Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (30 page)

Or they necked in the dark comfort of a movie house. Movies were already popular when the 1920s began, and by decade’s end, 75 percent of the population visited the movies at least once a week. The tavern’s smoky gloom paled in comparison to the allure of a shimmering screen populated by charming mustachioed men and impossibly thin women in chic frocks, all of whom held a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other.

Balanced against these competitors for time and money spent on beer was the home itself. Where Americans had once gravitated toward saloons for comfort and company, now they could enjoy both at home. The first commercial radio broadcast aired in 1920 and by 1929 nearly half the nation’s households owned at least one radio, a percentage that had risen to 60 by the time beer came back. They enjoyed the new entertainment in unprecedented comfort thanks to coal- or gas-burning furnaces, which Americans had purchased in record numbers during the 1920s. Forty-seven percent of urban houses were wired for electricity in 1920; by 1933, more than 80 percent enjoyed that convenience. Twenty-five percent of homes contained a mechanical refrigerator (up from less than one percent in 1920).

Unfortunately for the brewers, those refrigerators were more likely to contain Coca-Cola than Budweiser. Just because Americans had voted for repeal, it did not follow that they planned to drink; an entire generation of men and women had not tasted alcohol for decades—or ever—and had no plans to do so. They’d spent the dry years quaffing oceans of soft drinks, and as one advertising expert told brewers, “[v]ery few people are going to drop a fifteen year old liking for a favorite beverage merely because they can now get beer . . . ” Especially not if the soft-drink manufacturers had anything to say about it. They’d started cashing in on dry mania as local option laws had eradicated saloon and drink. Between 1911 and 1934, sales of Coca-Cola, ginger ale, root beer, and other soft drinks had tripled. For thirteen years the makers of soft drinks had bombarded consumers with billboards, radio ads, window and counter displays, and glossy magazine images designed to persuade a beer-bereft citizenry how much better their lives would be if they drank Coca-Cola or Vernor’s ginger ale. Battle-hardened softdrink makers were not about to cede ground to beer.

Women were particularly resistant to beer’s charms, and not just because they regarded the martini as a more attractive accessory. During the 1920s, they abandoned their mother’s serge skirts and high-neck blouses in favor of clingy rayon stitched into mere slips of gowns. The clothing left nothing to the imagination and led women down the merry path of weight obsession. Dieting became a national pastime. Women’s fear of fat spawned a loathing for beer, especially given brew’s stodgy reputation and the old stereotype of the female beer drinker as a “Munich matron with double chins running all the way to her ankles.”

So the old days when beer was king and a man’s saloon his empire were dead and gone. Americans were drinking less than half the brewing industry’s capacity, and demand would stagnate for decades. Until and unless Americans returned to beer, it was impossible for them to keep two or three thousand breweries in business, as an earlier generation had during the golden age of the saloon and beer garden.

But in post-repeal America, it would be easier for fewer breweries to fulfill more of the demand, thanks to roads and cars. To accommodate the growing flotilla of automobiles, Americans had begun building a network of paved highways. It was nothing like the sprawling interstate system that would exist later, but nonetheless a giant leap forward from the handful of (mostly unpaved) roads that had existed during the railroad era of the nineteenth century. The new highways linked town with country, state with state, East with West, and so offered the potential for long-distance shipping that dwarfed anything envisioned by even Frederick Pabst or Adolphus Busch, who had been at the mercy of north-south, east-west rail lines.

O
VER THE NEXT
few decades, these new realities would reshape the brewing industry. The dearth of breweries created an opportunity for those smart enough—and wealthy enough—to grab it. Brewers who would thrive in the middle and late twentieth century were those who used highways and wholesalers as well as modern advertising methods to move their beer into lager vacuums. The shift from saloons to the home market, and from local sales to long distance shipping, also turned the old preProhibition ratio of bottled beer to tap—about 90 percent tap—upside down. By 1935, about one-third of beer sold was already in a package. By 1940 it was half, and by 1960, 80 percent of beer would leave its brewery in a bottle or can. Successful brewers would learn how to capitalize on this shift.

In those first few years after repeal, none of this was yet obvious. But if we turn to the company whose owners visualized the new dynamic faster and more clearly than any other brewers, we understand the scope of the Busch family’s achievement. If any one factor explains the dramatic growth of Anheuser-Busch after repeal, it is that August A. Busch and his two sons accepted the challenge that Prohibition and repeal forced upon them: to learn how to do business—how to
make
business—beyond the insular world of nineteenth-century brewing.

For eighty-odd years, the Busch men had sold just one product—beer—and sold almost all of it in one place—saloons. They had long ago mastered the art of selling beer to bartenders, and of manipulating mortgages and leases in order to build a network of tied houses; they knew how to hand out beer trays and penknives stamped with the company name. But after January 1920, none of those skills mattered. “We had to forget that we were brewers, bred in the bone and trained that way for years,” August A. Busch told a reporter, a painful process that he likened to “tearing trees up by the roots.” The keys to not just survival but success, Busch understood, lay in diversification, distribution, and marketing.

Through trial-and-error, and more than a few failures, he and his employees gained an understanding of how to create a diverse line of products and introduce them into new territories. To sell ice cream, for example, Busch organized a marketing department—itself an innovation of the 1920s—and targeted four markets in four different regions of the country. Into each, his employees dispatched the new ice cream; $10,000 per week for advertising, which went “a long way in one place;” and a product-specific sales crew. If “demand persist[ed] after the nine-days’- wonder of the first promotion,” and the staff had amassed the necessary “experience on which to proceed, and the certainty” that it would “get [its] money back, and something more,” only then was it time for Anheuser-Busch to “undertake a
national
campaign.”

Looking back, the Busch strategy sounds absurdly basic, almost stupidly obvious, because it’s become the basis of the twentieth-century way of doing business. But to a brewer in the 1920s, it was all new, and after April 7, 1933, it became the key to the company’s success. In that respect, August A. Busch, like his father before him, stands as one of brewing’s greatest innovators. Like his father, he led rather than followed. Because he had been willing to first rip out and then replant the company’s roots, and had sworn to protect and preserve his father’s legacy, he did more than just endure Prohibition. He used the noble experiment as a school in which to learn a new way of doing business. That, along with a dedication to making a superior beer, enabled Anheuser-Busch to break away from its lesser competitors and thrive in the harsh terrain of post-repeal brewing—to become, and remain, the world’s largest brewing company.

Anheuser-Busch survived; August Busch did not. The nearly Sisyphean struggles of his life—first against his imperious and domineering father, then against Prohibition—had worn him down. On the morning of February 13, 1934, exhaustion and the ravages of ill health—heart problems, gout, and asthma—finally won out. He picked up a pearl-handled revolver and ended his life.

At the funeral, his friend Daniel Kirby remembered the “sweetness of nature” of a man who “never did a mean thing.” Kirby might have added that August Busch was one of the heroes of the industry. Busch would have shrugged off such praise, but the description is apt. Few brewers had worked harder to survive Prohibition. No one paid a greater price. And no brewery reaped greater rewards.

CHAPTER SIX

“You Have to Think About Growth”

T
HEIR 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.