Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

  • Home
  • About
  • Editorial
  • Birthdays
  • Art & Beer

Socialize

  • Dribbble
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • GitHub
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Powered by Genesis

Historic Beer Birthday: Carl W. Conrad

April 1, 2025 By Jay Brooks

Budweiser-new
Today is the birthday of Carl W. Conrad (April 1, 1843- October 26, 1922) Conrad’s widely believed to be the person who created the name Budweiser, and was a friend of Adolphus Busch, whose brewery did a contract beer for Conrad, which was marketed as Budweiser, but which later became the property of Anheuser-Busch.

carl-conrad

Here’s a short biography from Find a Grave:

Conrad, a good friend of Adolphus Busch, is usually credited with helping to develop the recipe for Budweiser beer. The brand name was first registered in the U.S. by Conrad, an importer of wines, champagnes & liquors. The Anheuser brewery produced the brand for him under contract. C. Conrad & Company had offices in Germany & in St. Louis & Adolphus got the rights to Budweiser when Conrad’s company went bankrupt in 1882. To pay off Conrad’s debts to the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association, the brewery assumed control of Conrad’s company & the brand name Budweiser. Conrad was given a lifetime job with Anheuser-Busch.

Anheuser-Busch’s own website spins the story differently than most accounts, with Busch taking credit for the Budweiser name:

In 1876, he and his friend, Carl Conrad, created an American-style lager beer that succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Adolphus coined the label “Budweiser”, a name that would appeal to German immigrants like himself, yet could be easily pronounced by Americans. Budweiser was a success and eventually, became the company’s flagship brand.

bud-1876
A Budweiser label in 1876.

Maureen Ogle, a friend, and the author of Ambitious Brew, wrote about Conrad and the creation of Budweiser in an article in a 2006 article for All About Beer magazine entitled Making Beer American: How Bohemian Lager Swept the Country:

But in 1874 or 1875 (the precise date is not known), Busch and Sproule developed a second rice beer, this one for Busch’s friend Carl Conrad, a St. Louis importer of wine and liquor. Conrad was no brewer but he knew a profitable market trend when he saw one and he contracted with Busch to create and brew a “very pale, fine beer” that Conrad would bottle and sell under his own label.

Conrad wanted the beer to stand out in an increasingly crowded field of Pilseners, so he asked his friend to model the lager after the pilsener brewed in Budweis (Ceské Budejovice), an ancient Bohemian city where an “official” court brewery produced the “Beer of Kings,” a slogan Busch would later invert. Budweis brewers used Saaz hops and Moravian barley, but they employed a slightly different mashing method than did makers of Pilsener, and the resulting beer was a shade lighter in color and slightly more effervescent than its Pils counterpart. Neither Busch nor Conrad had been to Budweis, but they had visited Bohemia and tasted Budweis beer in other European cities. Conrad claimed that Budweis-style lager “was always the finest Beer [he] could get in Europe,” and that the “Budweiser process [made] the finest Beer.”

Conrads-Bud-Card-1879

As she notes, it was Conrad who came up with the name:

The final result, which Conrad named after its place of origin, was a masterpiece of brewing prowess. Budweiser is “fine and elegant,” Conrad boasted. It “sparkles” and “has a very pretty flavor.” It’s not clear what his original label looked like, but the man who designed Conrad’s second label claimed that it included the word “champagne.” That would not be surprising because effervescent Budweiser looked more like Champagne than it looked like other beers, a comparison that Conrad fostered by corking the lager in Champagne bottles.

Conrad and Busch launched the lager by hitting the road. The two friends traveled around Missouri and to Arkansas and Texas talking up the beer and hunting for reliable sales representatives. Conrad also invested three thousand dollars outfitting a “fine place” in San Francisco “where people could find [his] beer.” He sold most of it to California but also shipped it to Chicago, New Orleans, Milwaukee, and Louisville, and cities in Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, and Alabama.

From the moment of its first public appearance in March 1876, Budweiser was a hit. Herman Kramer, Conrad’s California agent, pronounced the lager “an easy thing to sell.” “I never found a business so easy as this Budweiser,” he raved, and that despite it being “sold at a higher price than any other Beer in the country,” two dollars more per barrel than conventional lager. Even other brewers conceded Budweiser’s special character. “[I]t is the best bottled beer in this market,” said one. “I have drank Anheusers [sic] Bottled Beer, & the Budweiser beer is much the best.” Conrad sold a quarter of a million bottles of Budweiser in twelve months, and by late 1878, had sold six thousand barrels of the beer.

Conrads-Bud-1882
An 1882 ad.

In a 2006 magazine article by Bill Lockhart, Pete Schulz, David Whitten, Bill Lindsey, and Carol Serr, entitled “Carl Conrad & Co. – The Original American Budweiser” they go further in depth about the story of the beer.

Although Carl Conrad was neither a brewer nor a bottler, he contracted with AnheuserBusch, then the brewers of St Louis Lager Beer, to brew and bottle his beer for him. Conrad advertised his beer as “the Original Budweiser,” and there seems to be no doubt that his was the first use of that name on the American market. Although he was only in business for about six years, his use of embossed monograms on export beer bottles assured him a place in the history of manufacturer’s marks.

