Over the next few years, Hamm continued to snap up bankrupt breweries and to hold its place in the top five. Hamm was joined there by Falstaff of St. Louis and Carling of Cleveland, regional breweries that elbowed their way up using similar strategies, although neither ever employed as seductive a jingle or as adorable a mascot as Hamm.

But even the Hamm bear could not catch up with Gus Busch and Erwin Uihlein, who resembled bulls on a rampage, building or buying breweries as fast as they could sign the checks, apparently oblivious to the stagnant demand that was killing others, banking on some far-off day when Americans would perform an about-face and fall in love with beer again. In 1956, Erwin Uihlein bought an empty brewery in Kansas City, Missouri. A year later, he broke ground on a new plant in Tampa, Florida, the company’s first foray into the rapidly growing Southeast. In July, Busch informed the world that he had purchased 160 acres about a half mile from the Schlitz site; there he planned to build a $20 million plant. Anheuser-Busch added to its Florida holdings in early 1958 when it bought a Miami brewery. The purchase didn’t last long—the Federal Trade Commission ordered A-B to shed the acquisition on grounds that it violated federal antitrust laws—but it’s not likely Gus Busch lost much sleep over it, especially when he ended the year 1.1 million barrels ahead of the Uihleins.

Other brewers questioned his sanity. Gus Busch wasn’t brewing at 100 percent capacity now. No one was. Why did he want another plant? Busch had an answer, of course. “You have to think about growth,” he said. “You have to plan for it.”

That was what it took to stay on top in the near-fatal 1950s: Aggression. Planning. Risk. But in such precarious times, risk sometimes proved fatal. Consider the case of the Liebmanns, Julius and Alfred, both in their eighties but still active, and Alfred’s son Philip, brewery president. The family had never sold its Rheingold anywhere except the urban Northeast, where the annual “Miss Rheingold” contests attracted millions of voters and generated as much excitement and anticipation as the Oscars did in California. The company’s two New York City breweries provided a capacity of 2.5 million barrels a year. During the early 1950s, that, plus the Liebmanns’ fine beer, business smarts, and the various but always beautiful Miss Rheingolds, enabled the company to power its way into brewing’s top five.

But in early 1954, the family paid $6 million for Acme Brewing’s Los Angeles and San Francisco plants. The decision to sell its beer on what might as well have been another planet led to disaster. The family opened its newly refurbished California plants in 1954, brewing Rheingold at the Los Angeles facility and Acme’s Gold Label in San Francisco. A year later, Philip Liebmann shut the Gold Label plant and pondered the dismal scene in Los Angeles, where sales of Rheingold had fallen 48 percent since opening day. Two years later, he sold the facility to Hamm Brewing.

To his credit, Liebmann owned up to his mistakes, most of which boiled down to his failure to understand the complexities of the modern market. First was the beer: It had been brewed for New Yorkers, and Californians turned thumbs down on its (relatively) heavy, (relatively) bitter flavor. Second was distribution: In New York, Liebmann relied on his own drivers and trucks. That didn’t work in California, where brewers had long since learned to coexist with union teamsters and powerful wholesalers.

Last, the company’s advertising and marketing missed its mark. Back east, Liebmann told a reporter, the family targeted its lager and its ads at neurotic, hard-driving New Yorkers and “a sophisticated market, where [people] work like hell so they can live in Scarsdale, and then drop dead in an elevator.” That message bombed with Californians, who, Liebmann recognized too late, prized “leisure and casualness. At 5 o’clock there is a rush to the barbecues, and at home they live in their backyards.” Liebmann had missed the point of the pun in the slogan attached to the state’s bestselling Lucky Lager: “It’s Lucky when you live in California.” Even the Miss Rheingold contest, which drew millions of voters in New York, flopped in the land of beauty queens and starlets. Lesson learned, Liebmann told a reporter. “You don’t sell soapsuds and beer the same way.”

