Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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