1879 ca  Card  C Conrad & Co Budweiser 407 N 6th St  Louis MO

Carl Conrad & Co., St. Louis, Missouri (1876-1883)

Carl Conrad, a friend of Adolphus Busch, toured Europe in the mid-1870s, returning by 1876. According to Clint (1976:74), Conrad dined at a small monastery in Bohemia “where he was served a brew he declared to be ‘the best he ever tasted.’” Upon his return, Conrad began setting up Carl Conrad & Co. to market Budweiser Beer (named for the town of Budweis in Bavaria), although Conrad neither brewed beer nor manufactured bottles. Adolphus Busch actually made and bottled the beer, and a series of glass factories made the bottles. Conrad was initially successful, rapidly expanding his territory until his beer was sold nationwide. However, the business went downhill in the early 1880s, and Conrad declared bankruptcy on January 15, 1883. Baxter [another historian] hypothesized that Conrad was forced out of business because of the bottle shortage in the West. Beer and other bottled products were shipped long distances by wagon under difficult conditions. Because of this, the empty bottles became an important commodity.

Miles [still another historian] confirmed this shortage during an earlier period, when he noted that “teamsters could purchase a dozen bottles of liquor in Missouri for four dollars each, drink the contents along the way, and trade the empty bottles for six dollars worth of produce each in New Mexico.” Thus, virtually all bottles were reused. It is particularly true of the Southwest that a proliferation of bottles was directly tied to the arrival of the railroad. For breweries to profit from container sales, it was important that most bottles be returned. Unfortunately for the original bottler, the bottles were often not returned to the owner (the brewery) but continued to be refilled by competitors at the point of sale or elsewhere. The railroads alleviated the problem to some extent, but there were still many remote areas where bottles continued to be valuable well into the late 1880s or even later. Baxter’s argument that Conrad may have lost so much money on bottles that he was forced into bankruptcy thus is plausible. Baxter’s hypothesis, however, fails to explain why other brewers remained in business under the same circumstances.

The New York Times (1/17/1883), however, offered an alternative explanation, claiming that the very success of Conrad’s venture led to its demise. Conrad had grown so fast that he “erected new buildings on Sixth street, entered them, and established branch houses throughout the country.” Because “their branch houses were so scattered they found it impossible to get in collections as rapidly as they were needed” (New York Times 1/23/1883). Clint [yet another historian] provided examples of this expansion, noting that Conrad opened Colorado “outlets” at Denver and Leadville in 1881 and two more at Gunnison and Salida in 1882. Although “collections” probably referred to money, the beer bottle problem noted by Baxter may also have contributed to the overall problem. At the top of the list of Conrad’s principle creditors was Anheuser-Busch, although Adolphus Busch informed the paper that Conrad’s assets were expected to be sufficient to cover the debt. A meeting of the creditors on January 22, however, showed that Conrad’s assets would actually be about $140,000 short of paying all his bills (New York Times 1/23/1883).

When Conrad declared bankruptcy in January 1883, the Lindell Glass Co. was one of the largest creditors, being owed between $32,000 and $33,000 by Conrad. Although the loss hit Lindell hard, a local source stated that Lindell’s “continuance in the bottling business is almost an assured fact” (Crockery & Glass Journal 1883:30) – and that certainly proved true.

According to the Anheuser-Busch sources, the company “acquired rights to bottle and sell Budweiser” in 1883, the year Conrad declared bankruptcy. The transfer almost certainly occurred because Anheuser-Busch was the largest creditor (much larger than Lindell) at $94,000. Busch apparently accepted the Budweiser trademark as payment of the debt. Carroll noted that Conrad “eventually became an employee of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association,” although he was unclear about the time period. Conrad did not actually assign the trademark to Anheuser-Busch until 1891, and the “CCCo (sic) insignia and the name C. Conrad & Co. remained on the [paper] label until around 1920.”

Conrads-Bud-1886

By 1886, Conrad’s Budweiser label was looking a lot like the Anheuser-Busch label it would become. See the Evolution of America’s Most Famous Beer Label for a look at the label’s progression from 1876 to 2000.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser, History

Historic Beer Birthday: August Anheuser Busch, Jr. a.k.a. Gussie Busch

March 28, 2025 By Jay Brooks

a-b
Today is the birthday of August Anheuser Busch, Jr., better known as Gussie Busch (March 28, 1899–September 29, 1989). He was the grandson of Anheuser-Busch founder Adolphus Busch. His parents were August Anheuser Busch, Sr. “Starting at lower levels to learn the family business of Anheuser-Busch Company, Busch became superintendent of brewing operations in 1924 and head of the brewing division after his father’s death in 1934. After his older brother Adolphus Busch III’s death in 1946, August A. Jr. succeeded him as President and CEO.”

gussie-busch

Here’s a short biography from Find a Grave:

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he was the President and CEO head of the Anheuser Busch Brewery the largest brewery in the world, (1946-75). He succeeded his older brother Adolphus bush III as President and CEO and began using the Bud Clydesdale Horse Team as a company logo. He was an avid sportsman and became owner of the National League St. Louis Cardinals Major League franchise in 1953, until his death. He died at age 90 in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1984, the Cardinals retired the number 85 in his honor, which was his age at the time and he was posthumously inducted into the Cardinals team Hall of Fame in 2014.

Grants_Farm_Gussie
Gussie at his desk at Grant’s Farm.

This is August Anheuser Busch Jr.’s obituary from the New York Times:

August Anheuser Busch Jr., the master showman and irrepressible salesman who turned a small family operation into the world’s largest brewing company, died yesterday at his home in suburban St. Louis County, Mo. He was 90 years old and had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia.

August Anheuser Busch Jr., the master showman and irrepressible salesman who turned a small family operation into the world’s largest brewing company, died yesterday at his home in suburban St. Louis County, Mo. He was 90 years old and had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia.

He had been honorary chairman of the Anheuser-Busch Companies since his retirement in 1975. But he had remained active as the president of the St. Louis Cardinals, the National League baseball club he persuaded the company’s board to buy in 1953.