The Liebmanns’ tale of California woe was symptomatic of a deeper problem. Many brewers were following the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of a saloon-era game plan: sports-oriented sales pitches aimed at the “worker,” a mythological creature believed to be (a) lower income; and (b) addicted to watching or listening to sporting events.

On the face of it, that seemed like a logical move. After all, sixty years earlier brewers had gotten rich selling beer to the workingmen who thronged saloons. Nor could anyone blame brewers for assuming the continued existence of a sizable and powerful working class, given their ongoing, head-to-head confrontations with union labor. But union membership peaked in 1955, and in New America, the “workingman” was almost as likely to be female as male, to wear a white collar rather than a blue one, and to favor three-martini lunches over bologna sandwiches out of a metal lunchbucket. Moreover, the new working class enjoyed more disposable income than previous generations. They tended to buy according to reverse pricing: Higher-priced brews conveyed status and signified, in their own minds if no one else’s, that they were just as able to enjoy life’s finer things as their suit-clad bosses.

Perhaps this workplace fluidity explains an unintentionally goofy mid-1950s magazine ad for Ballantine ale. “Enjoy the game with light refreshing Ballantine! THAT’S ALE, BROTHER!” read the headline. The accompanying photograph featured two men sitting in a posh den outfitted with a bookcase stuffed with rows of matching moroccan-bound volumes. The pair held glasses of foaming beer, wore suits and ties, and sat in front of a television tuned to a baseball game. Pictures of athletes in action hung on the wall. Whom, exactly, was this ad supposed to woo? Blue-collar workers who devoted their weekends to yearning for the high life? Corporate executives getting in touch with their hidden “Joe Regular”?

 

FRED MILLER would never know. Just days before Christmas in 1954, he and his son headed for a holiday hunting trip in Canada. Minutes after taking off from General Mitchell Field on the city’s south side, the plane crashed. The Millers and their two pilots died. In one moment, Miller Brewing lost not just its dynamic president, but Fred Junior, twenty-one, a senior at Notre Dame, a high-school All-American quarterback, and, by all accounts, a near-clone of his father, so surely headed for brewing leadership, too.

Norman Klug, Fred C.’s able vice-president, carried on in his boss’s place. The company expanded, added more equipment, created the Miller High Life Open golf tournament, and aired its commercials during such TV blockbusters as Steve Allen’s The Tonight Show and the Mitch Miller sing-along program.

But the Champagne of Bottle Beer had lost its fizz and the Girl in the Moon her glow. The devotion to family and business that had sustained and inspired Elise, Clara, and the two Freds had run dry. This time there were no relatives eager to take charge. That included Buddy John, who was more devoted than ever to his Catholic charities and cared what happened in the brewhouse only insofar as it affected the stock dividends that fueled de Rancé, the foundation he had created to manage his philanthropic work.

From 1947 to 1953, Miller sales had risen 379 percent. From 1954 to 1960, they climbed a mere 13 percent. In-fighting and power struggles among various factions of the Miller family stymied Klug’s efforts to push the company forward. In the late 1950s, he investigated the possibility of several acquisitions, but followed through on none. Falstaff, sniffing disarray, tried to buy the brewery, but family members blocked the move. In 1960, Klug bid for Burgermeister, but family quarrels slowed the process and the California brewery slipped out of his hands and into the Uihleins’. The next year he succeeded in purchasing nearby Gettelman, but its 132,000 barrels hardly constituted a serious power play.

Where Miller Brewing might have wandered had it stayed in family hands is an unanswerable question. In July 1966, Lorraine Mulberger, the daughter of Elise Miller John and sister of Buddy John, startled Milwaukee and the brewing industry with the announcement that she was selling her company stock—by that time she held the controlling shares—to W. R. Grace, a billiondollar conglomerate whose holdings included shipping, chemicals, and chocolate.

