Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (6 page)

August Krug, too, longed for a larger operation. In 1849 he had added a brewery to the restaurant and saloon he owned on Chestnut Street, and an opportunity for growth presented itself a year later, when his father arrived from Germany bearing eight hundred dollars in gold coin and Krug’s eight-year-old nephew, August Uihlein (pronounced E-line). Krug placed the boy in school and invested the coin in the brewery. He purchased more land and excavated a 150-barrel lagering vault, a clear signal that he planned to run on the same turf as Phillip Best. Krug could manage the brewery and restaurant, but he needed help keeping an eye on the numbers. In 1855, he hired a bookkeeper named Joseph Schlitz.

But in December of that year, Krug tumbled down a hatchway and landed hard on the floor below; a few days later he died, leaving his estate to his wife. Schlitz wasted no time in offering the widow his life savings in exchange for a partnership. In 1858 he sealed the deal by marrying her, hiring August Uihlein as the new bookkeeper, and changing the company name to Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company.

Phillip Best’s brother Carl suffered a different kind of loss. He had not joined the family brewery, preferring to stick with the vinegar factory he had founded. But in 1849 he sold that, and he and a business partner purchased land for a new brewery three miles west of Milwaukee in the relatively unpopulated Menomonee Valley. They christened their venture the Plank Road Brewery, named for the wooden roadway that ran past their door (today’s State Street). The partners hoped to sell part of their output to the farmers who hauled grain into town one way on Plank Road and supplies back the other. When the partner ran the brewery into debt and then absconded, Carl and younger brother Lorenz carried on until young Lorenz died; Carl, either bereft or inept, let the brewery slide into bankruptcy.

Thirty-year-old Frederick Miller, who had emigrated to the United States a few months earlier, leased the property in 1855, then purchased it outright a year later and set about to make his family’s American fortune. He had begun training as a brewer fifteen years earlier, and by the time he arrived in the United States had achieved the status of brewmaster and managed his own brewhouse. Another century would pass before the small outfit he helmed joined the ranks of the world’s great breweries, but in the late 1850s, his talents earned a good living for his family. He lured Milwaukeeans to his relatively distant location with a garden filled with tables, shade trees, and a multicolored, aromatic array of formal flower beds that cascaded down the sides of the bluff behind the brewery. Customers enjoyed homemade breads and cakes and specially prepared hams. Women sipped a house specialty, mocha coffee, while men clutching beer steins thronged the bowling alley. Children romped to the strains of orchestras and choruses that performed under the roof of the open-air pavilion. Miller would succeed where Carl Best failed, and today all that remains to memorialize Carl’s efforts is a section of his lager cave, now the last stop on the visitors’ tour at Miller Brewing Company.

P
HILLIP AND JACOB JUNIOR
enjoyed the competition, which only spurred their own ambitions. By the late 1850s, the modest brewhouse on the hill, symbol of their émigré hopes and the limits of their original capital, had outlived its usefulness. In 1857, the pair plowed their profits—some $20,000 a year (over $400,000 in today’s dollars)—into a new plant: an imposing two-story brick complex adorned with turrets and Gothic windows, with a life-sized statue of lager-swilling Gambrinus, the mythical inventor of lager, perched on top. The new brewery could be seen from almost everywhere in the city, testimony to Phillip and Jacob’s ambitions and to the importance of lager to Milwaukee’s economy. But its crowning glory lay hidden from sight: The “vaults,” or lager cellars, consisted of several blocks of flagstone corridors surmounted by arched brick ceilings and lined with hundreds of rows of puncheons sized to hold thirty barrels, or about one thousand gallons, of lager.

The decision to expand forced them to live with stomach-wrenching risk. In order to earn a return on their investment, they had to operate at full capacity. Milwaukee’s growth continued apace, but the contest for customers grew more heated each year. Chicago’s growth was, if anything, even more astonishing, and the brothers could count on selling several thousand barrels there each year to taverns around that bustling city. But even that outlet bristled with uncertainty: They had to buy or rent real estate in Chicago, both for their office and for warehousing the beer. And they had to hire a reliable agent to manage their Chicago affairs—lining up customers, ordering ice, and hiring teams and drivers to deliver the beer. All of it—the new plant, the larger vats, the Chicago branch, the soaring payroll—forced the men to the edge of their means.