Mr. Busch, known as Gussie to virtually everybody who did not know him and as Gus to those who knew him well enough not to call him Mr. Busch, was the grandson and great-grandson of the founders of the company that bore two of his names.

The company, founded in 1876, survived Prohibition by moving into widely diverse products like soft drinks and automobile bodies.

Born in St. Louis on March 28, 1899, Mr. Busch entered the family business as a young man and became general superintendent of brewing operations in 1924. He took over as head of the brewery division after the death of his father in 1934. Although he did not become president of the company until the death of his older brother, Adolphus Busch 3d, in 1946, Mr. Busch had already made his mark as a salesman-showman.

To celebrate the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Mr. Busch recalled the draft horses that had once pulled beer wagons in Germany and pre-automotive America and obtained a team to haul the first case of Budweiser down Pennsylvania Avenue for delivery to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House. Since then the famous eight-horse hitch of Clydesdales has become almost as famous as the brand they continue to promote.

What was undoubtedly Mr. Busch’s greatest promotional coup was disguised as a civic duty – the company’s purchase of the Cardinals for $7.8 million in 1953 after the previous owner was convicted of income tax invasion.

”My ambition,” Mr. Busch declared, ”is, whether hell or high water, to get a championship baseball team for St. Louis before I die.”

He had a long wait. But beginning in 1964, the team won six National League pennants, most recently in 1987, and the World Series in 1964, 1967 and 1982.

Savored Success

Mr. Busch savored success, and he became a familiar triumphant figure to baseball fans in league playoffs and World Series home games when he would ride into Busch Stadium on the Clydesdale wagon waving a red cowboy hat.

He attributed the team’s success and the company’s to his policy of noninterference. Even so, he was active in the club’s affairs long after he left the company to others, and in 1982 he led the campaign among major league owners not to retain the previous commissioner, Bowie Kuhn.

Through the Clydesdales and the Cardinals, other promotional gimmicks and a commitment to mass advertising, Mr. Busch turned a comparatively small and financially ailing company into the industry giant. In his 29 years as the company’s active head, sales of beer went from 3 million to 37 million barrels a year. Last year the company produced 78.5 million barrels, almost double the output of its nearest competitor, and recorded sales of $9.7 billion. Its flagship brand, Budweiser, is the most popular beer in the world.

Medium Stature, Loud Voice

Through direct ownership and various trusts, Mr. Busch owned 12.5 percent of the company, or more than 30 million shares of its common stock. At yesterday’s closing price of $43.375 on the New York Stock Exchange, the holdings were worth more than $1.3 billion. The day’s increase of $1.125 a share represented a gain of more than $30 million. Trading in the company’s stock was suspended for 20 minutes after the announcement of his death.

Mr. Busch, at 5 feet 10 inches tall and 165 pounds, was a man of medium stature, but he had a loud voice that was once likened to the roar of a hoarse lion.

Fortunately for his colleagues, he had a sense of humor about his own shortcomings, which included a hairtrigger temper. ”All right, you guys,” he once shouted at a raucous company meeting. ”Let me blow my stack first. Then you can blow yours.” He also had an outsized zest for life, and both the wealth and the inclination to indulge it.

Among other things, his 281-acre estate, Grant’s Farm, includes a cabin built by hand by President Ulysses S. Grant and has a 34-room French Renaissance chateau and a well-stocked private zoo, which reflect his abiding love of animals. Mr. Busch trained his own chimpanzees and elephants before donating them to the St. Louis Zoo.

A onetime rodeo rider who later served as master of the Bridlespur Hunt outside St. Louis, Mr. Busch stocked his air-conditioned stables with several breeds, including hackneys, hunters and jumpers.

He clattered his way into family legend one day when he rode one of his horses up the main staircase of the family residence to cheer up his bedridden father.

Mr. Busch was married four times. Two of the marriages ended in divorce. His last wife, the former Margaret Rohde, died last year.

3-Buschs
August A. Busch (center) and his sons, Adolphus III (left) and August Jr., seal the first case of beer off the Anheuser-Busch bottling plant line in St. Louis on April 7, 1933, when the sale of low-alcohol beers and wines was once again legal. Prohibition didn’t officially end until Dec. 5 of that year.

During World War II, Busch was very involved in the war effort through the Ordnance Corps, during which time he attained the rank of colonel.

Colonel August A. Busch, Jr. was born in 1899 in St. Louis, Missouri and was educated in the public schools there. He entered the family brewing business in 1924, and by 1931 was Second Vice President and a member of the board of directors. In June 1942, he was commissioned a major in the Ordnance Corps and was assigned to the Ammunition Division in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance.

He later became Deputy Chairman in charge of the Industry Integrating Committees of Ammunition (one of 82 committees set up to work with industry). Each Industry Integration Committee was made up of representatives from each participating contractor and set up to integrate Ordnance with industry. As Deputy Chairman, he was instrumental in expediting and improving production on several items. In January 1943, he was assigned to the Tank and Automotive Center at Detroit, Michigan. His task was to further the efforts of the committees on the production of tanks, the most critical item of Ordnance procurement. In March of 1943, he was reassigned to the Industry Committees of the Ammunition Division, as the Assistant Chief in Charge of Procurement for metal parts. In 1944, he became Chief of the Industry Production Branch while still retaining the title and duties of the Deputy Chairman of Industry Integrating Committees.