The outside world may have been shocked, but insiders were not. J. Peter Grace, the company’s president, was no stranger to the Millers or their brewery. He was an old family friend and, as a fellow Catholic and philanthropist of the first order, had mentored Buddy John in the art of giving money away. Buddy had chosen Grace to serve as treasurer of de Rancé and, more important, as one of his two representatives on the brewery’s board of directors. Grace, in turn, wanted the brewery, a fact he never tried to hide. Once on the board, he hounded both Buddy and Lorraine to sell him their shares of the company, which he regarded as an attractive addition to his already diverse holdings. Brother and sister had wrestled with the idea of selling, but neither was willing to make the first move. Only God, it seemed, was going to push one of them off center.

Like the rest of the Miller family, Mulberger had been raised Catholic, but in the early 1960s she had left the family faith to join a Protestant fundamentalist church. And in July 1966, she told a handful of reporters that God wanted her to remove the evil of alcohol from her life. Price? Thirty-six million dollars, not a bad return on God’s will. Brewery president Norman Klug died not long after, perhaps of a broken heart, and Peter Grace installed his own man at the top.

The ramifications of the Miller–Grace merger would ripple through brewing for years to come: A few years later Peter Grace would in his turn sell the company to another, much larger corporate conglomerate that would rewrite the rules of engagement among brewing competitors. But in 1966 it was just another of thousands of corporate marriages. Between 1951 and 1968, nearly fifteen thousand American firms surrendered their independence, twelve hundred of them giants holding assets of $10 million or more. Seventy percent of the deals were “conglomerate” mergers like the Miller–Grace marriage, wherein a company that manufactured, say, copper wire, acquired one that produced nylon stockings.

Many small and regional breweries that had survived both stagnant demand and the national giants’ power seized on merger as a way to gain strength through diversity. Many had no choice: Every year it became harder to compete against the giants, and every year Americans, who had become accustomed to the still new but powerful sway of television advertising, turned their backs on “local” products in favor of ones with national name recognition. The biggest manufacturers, aware of that fact and that more Americans were changing residences more and more often than ever before, advertised regularly in national media, and it was their names—Hunt’s, Heinz, Colgate, Schlitz—that won out over names recognizable only to locals born-and-bred. Family-owned businesses with mostly local markets found it hard to compete.

Thus they turned to mergers. National Brewing bought an olive oil company and Heileman purchased Machine Products, which fabricated airplane parts. Iroquois Brewing of Buffalo acquired an investment firm, a maker of natural food supplements, and a company that manufactured parts for computers and spacecraft.

More than one ailing brewery surrendered its independence to outsiders. The Liebmann family, which never recovered from its California fiasco, sold Rheingold to Pepsi-Cola United Bottlers, Inc (PUB). Jake Ruppert’s brewery suffered a similar ignominious fate. In 1963 Marvin Kratter, a New York real-estate developer, bought the brewery and then leveraged it two years later to buy the Boston Celtics basketball team. Kratter’s heart wasn’t in beer; it was in wheeling and dealing. Soon after the Celtics deal he sold the Ruppert brand to PUB/Rheingold, thus closing the hundred-year-old brewery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. (He held on to the Celtics for three years, and then sold them to Ballantine Brewing. The reason? A computer manufacturer had absorbed Kratter’s company and the new management had no use for a basketball team.)

But most brewery mergers consisted of like joining like, as strong players gobbled weaker ones. Narragansett Brewing of Rhode Island bought Heffenreffer and 103-year-old Krueger, the canned beer pioneer, then was itself acquired by Falstaff. Drewry’s bought Piel Brothers of Brooklyn; Pfeiffer of Detroit bought E. & B. Brewing; and Rochester Standard absorbed Haberle Congress in Syracuse, New York. Peter Hand of Chicago merged with Buckeye of Toledo, Ohio. Ortleib Brewing of Philadelphia took over Fuhrman and Schmidt of Shamokin, Pennsylvania; Sunshine Brewing in Reading, Pennsylvania, snatched Columbia Brewing in Shenandoah. Blitz-Weinhard of Portland, Oregon, grabbed Great Falls Breweries of Great Falls, Montana, and Oshkosh Brewing in Wisconsin picked up Rahr Green Bay Brewing. Carling bought Arizona Brewing in 1964, but sold it two years later to National Brewing of Baltimore (which staged a successful takeover of Carling in 1975).