What is most remarkable about this moment in the history of what would become the world’s largest brewery is that Phillip and Jacob played their hand just as the nation’s economy skittered into a two-year recession. The so-called Panic of 1857 spawned a string of bankruptcies and foreclosures that reached from the urban coast to the rural frontier. The impact crashed across the Midwest, where investors in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa had dumped millions into railroad projects, using loans from chronically wobbly banks that crumpled under the impact of first recession, then depression. In Milwaukee, beer sales plunged: The 100,000 barrels produced by the city’s brewers in 1857 fell to 42,000 in 1859.

That may explain why, just a year after building the new brewhouse, the brothers parted ways, Phillip claiming the brewery and Jacob the real estate—a couple of lots and a large brick building—that they owned in downtown Milwaukee. Years later, an aging Milwaukee saloonkeeper claimed that the brothers rolled dice to determine the division of property. According to this account, Phillip won the toss and opted to keep the brewery, betting, apparently, that good times would return and so would the demand for his beer.

It’s hard to imagine so shrewd a businessman as Phillip Best risking so much on chance. On the other hand, he never lost touch with the hard-driving roustabout within. On more than one occasion, he galloped his horse down East Water Street and charged through the doorway of the Menomonee Saloon, one of the city’s most popular watering holes. As the men draped across the bar or slouched in chairs watched, whooped, and hollered, the equally amused barkeeper shooed Best out the door. Phillip tied his horse at the rail outside and then strolled back inside, shouting an order to “‘set ’em up’ for the house.”

As with the dice-rolling partnership split, there’s no way to know if the horse tale is apocryphal. But both have a ring of truth: If we know anything about Phillip Best and the handful of brewers who laid the foundations of fortunes in those early days of the brewing industry, it is that they embraced risk. After all, Phillip had turned thirty the year he left Europe for the United States. By the late 1850s, he’d long since passed the first flower of youth and understood that this gamble might not pay off, especially given the number of players who crowded the table. Like him, ambitious brewers in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities were busy adding steam engines and larger vats to their brewhouses. Also like him, they relished the competition from the hundreds of new breweries that had opened to accommodate Americans’ new passion for lager.

Phillip’s choice, like his earlier decision to risk his adulthood on America, paid off. By the time he gained sole ownership of the brewery, he could measure his American success by more than his company’s profits. A Democratic governor honored his contributions to Wisconsin politics by granting him a commission in the Milwaukee Dragoons militia company, and a grateful Republican governor elevated him to the rank of brigadier general in a division of the state militia.

In 1857, Phillip reigned as Prince during Milwaukee’s first Lenten-season Carnival. He presided over a lavish reception on opening night and sat enthroned on the lead wagon of a parade that sashayed through the city’s streets the next day. Behind him marched horn-tooting musicians and beribboned stallions carrying local dignitaries. A river of wagons flowed behind, loaded with men and women attired in ornate costume and mask: A majestic King Gambrinus waved to the delighted onlookers; Bacchus greeted his subjects; two “apostles of Temperance” perched on another wagon, and the crowd roared when one fell off and into the muddy street.

By any measure, German or American, Phillip had succeeded. Among the city’s two dozen or so brewers, only Val Blatz produced more lager, and Best Brewing lagged by fewer than two hundred barrels. As the decade turned, the landscape that Phillip surveyed from his hilltop empire contrasted dramatically with the one he had first seen back in 1844. Then, he looked down on a sea of leafy green on one side and a small town on the other. Now Milwaukee, population forty-five thousand, sprawled in all directions. Rippling layers of forest had given way to houses and roads. Phillip owned not just two small lots, but several city blocks. And beneath his feet lay thousands of barrels of German lager, the stuff of his American dreams.

CHAPTER TWO

“I Must Have Nothing But the Very Best”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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