Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (8 page)

Where and when Frederick Pabst met Phillip Best is not known. Their German heritage would have brought them together socially, but Best may have encountered the Captain during one of the brewer’s trips to Chicago. In any case, three days before his twenty-sixth birthday, in March 1862, Frederick Pabst married Best’s oldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Maria.

The union benefited both men. Just three of Best’s seven children had survived infancy, and his only son, Henry, was but ten years old. Presumably Phillip and Frederick discussed the possibility of Pabst leaving the water for beer. Bad luck forced the issue. On December 16, 1863, a ferocious storm pounded Lake Michigan. Pabst was on a regular run, his beloved
Sea Bird
filled with passengers and crew. Faced with the possibility that vessel and passengers might not survive the onslaught of waves and wind, Pabst beached the steamer, a maneuver that damaged it but saved everyone’s life. It would cost $20,000 to repair the
Sea Bird’s
broken hull. A few weeks later, Frederick Pabst reported for work at the brewery on Chestnut Street.

Another of Phillip’s sons-in-law, Emil Schandein, soon joined Pabst at the helm. Schandein had trained as an engineer before he emigrated to Philadelphia in 1856, at age sixteen. There he tended bar, a position that surely disappointed him intellectually and financially. A year or two later, he headed west to Illinois for the life of a traveling salesman. That work carried him to Watertown, Wisconsin, where he met the Best family. He married Phillip’s daughter Lisette in the spring of 1866 and went to work for his father-in-law soon after. As vice-president of Best Brewing, he complemented Pabst’s lack of education with his own scientific and technical expertise. But Schandein suffered from frail health—induced, perhaps, by the heavy drinking that provided an escape from an unhappy marriage (Lisette conducted a long affair with their son-in-law). He spent much of his time in restorative travel, during which he visited the company’s branch offices and spied on the competition.

I
N THE MID
-1860s, Pabst and Schandein, Busch, and the Uihleins were just a few brewers among many, their brewhouses barely distinguishable from thousands of others. Each boasted a dozen or so employees, a steam engine, some wagons, and a few teams. Each served up about four thousand barrels of beer, or one-third of the output of what were then the country’s biggest brewhouses. Forty years later, these men helmed the three largest breweries in the world, sprawling factories whose output topped or neared the million-barrel mark.

Historians today generally scorn the idea of the “great man,” but these émigrés who became the giants of the American brewing industry were made of rare and precious materials; were, in their own way, great men who ranged through their days oblivious to indecision or failure, dismissive of doubt and human frailty. Where some men edged their way toward change, Frederick Pabst dived headfirst. What some condemned as recklessness, Adolphus Busch embraced as lifeblood. August Uihlein seized the chance from which other men shrank. Their personalities differed, but circumstances and a passion for competition linked their futures.

So did another fact, one so obvious that it’s easy to overlook: Each fell into the industry by accident rather than design. True, Adolphus Busch worked briefly—less than a year—at an uncle’s brewery, but his real training in the business, and that of the other great brewers, only began after he had sealed a partnership with a relative. Like the nation they adopted as home, these men were wedded to the future, not the past, and so entered their careers unburdened by stone-etched ideas about how a brewery ought to run and who its customers should be. Nor were they brewmasters, and so came to the brewhouse without any firm ideas about how the beer ought to look or taste. Their breweries sat before them as lumps of clay, raw potential on which each man’s ambition could work its will.

In that respect these four matched the times. In the thirty-five years after Appomattox, Americans masterminded one of the greatest economic and social transformations in history, and theirs became the leading industrial nation in the world. The heady 1840s and 1850s proved a mere appetizer for the main course, a late-century feast of automated production and gargantuan factories. Ravenous manufacturing operations devoured the labor of nearly twelve million new immigrants, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who migrated to town and factory, refugees from farms where McCormick’s reapers and Deere’s plows rendered their labor obsolete. The owners of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts, the world’s largest textile mill, required the services of seventeen thousand people to manage and operate their clanking bobbins and looms. Cyrus McCormick’s fifteen hundred hands built fifty thousand reapers a year.