The mergers reduced the number of breweries—and the array of beer brands found in grocery stores. It’s easy to blame mid-century brewing’s shrinking numbers on corporate giants, but as the roll call above reveals, small and medium-sized brewers were hardly innocent victims; they played their own part in downsizing the industry. Mergers provided marginal players with additional brewing capacity and so a chance to make a run for glory, but in the 1950s and 1960s, vat capacity mattered less than that most valuable of all assets: space on a distributor’s truck. When Blitz-Weinhard of Oregon, for example, bought Great Falls Brewing of Montana, Blitz bought not just a brewery, but access to its distributors and so to another market.

As the brewers’ ranks dwindled, the competition between them intensified, and the wholesaler himself became vulnerable. An Illinois wholesaler for Falstaff learned that truth in a particularly brutal manner. First the brewery sold him lager contaminated with phenol; many of his customers dumped him and his bad beer. Then Falstaff’s sales manager showed up at the warehouse and demanded that the wholesaler capture 98 percent of the territory for Falstaff, and do so using “chiseling” tactics, such as offering lower prices to favored customers, or providing free kegs to tavern owners who would switch to Falstaff. The wholesaler struggled, torn between the need to protect his investment in trucks and warehouses and his desire to preserve his integrity. When he refused Falstaff’s demands, the brewery terminated his contract. The wholesaler lost everything, and sold his trucks, warehouses, and other assets for a few cents on the dollar.

Wholesaling functioned, in other words, as the old tied-house system had worked before Prohibition. And as in the days of the tied house, one man’s disaster was another man’s opportunity. No one understood this dynamic better than Roy Kumm, the president of Heileman Brewing in La Crosse, Wisconsin. In the early 1960s, Kumm bought five failing breweries in order to gain access to their distributors. Kingsbury Brewing gave him an entrée into Minneapolis, northeastern Wisconsin, and parts of California and Washington. Brewmaster provided accounts in Ohio and Michigan. Foxhead opened doors in New York and New Jersey.

California, which had become one of the largest beer markets in the country, proved a harder lock to pick. Those brewers who had invaded the state back in the early 1950s controlled distribution and thus retail outlets. The only way in was by purchasing an existing California beermaker, which Kumm tried to do in 1966, when he bid on, but failed to win, Lucky Lager. “There is,” he groused, “no other way to do it. You cannot get in with any of the wholesalers out there. It is an absolute impossibility. It is a locked door.”

As it had back in the 1880s, the merger movement of the 1960s kept some small players alive for a few more years. But in the end, it also inadvertently fostered the giants’ ambitions and placed the smaller players in an even tighter squeeze. In 1966, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that found Schlitz guilty of violating antitrust statutes when it had acquired another brewery. That decision haunted—and shaped—the industry for years.

Barred from acquiring competitors’ plants and equipment, Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch simply dug into their pockets and built more plants. They’d started doing so back in the 1940s, but their pace of construction accelerated significantly in the 1960s, and the new factories were far more efficient than any of the tiny, aging breweries available through merger. With these behemoth brewhouses, the Big Two could produce more beer at a much lower cost than anyone else and slash their distribution expenses as well. By the early 1970s, A-B and Schlitz owned fourteen breweries between them, produced eight or ten million barrels apiece each year, and measured their annual growth in double digits. No one could catch them. That was unfortunate, because the two giants built those plants at a moment when seismic shifts rattled the industry. In the 1960s, the decade and a half of stagnant demand ended and beer consumption shifted upward. The moment Gus Busch had planned for had arrived.