He established precedents and procedures that helped industry and Ordnance work together towards the war effort. His intimate knowledge of industry and his ability to gain the confidence of industrial leaders made him an invaluable asset to the Ordnance procurement process. During his later years, he served as Chairman of the board and Chief Executive Officer of Anheuser-Busch, Inc. and as Chairman of the board and President of the St. Louis Baseball Cardinals organization. Colonel Busch died in 1989.

gussie-busch-time

The St. Louis Cardinals, which Anhesuer-Busch bought in 1953, became an important part of Gussie Busch’s life.

In 1953, Cardinals owner Fred Saigh was convicted of tax evasion. Facing almost certain banishment from baseball, he put the Cardinals up for sale. When Busch got word that Saigh was seriously considering selling the team to interests who would move the team to Houston; he decided to have Anheuser-Busch get into the bidding in order to keep the Cardinals in St. Louis. Ultimately, Busch persuaded Saigh to take less money ($3.75 million) than what he was being offered by out-of-town interests in the name of civic pride, and also achieved a marketing tool.

As chairman, president or CEO of the Cardinals from the time the club was purchased by the brewery in 1953 until his death, Busch oversaw a team that won six National League pennants (1964, 1967, 1968, 1982, 1985, 1987) and three World Series (1964, 1967 and 1982). When his son, August Busch III, ousted him as president of Anheuser-Busch, the elder Busch remained as president of the Cardinals.

Although the Cardinals were the dominant baseball team in St. Louis, they did not own their own ballpark. Since 1920 they had rented Sportsman’s Park from the St. Louis Browns of the American League. Shortly after buying the Cardinals, Busch bought and extensively renovated the park, renaming it Busch Stadium (but only after a failed attempt to rename it as Budweiser Stadium). The team played there until Busch Memorial Stadium was built in the middle of the 1966 season.

In 1984, the Cardinals retired a number, 85, in Busch’s honor, which was his age at the time.

Gussie-and-Ken-Boyer
Cardinal’s Owner and beer baron Gussie Busch threw a party at the Chase Hotel following the Cardinals 1964 World Series Championship. Here he congratulates Cardinal’s third baseman Ken Boyer, who hit two home runs and drove in six.

The Busch family also acquired Grant’s Farm, and made it the Busch Family Estate, opening it up to the public beginning in 1954. The estate website also has a timeline and there’s a short history of the farm from Wikipedia:

The property was at one time owned by Ulysses S. Grant and prior to that, by the Dent family. It is now owned by the Busch family, who owned the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company for many years until it was sold to InBev in 2008. Grant’s Farm has been an animal reserve for many years and is open to the public for free; however, there is a parking fee of $12 per vehicle. This fee helps to maintain the farm. The farm is home to such animals as buffalo, elephants, camels, kangaroos, donkeys, goats, peacocks, the iconic Budweiser Clydesdales and many more. Most of these animals can be seen by visitors on a tram tour of the deer park region of the park, while the Clydesdales are found in their nearby barn and pastures. The farm also contains a cabin called “Hardscrabble,” which was built by Ulysses S. Grant on another part of the property and later relocated to Grant’s Farm. It is the only remaining structure that was hand-built by a U.S. president prior to assuming office.

Also on the farm is the Busch family mansion, and a house in which Ulysses S. Grant resided between the Mexican and Civil Wars—White Haven. This had been his wife, Julia Grant’s, family home. Frederick Dent, Julia’s father, gave 80 acres of the farm to the couple as a wedding present. White Haven is now a national historic site: the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, and is located just across the road from Grant’s Farm.

gussie-elephant

Here’s Gussie’s entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

August Anheuser Busch, Jr., byname Gussie Busch (born March 28, 1899, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. — died September 29, 1989, near St. Louis), American beer baron, president (1946–75) of Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc., who built the company into the world’s largest brewery.

In 1922 Busch was put to work sweeping floors and cleaning vats at the brewery cofounded by his grandfather Adolphus Busch, but by 1924 he was general superintendent of brewing operations. After his father died (1934), Busch became head of the brewery department, and he was installed as president of the company following his older brother’s death (1946).

Busch was a civic leader who helped revive St. Louis in the 1950s by donating $5 million toward the construction of Busch Memorial Stadium and purchasing the St. Louis Cardinals professional baseball team for $7.8 million. A familiar figure during postseason play-off games, Busch often rode into the stadium in a wagon drawn by Clydesdales, the horses that were indelibly identified with the beer wagons of Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch’s main brand. Grant’s Farm, the Busch family estate near St. Louis, was converted into a 281-acre (114-hectare) historical site and wildlife preserve.

gussie-busch-signed-photo

And finally, here’s a video created for Gussie’s induction into the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame.

Gussie-and-IIITo celebrate production of the ten millionth barrel of beer, August A. Busch Jr. (right) and his son August III share a toast with other officials of the company on December 15, 1964.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, History, Missouri, Video

Beer Birthday: Mitch Steele

December 31, 2024 By Jay Brooks

new-realm-rectangle
Today is the 63rd birthday of Mitch Steele, former production manager/head brewer at Stone Brewing. Mitch started out at the tiny San Andreas Brewery in Hollister, California but spent a number of years at one of the much larger Budweiser breweries when he brewed for Anheuser-Busch, before finding a home at Stone. More recently, he’s left that job to create something of his own, in Atlanta, Georgia. New Realm Brewing opened officially in January of 2018. He’s obviously a terrific brewer but is also a great person and close friend, too. He has been my roomie for GABF judging a couple of years and is also the author of IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes and the Evolution of India Pale Ale. He’s a big advocate for craft beer and always willing to help out a fellow brewer or homebrewer. Join me in wishing Mitch a very happy birthday.

cbc07-37
Mitch with Stone co-founder Steve Wagner at the Craft Brewers Conference in 2007.