Other manufacturers cranked out typewriters and copper tubing, railroad tracks and ready-made clothes. Mechanical rocking chairs and porcelain toilets. Thousands of miles of electrical wire to carry millions of telegraphic messages. Gears and bolts and nails and drills tumbled out of factories large and small. Saddles and whips and machine-made doilies. Canned soups and bottled condiments—fifty-seven varieties from the Heinz Company alone. Boxes of crunchy Uneeda Biscuits to replace barrels of anonymous general-store crackers. Enough velvet upholstery and drapery fabric to reach the moon. Machine-rolled cigarettes and two-story Corliss steam engines. The American landscape would never be the same, and Americans would wait a hundred years before they negotiated another such moment of transformation.

When the nation celebrated the hundredth anniversary of independence in 1876, the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition was Machinery Hall, a massive structure filled with fourteen acres of every kind of labor-saving and automated device then known to man. The building’s “tremendous iron heart” was a 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engine that stood forty feet tall, weighed six hundred tons, boasted a three-hundred-foot driveshaft, and drove the full mile of shafting that powered exhibits such as mechanical icemakers and refrigerators, presses, lathes, and looms. So important was the Corliss engine that President Ulysses Grant formally opened the Exhibition by cranking the handle that set into motion this “athlete of steel and iron.”

But the products of the factories and the sweatshops were useless without buyers. They were there, too, thanks to investors like Jay Gould and Jay Cooke—manipulators, some called them—who transformed what had been single, scattered rail lines into vast railroad empires that linked coast with coast and carried goods over vast distances. Between 1865 and 1893, crews of Irish and Chinese laborers laid 150,000 miles of railroad tracks. Unlike the rails of an earlier age, these were steel, the core of the new economy. In 1870, Americans produced just 850,000 tons of steel, at that time a revelatory new material—an inexpensive process for making large batches was developed only in the late 1850s. By 1900, with steel-manufacture technology perfected, more than ten million tons of the magic material rolled out of enormous fiery altars tended by thousands of men sweating through the brutality of ten- and twelve-hour shifts.

The era’s potential sprawled ripe and full at Americans’ feet, ready for the picking by men of vision and energy. That some were corrupt or rapacious—Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller come to mind—was never the point. What mattered was that J. P. Morgan and Charles Schwab, Thomas Edison and John Roebling, Peter Cooper and Gustavus Swift understood how to transform incandescent potential into substance and heft. Could turn a split second of inspiration—the light bulb—into a vast network of dynamo and wire and alter night’s landscape. Could fashion a skein of steel into that majestic ribbon of grandeur, the Brooklyn Bridge. Could weave ambition and daring (and greed and deceit) into personal fortunes, as Jay Gould would do time and again. Could extract billions of gallons of petroleum from the Pennsylvania hills and enrich men like Rockefeller and his partner Henry Flagler beyond imagination.

B
USCH
, P
ABST, AND
the Uihleins belong in that pantheon. They dived into the age, gambling on new and untested technologies: artificial refrigeration, pressurized carbon injection, pasteurization, and automated bottling machines. They built state-of-the-art laboratories and staffed them with European scientists who explored the manufacture and manipulation of yeasts and bacteria. Henry Ford usually gets credit for pioneering the concept of assembly-line production, but his factories came nearly forty years after these brewers transformed what had been small-batch, labor-intensive workshops into sprawling factories devoted to automation, efficiency, and profit.

They also enjoyed the luck of good timing: All of them entered brewing at a heady moment for the industry. In the five years after the Civil War, another thousand brewers set up shop nationwide, testimony to returning soldiers’ fondness for lager and to the steady westward movement of population. San Francisco, offspring of the great gold rush of the early 1850s, boasted a dozen or so breweries. A fistful of others lay scattered across the plains and mountains, from Montana to Texas, where men dreamed of another gold rush or herded cattle toward eastern markets.

Over all these towered New York City. The combined output of Milwaukee and St. Louis was a mere drop in the ocean of beer that poured out of Manhattan’s brewvats in the nineteenth century. Brewers there benefited from relentless population growth that transformed Manhattan’s rocky, wooded terrain into a tidy grid of paving and brick, each block crammed with buildings, each of those stuffed to suffocation with humanity. The city’s half million people in 1850 swelled to 814,000 by 1860 and 1.2 million in 1880.