 

ROBERT A. UIHLEIN, JR., grandson of August, did not intend to let Gus run away with his lead. He had joined Schlitz Brewing in 1942, starting in sales and working his way up to a vicepresidency in 1951—just in time to watch A-B knock Schlitz out of the number-one slot. Bob Uihlein longed to fight back, but his uncle Erwin, the company president, wasn’t interested. Nor was Sol Abrams, general manager and a Schlitz employee for some sixty years. The two older men settled into second place. For much of the 1950s, one employee said later, Schlitz Brewing resembled a “big lion dozing in the sun.”

That worried Bob Uihlein and the four hundred or so other Uihleins whose comfortable lifestyles depended on stock dividends. In 1961, the family-dominated board of directors replaced Erwin Uihlein with his nephew. Eighty-seven-year-old Sol Abrams retired.

Bob Uihlein was a tall hulk of a man with a passion for tennis, polo, and big-game hunting. He was decisive, smart, and ready to tackle a job for which he’d been training his entire life. He purchased an IBM computer and hired a slew of “genius-I.Q. types,” including Fred R. Haviland, Jr., who came to Schlitz via advertising and a stint at Anheuser-Busch. Sales rose 19 percent in Uihlein’s first year on the job, thanks in part to a new advertising campaign (“Real gusto in a great light beer”). He plowed some of the profits into acquisitions, on the theory that a diversified company was a healthy company. His new vice-president for finance spent $100 million on Chilean fishing fleets, a Pakistani glass factory, and breweries in Puerto Rico, Spain, Belgium, and Turkey. None of the investments returned a profit, but by the time Uihlein figured that out, it didn’t matter, thanks to Haviland and the whiz boys in marketing.

Indeed, the new gusto in Schlitz stock was due less to Uihlein than to Fred Haviland. When you drink, he explained to a reporter, “you imbibe the image along with the brew.” He and his computer analyzed consumer behavior, trying to figure out “what makes the beer drinker tick and how to get to him . . . Beer to us is a product to be marketed—like soap, corn flakes, or facial tissues.” “It’s the Procter & Gamble way,” he added, in case anyone had missed the point. “We’re Procter & Gamblizing the beer business.”

Procter & Gamblizing meant determining how, why, when, and where people drank beer; why they chose one brand over another; and how and why the color of the label, its wording, or even the shape of the bottle affected their decision. Haviland and his staff determined that people regarded beer as an extension of themselves, and most wanted their chosen brand to convey a sense of “premiumness”: If the beer appeared to be refined and high class, so, by extension, was the person drinking it. Never mind that the brew in question probably looked, tasted, and cost the same as any other; advertising and image created the “premiumness” that drinkers desired.

Haviland’s efforts inspired the campaign built around the word “gusto” and new labels for Old Milwaukee, the company’s lower-priced beer, that featured “lots of white to suggest lightness.” Clearly, Bob Uihlein had seen the light.

He wasn’t the only one. Other brewers hunted for what marketing mavens called “segments” of potential profitability. That explains “Lite” beer, introduced in 1967 by Meister Brau of Chicago, an agglomeration of small midwestern breweries. Back in the 1950s, some brewers had tried to promote ordinary beer as diet friendly and no more fattening than grapefruit or crackers—without changing their lager’s recipe. Lite beer was a whole different animal: Unlike its predecessors, it contained fewer calories than regular beer. The company supported the new brew with television ads that featured a lithe blonde dressed in a sleeveless black-and-white striped cat suit who performed exercises and urged viewers to “Meet the beer you needn’t hold back on . . . ” A few months later, Forrest Brewing, a division of Rheingold, trotted into the segment with Gablinger’s, which contained sixty fewer carbohydrate calories than a regular bottle of beer, or about the same number as a slice of bread. Drink Gablinger’s, suggested the advertising campaign, and “save the bread for a sandwich.”