Mitch Steele, from Stone Brewing, took 3rd for Levitation Ale
Mitch picking up his 3rd Place award on the floor of GABF 2009 for Stone’s Levitation Ale on cask at a special judging at the Great British Beer Festival in 2009 (and which I had the pleasure to judge).

Betsy, Judy Ashworth, Mitch Steele, Brendan Moylan & Bruce Paton
Betsy Hensley, Judy Ashworth, Mitch, Brendan Moylan & Bruce Paton at the Celebrator’s 22nd Anniversary Party.

mitch21a-5
Mitch and 21st Amendment brewer Shaun O’Sullivan practicing their pointing during a collaboration brew in 2008 in San Francisco.

bistro-ipa07-09
Outside the Bistro IPA Festival in 2007 with Publican Judy Ashworth, Former San Andreas Brewing owner Bill Millar, Mitch and Bistro owner Vic Krajl.

george-reisch-mitch-steele
Pete Slosberg, Marty Velas, George Reisch and Mitch at Grillshack Fries and Burgers in Nashville during CBC.

mitch-steele-prom-color
And no birthday post is complete without a blast from the past. Here’s Mitch’s high school prom photo in all its living color glory. It’s from Northgate High School Class of 1980 in Walnut Creek, CA (special thanks to Mitch for updating the old black & white photo with the glorious color one!). Love the powder blue tux.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, California, Georgia, San Diego

Historic Beer Birthday: August A. Busch, Sr.

December 29, 2024 By Jay Brooks

a-b
Today is the birthday of August A. Busch, Sr. (December 28, 1865–February 10, 1934). He “was an American brewing magnate who served as the President and CEO of Anheuser-Busch, based in Saint Louis, Missouri, from 1913 to 1934.”

A-Busch-1918
August Busch in 1918.
August Anheuser Busch was born on December 29, 1865 in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Adolphus Busch, was the German-born founder of Anheuser-Busch. His mother, Lilly Eberhard Anheuser, was the third daughter of brewer Eberhard Anheuser, who owned the Aneuser Brewery.

August_Anheuser_Busch

Here’s a short biography from Find-a-Grave:

Businessman, President of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company. Born in St Louis, Missouri on December 29, 1865, August was the eldest son of Lilly (Anheuser) and Adolphus Busch. After completing his studies at Lyon Free School in St Louis, Missouri, he attended Morgan Park Military Institute in Chicago, Illinois and the Kemper School of Boonville, Missouri. He then spent several years in Germany and New York City learning brewing techniques and the brewing business. August Busch began his career at Anheuser-Busch by serving as a brewer’s apprentice for three years and then, by successive steps, he advanced within the company learning all facets of the business. August married Alice Ziesemann on May 8, 1890 and they had five children: Adolphus, Marie, Clara, August A, and Alice. After the death of his father, Adolphus Busch, on October 10, 1913, August became president of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company. He guided the company through three major crises—World War I, Prohibition and the Great Depression. In order to survive the turbulent times, he began to diversify the company’s products. August patented the first diesel engine, which he installed in the brewery to increase production. During World War I, a subsidiary was formed to produce the engine for U S Navy submarines. To support the war effort, the Busch family purchased sufficient war bonds to finance two bombers; each of them was named “Miss Budweiser”. In November 1918, President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill instituting Prohibition in 1920. Unable to brew beer, August diversified the business into related products: malt syrup, for home beer production; a refrigerated car to transport perishables; corn products; baker’s yeast; ice cream and soft drinks. Even though most of these products were discontinued after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, his legacy of diversification is a hallmark of the Anheuser-Busch Companies today. After suffering in extreme pain for over 6 weeks with heart disease, dropsy and gout, August A Busch Sr. took his own life on February 10, 1934 with a self-inflicted bullet to the abdomen. Adolphus Bush III succeeded his father as president of the company.

3-Buschs
August A. Busch (center) and his sons, Adolphus III (left) and August Jr., seal the first case of beer off the Anheuser-Busch bottling plant line in St. Louis on April 7, 1933, when the sale of low-alcohol beers and wines was once again legal. Prohibition didn’t officially end until Dec. 5 of that year.

This focuses on his “Career” on Busch’s Wikipedia page:

Busch became President of Anheuser-Busch in 1913, shortly after his father’s death. Under his leadership, the company survived World War I, Prohibition and the Great Depression by innovating and diversifying. The company delved into the production of corn products, baker’s yeast, ice cream, soft drinks and commercial refrigeration units to stay afloat during Prohibition. After Prohibition ended in 1933, many of these operations were discontinued. August also managed to keep Anheuser-Busch prosperous during anti-German bias of World War I. He built the Bevo Mill, about halfway between his mansion on Gravois Road and the Anheuser-Busch brewery downtown.

August-Busch-with-grandchildren
August A. Busch with two of his grandchildren on his knee.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Breweries, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, History, Missouri

Historic Beer Birthday: Eberhard Anheuser

September 27, 2024 By Jay Brooks

a-b
Today is the birthday of Eberhard Anheuser (September 27, 1806-May 2, 1880). He “was a German American soap and candle maker, as well as the father-in-law of Adolphus Busch, the founder of the Anheuser-Busch Company.

Anheuser grew up in Kreuznach, where his parents operated a vineyard that had been in the family since 1627. He and two of his brothers moved to America in 1842. He was a major creditor of the Bavarian Brewery Company, a struggling brewery founded in 1853. When the company encountered financial difficulty in 1860, he purchased the minor creditors’ interests and took over the company.

