Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Read Online Free

brewery was profitably producing 27,000 barrels a year. Eberhard rewarded Adolphus in 1879 by making him a partner in the rechristened Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association and allowed him to purchase a minority stake in the company, amounting to 238 of the 480 shares of stock. When Eberhard died in 1880, he divided his stock among his five adult children. With Lilly’s 116 shares added to his own 238, Adolphus controlled a majority, and his own destiny.
    One of the first things he did as president of his own brewery was to acquire, through a close friend and local restaurant owner named Carl Conrad, the recipe for a beer that for years had been produced by monks in a small Bohemian village named Budweis. The crisp, pale lager was known in the region as Budweiser. Adolphus adopted the name along with Conrad’s refined recipe and, now armed with a competitive product, set about revolutionizing the brewing industry.
    Adolphus was the first brewer in the United States to pasteurize his product, which enabled him to bottle Budweiser and store it longer without fear of spoilage. He built a system of rail-side icehouses and became the first brewer to distribute his beer far beyond the local market. The icehouses morphed into a national distribution network when he pioneered the use of artificial (non-ice) refrigeration, first in his plant and then in a fleet of 250 railroad cars that transported his beer throughout the country. A proponent of vertical integration before there was even a name for it, he bought a controlling interest in the company that built the rail cars he used, as well as the company that made the glass bottles his brewery consumed in huge quantities. He bought two coal mines on the Illinois side of the river and built his own railroad connecting them to the brewery.
    And he extended his control of the process all the way to the other end of the supply line by acquiring an interest in countless taverns, often paying for a new proprietor’s liquor license, permits, and sometimes even rent, and providing promotional light fixtures and glassware, all in exchange for a signed agreement that the establishment would sell only Anheuser-Busch products.
    As other brewers scrambled to compete by buying into their own saloons, abuses abounded, with proprietor-partners dabbling in prostitution and gambling on the side, bribing local police and politicians to look the other way. Those corrupt practices would come back to bite the brewing industry, but not before Adolphus Busch had built Budweiser into the first national brand of beer.
    Of course, Adolphus got an assist from the U.S. population, which more than doubled between 1820 and 1870 with the arrival of 7.5 million immigrants, two-thirds of whom came from the beer-drinking countries of Germany and Ireland. He saw the dramatic population growth in St. Louis’s German neighborhoods of Carondelet and Soulard and in the Irish section of the city known as the Kerry Patch, and he concluded that beer was on its way to becoming America’s national drink. So he plowed profits back into the company, building more and more production capacity. Sure enough, between 1870 and 1900 per capita consumption of beer in the United States quadrupled, rising from four gallons a year to sixteen, and Anheuser-Busch became the largest brewer in the country, pumping out more than a million barrels of beer annually by the turn of the century.
    Adolphus turned that river of beer into a mountain of money that he lavished on himself and his large family (Lilly gave birth to thirteen children, nine of whom survived to adulthood). With a personal income of an estimated $2 million a year at a time when there was no income tax, he maintained baronial mansions in St. Louis; Cooperstown, New York; Pasadena, California; and Bad Schwalbach, Germany, on the banks of the Rhine River. He called the Pasadena estate Ivy Wall, but it became known to the public as Busch’s Garden due to the