The diet beer segment was just one of many fragments into which the brewing industry was splintering. Demand was back—but Americans seemed suddenly, almost inexplicably, to want something other than basic American lager. Consider imported beer: In the 1960s, it comprised less than 1 percent of the total beer market, but that slice grew at the rate of 9 percent a year, a gallop compared to domestic sales’ 2 percent trot. Choosing an imported beer over a domestic one, opined an advertising manager for Heineken, was like buying a Cadillac instead of a Ford. The decision bespoke sophistication, worldliness, and appreciation for “the finer things.” “It’s fun when you have guests in to ask, ‘Would you rather have German or Mexican beer?’” said a man interviewed for a report in Newsweek magazine. He stocked up at Tony’s Liquors in suburban Los Angeles, where thirty-two different imports lined the shelves.

Fun? Not as far as American brewers were concerned. “It is particularly irritating,” groused a vice-president at Carling, “to see someone pay 75¢ for a bottle of Heinekens.” Even more irritating to see visitors at the 1965 World’s Fair in New York drink three million glasses of Löwenbräu. And positively maddening to watch Americans flock to the British-style pubs that, along with the Beatles and Mary Quant clothes, were all the rage in the mid- to late 1960s. Dozens of pubs, complete with darts, fish and chips, and British beers and ales (served cold to accommodate Yankee palates), opened in New York (thirty opened in the space of about a year), Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and even Atlanta.

The Carling executive ought to have paid closer attention, because the sudden popularity of imports marked the onset of a transformative moment in the American palate. Had the Carling man but known it, the era of bland food was grinding to a halt, and the next twenty years would see what amounted to a revolution in American food and drink. The cause of these tectonic shifts in cultural markers are always hard to pinpoint with precision, but post-war affluence was surely one factor. So was travel abroad and a generation of kids determined to reject whatever the establishment had to offer.

Whatever the reason, in late 1966, Time magazine analyzed the trend. A shop owner in San Diego reported that he stocked three thousand different “fancy foods, from kippered sturgeon and kangaroo tails to pickled rooster combs.” A grocery store manager in Washington, D.C., remarked that just ten years earlier, an average chain store carried perhaps a half dozen kinds of cheese. Now, he said, any self-respecting grocer stocked “at least 50 assorted, high-powered imported cheeses.” An array of photographs illustrated the report, most of them showing notable Americans at work in their kitchens. It’s a measure of the times (and their difference from our own) that the “celebrities” included Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an MIT provost, the wife of an architect, and historian Barbara Tuchman. Augie Busch, Gus’s son, was there, too, preparing doves broiled with butter and served rare.

If Americans wanted something exotic, then smart brewers were going to give it to them. Gus Busch put Michelob, a beer developed by his grandfather sixty years earlier, into a sleek new bottle, slipped an importlike foil wrapper around its neck, slapped on an eye-opening price (an astonishing $7.30 a case, more than twice the price of Bud), and sent it to market. Meister Brau introduced Meister Brau Bock and bought the North American distribution rights to a German beer. Others followed suit, signing franchise agreements and brewing pseudo-imports, dark beers, bocks, and anything else that might tempt the palates of the “discriminating drinker” segment.

But in the 1960s, the most important segment was “youth.” Brewers understood that their future success rested on the ability to capture and keep the millions of “war babies,” as Americans called them, tumbling into adulthood. Easier said than done. The kids of the 1960s, at that time the most well-educated, affluent young adults in American history, were not behaving quite like anyone had expected them to. In the spring of 1962, several dozen students gathered at a camp on the shore of Lake Huron in eastern Michigan and drafted a political statement that condemned American foreign policy, racism, capitalism, colonialism, and the military-industrial complex, and inspired dozens of antiwar, antinuclear marches.