Eberhard Anheuser became president and CEO and changed the company name to the Eberhard Anheuser and Company. His daughter Lilly married Adolphus Busch, a brewery supply salesman, in a double wedding with Anna Anheuser (Lilly’s older sister) and Ulrich Busch (Adolphus’ brother) in 1861. Despite the outbreak of the Civil War, the brewery remained competitive, partially because lager was not banned by the Union Army, while other hard liquors were. As Anheuser became older, Adolphus Busch took up more of the companies duties, and the company was renamed Anheuser-Busch in 1879.

Eberhard Anheuser

Here’s a short biography from Find-a-Grave:

Businessman. Born in Kreuznach, Germany in 1843, he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was joined shortly thereafter by his family. For the early part of his entrepreneurial career, people associated him with a completely different product, that product was soap. It is unknown whether he trained as a soap manufacturer in Cincinnati, if this training was part of his education as a chemist in Germany. In 1845 Eberhard and his family moved to St. Louis. Eberhard became a brewer just as changes in American consumer behavior sparked massive growth in beer consumption. Over the course of his career, the American brewing industry began a transition from being mostly small-scale in production, locally based in market, and limited in its competitive nature into an industry known for its acute competitiveness, rapidly expanding production capacity, and internationally expanding market. Although these new trends came to full fruition during the twenty years after Eberhard’s death, he witnessed their birth during his twenty-year career as a brewer. Eberhard made several contacts within the German brewing community. Some became lifelong friends, such as William J. Lemp, the largest brewer in St. Louis at the time. Others became relatives. Eberhard met a young brewery supplier named Adolphus Busch, and his older brother Ulrich, who ended up marrying Eberhard’s daughters Lilly and Anna in a double ceremony in 1861. The company became Anheuser-Busch in 1879. The partners agreed to expand the brewery continually with reinvested money from increased sales, so that the 8,000 barrels produced in 1865 shot to 141,163 by the time of Anheuser’s death in 1880. Using this strategy, the brewery grew so much that it received notice as a local landmark during Eberhard’s lifetime. Eberhard died in 1880, after a long struggle with throat cancer. He was 73 years old.

e-eberhard-brewery-1860s
An illustration from One Hundred Years of Brewing of Eberhard Anheuser’s Bavarian Brewery, c. 1860.

Immigrant Entrepreneurship has a lengthy, and through, biography of Eberhard Anheuser:

Introduction

At present, Eberhard Anheuser’s (born September 27, 1806 in Kreuznach, French Occupied Electoral Palatinate; died May 2, 1880 in St. Louis, MO) name is synonymous with beer and the brewing industry. However, for the early part of his entrepreneurial career, people associated him with a completely different product — soap. From one perspective, the story of his career in these two industries is one of continuity. From beginning to end, his forty-four-year entrepreneurial career in America was closely intertwined with connections to family members and to the German immigrant community. From another perspective, his career epitomizes change. Anheuser became a brewer just as changes in American consumer behavior sparked massive growth in beer consumption. Over the course of Anheuser’s career, the American brewing industry began a transition from being mostly small-scale in production, locally based in market, and limited in its competitive nature into an industry known for its acute competitiveness, rapidly expanding production capacity, and internationally expanding market. Although these new trends came to full fruition during the twenty years after Anheuser’s death, Anheuser witnessed their birth during his twenty-year career as a brewer. Accordingly, his story makes an illustrative case study of the transition between old and new trends in the nineteenth-century, American brewing industry.

Family and Ethnic Background: In the Land of the Fickle Fruit

Eberhard Anheuser was born on September 27, 1806, in Kreuznach, a historically Germanic region along the Rhine that at the time was occupied by Napoleonic French forces. It later became part of Rhenish Prussia. Although his name became famously associated with the beer industry, Eberhard actually started out as one of a long line of Anheusers engaged in the production of wine. The Anheuser vineyard was founded in Kreuznach in 1627, and is at the time of this writing under the direction of the fourteenth generation of the Anheuser family. Since by the time of Eberhard Anheuser’s birth the family’s vineyard had been conducting business successfully for almost 180 years, the question arises as to why he did not just stay there to carry on this family tradition.

Although it is not known why Anheuser left his homeland for America in 1843 when he was already in his late thirties, married, and with children, German history points to several converging economic factors that were making it harder for vintners to succeed, which may have influenced his decision to emigrate. Since the southwestern German lands were a region of divisible inheritances, it was customary for landholders in the area to divide estates among their heirs, rather than deliver them intact to a single heir. Although agricultural productivity was increasing with the advent of new farming methods, the population was increasing much faster, leading to land shortages, which caused land prices to skyrocket. The cost of acquiring land was beginning to outweigh the possibility of profit to be made by cultivating it. Additionally, the grape is a fickle fruit. It needs just the right conditions to thrive, and fails easily. Crop failures, like those that were common in the region in the 1830s, increased the financial strain on vintners, often leading to the accumulation of large debts, especially among those with smaller landholdings. In order to ensure the success of the business in the face of crop failures, it was important to cultivate enough land to build up sufficient reserves of wine during the good years to offset the losses in the bad years. In this environment, subdivision of property could spell economic disaster for the heirs of vintners. While the southwestern German lands would experience record grape harvests later in the 1840s, this was not the trend in the years leading up to Anheuser’s departure in 1843.