In the 1870s, one of those New Yorkers, George Ehret, reigned as the king of American brewing. Ehret, a trained brewer, emigrated in 1857, the same year as Adolphus Busch. He found work at an established brewery, but like so many of his fellow emigres, he chafed under another man’s lead. In 1866 he opened the doors at his own brewhouse, situated on what was then a rural area north of the city but is today the northern reaches of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Eight years later his Hell Gate Brewery, named after a particularly vicious stretch of the East River, surpassed the 100,000-barrel mark. Like the Uihleins, Ehret believed in diversifying his assets. When he died in 1927, he was the city’s second-largest landowner (bested only by the John Jacob Astor estate), claiming title to a Fifth Avenue mansion, large holdings in the Wall Street area, a corner lot abutting Columbus Circle, and chunks of Harlem, in the late nineteenth century a posh neighborhood for the city’s upper middle class.

Just south of Ehret’s brewery stood the outfit belonging to Jacob Ruppert, Sr. In 1867, Ruppert cleared the timber on a lot on what is now Third Avenue between Ninety-first and Ninety-second streets and brewed his first beer. He lagged behind Ehret by some fifteen thousand barrels, but even at that pace he was forced to build a new plant in 1874. So, too, a mile or so to the south at East Fiftieth Street and Fourth Avenue (today’s Park Avenue), the Schaefer brothers, Frederick and Maximilian, struggled to keep pace with demand. They’d built a four-story building in 1848, grand and imposing for its day, but outgrew it almost as soon as the last brick was laid. By the time Ehret and Ruppert opened shop, the Schaefer brewery had devoured several blocks, and that despite the fact that the Schaefers produced only about 44,000 barrels a year.

Although none of the New York brewers knew it at the time, the city’s teeming multitudes would prove both a boon and a burden: No matter how many brewvats Ehret or Ruppert added, no matter how large the Schaefers’ malthouse, New Yorkers devoured every drop. As a result, brewers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Newark, New Jersey, never had to seek new markets; never tested the treacherous waters of long-distance shipping; never built networks of salesmen and agents, warehouses and depots. The ready market fostered a complacency that would eventually prove near-fatal.

Pabst and Schandein faced different challenges on their march toward greatness. They demonstrated their intent—and their mettle—in those first few years after the war when Phillip Best, trusting their judgment, retired to Germany to nurse his poor health. The pair apprised their father-in-law of their efforts in letters detailing purchases of malt and hops and the progress of employees new and old. “Dear father, last Saturday we burnt coal and noticed that this is cheaper for us than purchasing wood,” Pabst told Best in the summer of 1867. He calculated that they could save three dollars a day by switching from wood to coal, and reported that Blatz had surrendered most of his Chicago trade to Schlitz, and Pabst knew why: “His beer is bad.”

Pabst and Schandein tracked their pennies because they needed each one in order to finance their plans for growth. Phillip Best died in the summer of 1869, so he did not live to see his sons-in-law launch their journey toward brewing history. A year later, Pabst and Schandein borrowed $100,000 to buy the South Side Brewery, a large, well-equipped plant left idle by the death of its owner. The acquisition offered a feast of opportunities: Besides its brewkettles, maltkilns, cellars, and steam engines, the property included a substantial dock on the Menomonee River, pathway to Lake Michigan and points south and east, as well as rail sidings whose tracks fed into two major lines. Together with the original plant on Chestnut, the new property provided the men with a capacity of about ninety thousand barrels a year, a universe of production away from the five or six thousand barrels their father-in-law had brewed in a good year.

The maneuver also represented a gamble of the first order, because the burden of debt would crush them unless they filled the vats at both plants. Luck paid a visit. The Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed two million dollars’ worth of brewing real estate. Reconstruction would take months.

Pabst and Schandein moved in for the kill. Running the Empire and South Side breweries at capacity, they ordered new vats, boilers, and engines, and tripled the number of employees and teams dedicated to filling Chicago’s lager vacuum. Day and night, hot wort streamed into flat cooling pans and then into fermenting tubs.