From Greenwich Village to Hibbing, Minnesota, from Chicago to Denver and beyond, kids flocked to coffee shops to hear guitar-strumming folk singers. On the radio, shoo-bop and doowop gave way to youthful angst in the form of “The Sound of Silence” and “Eve of Destruction.” At Drop City in southern Colorado, one of hundreds of experiments in communal living, the inhabitants built geodesic domes out of scrap material and new lives out of their imaginations, and believed that “anything was possible . . . ”

Brewers tried to make sense of this potentially lucrative segment. The editors of Brewers Digest bombarded beermakers with articles that explored drugs, young people’s sense of alienation, and the sociology of pot smoking. One series examined teenagers’ passions for fads and tattoos and the relationship between existentialism and drugs. But a Chicago advertising executive spoke for many when he admitted that the new crop of young people “are a puzzle to us and we are a puzzle to them.” They have “their own ideas” and “won’t accept as fact the values and symbols of their elders.” Surveys showed that they were also none too keen on beer. A full 40 percent of young people quizzed in one market analysis described beer as “unpleasant or bitter,” and most females preferred hard liquor to beer.

And some of them simply preferred pot. The manager of a discothèque in Miami told a reporter for the New York Times that marijuana “spell[ed] disaster to the liquor trade. If they ever legalize it, the liquor business is dead.” Parts of the business, anyway. A store owner in Boston said that he’d “been selling a lot more wine since the drug thing started.” “It used to always be beer that the kids wanted,” he mused. No more. “Beer drinking is very bourgeois,” explained one student, “but wine is ideal for sipping while you smoke pot.” Out in Colorado, a beer distributor reported that beer consumption had plunged at bars near the university campus in Boulder.

At West End Brewing, the Matt family fought back. Since the end of the war, the Matts had stayed low to the ground, sticking with their Utica Club brand and the familiar environs of upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania. During the 1950s, they lured consumers with a series of captivating television commercials based on talking beer steins Schultz and Dooley and their friends Farmer Mugee and the lovely Bubbles La Brew. The decision to keep it simple enabled the Matts to sell about 600,000 barrels a year, about one-tenth of what poured out of Anheuser-Busch or Schlitz, but enough to pay the bills and keep the doors open.

But in the spring of 1968, as long-haired kids wearing flowers in their hair marched against the war, the Matts launched a new advertising campaign centered on an imaginary discothèque called the Utica Club (“where it really swings”). The series of TV commercials served up a screwball mixture of the hip and hilarious and allowed the Matts to poke fun at themselves and at brewing’s stodgy reputation.

The campaign’s centerpiece opened with flashing lights and a go-go girl dancing to “The Utica Club Natural Carbonation Beer Drinking Song,” played by the Natural Carbonation Band. The camera panned to the club’s entrance, where a gorilla showed his membership card to a doorman and slid down a chute to the dance floor. Over the next forty-five seconds, the gorilla chased and captured a hunter; Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane showed up; brewery salesmen showed off their dance moves; and boxer Rocky Graziano stumbled into the scene in his role as a baffled representative from the older side of the generation gap. “Utica Club is where it really swings,” announced the voice-over. “You never know what might happen or who might show up at the Utica Club.”

Inventive, funny, and surprisingly hip for an otherwise old-line, establishment brewery, the ads spoke directly to the same young adults who, as children, reveled in the antics of Schultz and Dooley, and pushed company sales to new heights. But the Matts weren’t taking any chances. They wooed the next generation down the line with another venture, a Victorian-theme tour center, complete with a Gay ’90s bar, a collection of nineteenth-century mechanical music machines, and a Utica Club trolley that hauled visitors around the grounds. The brewery sat in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, prime resort territory, and the Matts’ free tour focused on families and fun in a manner that echoed the delights of beer gardens of a century earlier. Kids loved the music machines, the root beer, and the going-away gift, an easy-to-assemble cardboard replica of the brewery and trolley.