The problem of land shortages was compounded by a decline in profits. Because of the 1818 Prussian Tariff Rule, Rhenish winegrowers were protected from competition from French wines, and possessed something of a monopoly in the Prussian wine trade, leading to sustainable high prices. However, interstate tariff rates were lowered, first by an agreement between Prussia and Hesse in 1828, and then by the creation of the Zollverein customs union in 1834. This exposed Rhenish Prussia to increased competition with other German wine producing states. By the mid-1830s, prices were about one-fourth as high as in 1826. Also, as a result of the crop failures of the 1830s, the chemist Ludwig Gall promoted a technique of wine sweetening in the region in order to counteract the effects of harvesting unripened grapes. The influx of cheap, sweetened wine in the market drove down prices for vintners producing middle and lower-quality varieties. Wine prices also suffered due to the rise of cheaper alternatives, such as alcoholic spirits made from distilled potatoes. Although prices rebounded from their low point in the mid-1830s, regional prices fell by about fifty percent overall between the late 1820s and early 1840s, when Anheuser left the region. Profits were further lessened by the sharp increase in the price of wood, which was needed for the stakes that were vital for supporting grapevines and the barrels used to store and ship wine. Additionally, taxes in the region were high, and food prices were rising. Vintners especially suffered from increased food prices because they had to purchase much of their food, since most of their land was tied up in the cultivation of grapes.

If there was not enough production capacity in a piece of land that one owned, or stood to inherit, to compensate for crop failures, high taxes, falling wine prices, and rising food prices, emigration became more alluring. Therefore, many educated, middle- to upper-class children of vintners immigrated to America in the 1830s and 1840s in a quest to maintain the economic standing they stood to lose if they stayed where they were. It is likely that Eberhard Anheuser was one of this number.

e-eberhard-brewery-1860s
An illustration from One Hundred Years of Brewing of Eberhard Anheuser’s Bavarian Brewery, c. 1860.

Business Development: A Slippery Start

Eberhard Anheuser’s business career in America got off to a slippery start. That is to say, he worked in the soap manufacturing industry. After arriving in America in 1843, Anheuser settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was joined shortly thereafter by his wife, Dorothea, his sons William and Adolf, and his daughters, Anna, Minna, Lilly, and Hermine. Although it has been stated that before emigrating “he had fitted himself, both by education and experience, to enter upon a successful career as a man of affairs,” the exact nature of these affairs during his first two years in Cincinnati remain a mystery. In one of his obituaries, Anheuser was remembered as “an energetic businessman” and a “talented technician and chemist,” who was “trained as a soap manufacturer.” It is unknown whether he trained as a soap manufacturer in Cincinnati, if this training was part of his education as a chemist in Germany, or if he picked up this skill in St. Louis, where he settled for good.

What is known is that Anheuser’s business career in St. Louis always had strong ties to the city’s German population. After Anheuser came to St. Louis in 1845, he worked in the soap factory of William D’Oench. About ten years Anheuser’s junior, he was a German from Prussian Silesia who had immigrated to St. Louis in 1841. D’Oench had studied medicine and chemistry, and ended up becoming a wholesale druggist, merchant, and soap manufacturer. He was also involved in several other business ventures, some of them involving Eberhard Anheuser, before re-immigrating to Stuttgart in 1872. It is unknown whether Anheuser was an employee or partner in the D’Oench and Ringling soap and candle factory. It is possible that this is where Anheuser completed his education in the soap industry. The pair remained on good terms, and continued to do business with each other after Anheuser left D’Oench’s factory in 1852. Later in the 1850s, Anheuser had stock in the Franklin Insurance Company/Franklin Savings Institution, where D’Oench served as president and in which almost all of the company officers were German. In 1860, the two partnered to take over a struggling brewery.

Although most of Anheuser’s business relationships were with fellow German immigrants, he also partnered at times with American-born businessmen. For example, in 1852 Anheuser became a partner with Lawrason Riggs, a native New Yorker about ten years his junior, in the Riggs & Co. candle, soap, and lard oil factory (often confused with Riggs & Levering, the name of the wholesale grocery and merchant’s shop where Riggs was also a partner). Anheuser’s partnership with Riggs lasted for five years, and was replaced with a four-way partnership with another native-born American and two fellow German immigrants. In March 1857, Anheuser’s partnership with Riggs was dissolved and he joined up with Nicholas Schaeffer, Anheuser’s former competitor in the candle and soap business and a longtime friend. Schaeffer was from Alsace, which, like Kreuznach during the Napoleonic era, was an area along the Rhine that contained a large ethnic German population but belonged to France. Schaeffer also originally immigrated to St. Louis via Cincinnati, although roughly a decade before Anheuser’s arrival. On May 1, 1857, Schaeffer and his partners, German immigrant Adolph Krauss and native-born American entrepreneur James Reilly, announced that Anheuser had become a full partner in the N. Schaeffer & Co. soap, candle, and oil factory. The company was then renamed Schaeffer, Anheuser & Co.[11] Schaeffer and Anheuser soon began building a new factory, finished in February of the following year, which they promised would help them “fill orders in our line with dispatch, on the most favorable terms.”

Anheuser’s business career was also heavily intertwined with his family relationships. Shortly after partnering with Schaeffer, Anheuser brought in his eldest son, William, to serve as foreman in the company. It seems Anheuser’s relationship with William was somewhat complex and, to some degree, strained. Perhaps their relationship suffered after Anheuser’s wife, Dorothea, died in 1854 at the age of thirty-nine, leaving Anheuser a single father to the eighteen year-old William and his five younger siblings. It is clear that Eberhard invested heavily in William’s future, and had high hopes for him early on. He started by putting William in private school with Professor Edward Wyman, a leading local educator from Massachusetts. Under Wyman, he received “careful instruction in both the English and German languages.” Apparently, William was meant to succeed Eberhard in the soap business, as he had worked with his father for a number of years before being made foreman, and was given “particular attention to the study of chemistry” in his schooling. On June 28, 1862, Anheuser announced the dissolution of his partnership with Schaeffer, Reilly, and Krauss, and started a new soap, candle, and oil business with William as a full partner under the name of E. Anheuser & Son. While the Anheusers’ partnership only lasted about five years, Schaeffer & Co. continued to thrive, focusing more on lubricants and oil over time. Today, the company is still based out of St. Louis and is known as the Schaeffer Manufacturing Company.

