Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (10 page)

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.

T
HE 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.