A similar scenario played out a thousand miles west at Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Like West End, Leinenkugel sat in the heart of a forested lake district that offered vacationers plenty of fishing and swimming, canoeing and camping. The region drew people from Wisconsin, northern Illinois and Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The family capitalized on that seasonal influx by offering brewery tours twice a day, conducted by young women dressed in Indian maiden outfits complete with a headband out of which sprouted a ten-inch feather. (Bill Leinenkugel’s daughter agreed to the costume but drew the line at the feather, which she deemed too ridiculous to bear, an example, apparently, of a young person refusing the symbols of her elders.) Every visitor who signed the guestbook received a Christmas card from Bill Casper, the company’s president and grandson of founder Jacob Leinenkugel.

This was building for the future, small-brewery-style, and a smart move for a tiny operation surrounded by hungry predators. It helped that rural Wisconsinites remained loyal to local brewers, and that the area was so isolated and relatively unpopulated that the big brewers ignored it. The brewery always made a profit, but the pressure to do so was, as Bill Leinenkugel later recalled, “horrible”; neither he nor any of the other Leinenkugels enjoyed much more than a modest lifestyle. They invested most of their profits in two areas: first, modern machinery, because too many small brewers stuck with outdated or poorly maintained equipment from which, inevitably, flowed bad beer; and second, a well-trained brewmaster, who, as per an unwritten Leinenkugel law, came from outside the family. (If the brewmaster was an uncle or brother, Bill Leinenkugel explained, no one would want to tell him his beer had gone bad.)

 

THE MATT AND Leinenkugel families were safe for the time being, protected by their small size and rural locations relatively distant from the kingdoms of the giants. Not so the mid-sized beermakers who wrestled each other for a spot in the top tier, or tiny outfits whose only crime was proximity to a kingpin. Fred Haviland made short work of much of Schlitz’s Wisconsin competition when he unleashed the revamped version of Old Milwaukee. He spent $2 million on advertising in just five counties, which worked out to between $200 and $300 a barrel, and then deployed the dreaded “price promotion,” slashing the price per case from $2.59 to $1.85. Dealers who bought thousand-case lots got an even better deal. “Now no brewery can match that,” complained Roy Kumm of Heileman. “It was absolutely unmerciful.” He and twenty other Wisconsin beermakers convened in emergency session, but they could not stop the juggernaut. “I think,” he said in 1966, “there are only three of them left that were in that room.” The rest had gone bust. Kumm helped himself to a few of the fallen, closing the breweries and keeping the distributors’ contracts. The giants left him no choice. It was the only way he could gain access to wholesalers’ trucks.

In 1958, 211 beermakers operated 252 plants and the four largest owned only 18 percent of the market. By 1967, 124 brewing companies operated 153 plants and the top four accounted for about one-third of all sales. Anheuser-Busch reigned as the undisputed leader, selling eighteen million barrels of beer in 1968. Number-two Schlitz lagged by a full two million, and number three Pabst, with just under eleven million, was no longer in the race. Nor for that matter were the rest of the top ten. Falstaff might boast that it was the fourth-largest brewer in the United States, but its six million barrels placed it firmly in the category of also-ran.

As for Miller Brewing? Fewer than five million barrels and the number-eight spot. Not good enough for J. Peter Grace, who was fed up with beer. His investment in Miller Brewing had not paid off. Financial frustration was complicated by the constant irritation of thorn-in-the-side Buddy John, who held 46 percent of the company’s stock and meddled in Miller affairs every chance he could. On a Sunday evening in June 1969, Grace sat in the bar at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and phoned Joseph Cullman III, chairman and chief executive officer of Philip Morris, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with one fist clenched around cigarettes and the remaining hand rummaging through adhesives, packaging, chewing gum, and razor blades. Two days later, Philip Morris owned Miller Brewing.

Any sensible person might be excused for assuming that here lay brewing’s future: beer as a cog in the wheel of a giant corporate conglomerate. But a few months later, a young man from Iowa bought a brewery in California. The acquisition went unnoticed by anyone in brewing, but he, not the Philip Morris purchase, signified the industry’s future.