In 1864, the Anheusers brought in Constantine (Constanz) Peipers, a Prussian about William’s age who was involved in real estate and insurance sales, as a full partner in their company, which was renamed Anheuser, Peipers & Co. The 1867 St. Louis City Directory shows that the partnership was dissolved when William started a new soap and candle company with Hermann Eisenhardt, another Prussian about his age. After this, Eberhard Anheuser apparently dropped out of the soap business for good. William’s new partnership, Anheuser & Eisenhardt, lasted until 1872, when Eisenhardt purchased his share in the business and William left for California, from which he did not return until 1882, two years after Eberhard Anheuser’s death.

It has been reported that William helped start a large soap factory in California. However, there is no record of his business activities there for his first five years. The William Anheuser that emerged in 1877 in Oakland seems a far cry, financially speaking, from the one who left St. Louis. Whereas he had been a full partner in two soap and candle businesses in St. Louis, William was listed only as a foreman for the Standard Soap Company in the 1877-1881 Oakland City Directories. In the 1880 census he was labeled a “workingman” instead of an “owner.” It is certain that Eberhard and William had a major falling out, due in part to financial issues. When Eberhard died in 1880, he left William only one dollar, giving what would have been William’s share, “less the sum I have heretofore given and advanced to my son William, ” to trustees for William’s children. Eberhard allowed the trustees to use up to $5,000 (approximately $113,000 in 2011$) as they saw fit to take care of William and his family. Anheuser ordered that the remainder of this share be reinvested in another family business until William’s children came of age. It was this second family business — a brewery — that secured the financial fortunes of generations of Eberhard Anheuser’s descendants. However, this ultimate success sprang from a series of failures.

A-B-1860

A Different Kind of Suds

Although beer was not unknown in St. Louis prior to Anheuser’s arrival in the 1840s, it was not anywhere near the drink of choice. Other spirits were preferred that were cheaper, traveled more easily, and stayed potable longer, such as cider and whiskey. It was not until the massive influx of German immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s that beer became worth producing at commercial levels in St. Louis. Still, the beginnings of the industry were inauspicious. According to one account, there were only six breweries in operation in the city in 1845, with none having the capacity to brew more than twenty-five barrels on a given day.

The wave of German immigrants that flooded the city in the following decades brought with them a taste for beer. One type in particular, lager beer, quickly became the most popular type of beer in America. Lager is a lighter, clearer, crisper brew that uses a special type of yeast which ferments on the bottom of the brewing vat. The top-fermenting American and English ales, porters, and stouts being produced in small-scale operations prior to 1840 were initially not very popular. The top-fermenting yeast they used reacted differently in America than it did in Europe, often resulting in a bitter tasting final product that spoiled extremely quickly. Lager beers were more difficult and time-consuming to produce. They required access to higher quality water and needed a long period of cold storage during and after the fermentation process (the root word “lagern” means “to store”). This made lager a seasonal product in the era before mechanical refrigeration. However, the bottom-fermenting yeast used in lager did not become bitter, and the final product lasted a long time if kept cool.[23] Because of its access to good water, ice from the banks of the Mississippi in the winter, and a bevy of caves and caverns nearby that served as a natural source of refrigeration, St. Louis was an excellent site for lager brewing. This was not lost on the German-American entrepreneurs in the city. St. Louis housed thirty-six breweries in 1853. Over half of their annual production of 216,000 barrels was lager beer.[24] A miniscule part of that number was provided by Georg Schneider, a Bavarian immigrant who had built a small brewery in 1852. Although placed advantageously next to a large portion of the city’s German population in South St. Louis, Schneider’s brewery was a small affair. It produced only about 500 barrels annually after five years in business.

Still, Schneider’s sales grew enough that he felt an expansion was in order, so in 1856 he built a new brewery on Eighth Street in the city block between Arsenal and Pestalozzi. He nostalgically named it “The Bavarian Brewery.” Unfortunately for Schneider, the next year ushered in the Panic of 1857, which hurt his profits and effectively destroyed access to the necessary credit and investment capital needed to keep his business alive. Thus, Schneider was forced to sell his brewery to Philipp Hammer, an immigrant from Baden, on December 11 of that year. Hammer’s brother Carl soon joined him at the Bavarian Brewery, and the two formed a partnership, named C. and P. Hammer & Co. However, neither of them had any brewing experience, so they left the business to their brother, Adam, in 1858. In December of that year, Adam formed the partnership Hammer & Urban with Dominic Urban, the head of the city’s board of assessors. The pair borrowed heavily in 1859 to augment the brewery’s production capacity. While the previous owners of the brewery had only produced scant hundreds of barrels annually, Hammer & Urban boosted production to around 3,200 barrels. Sadly, demand for their particular brand did not increase at anywhere near such a rapid pace, and the partners soon went bankrupt.

In 1860, the duo’s major creditors came calling — one of whom was Eberhard Anheuser. Rather than try to sell the brewery and parcel out the proceeds with Hammer & Urban’s other creditors, Anheuser decided to buy them out and take over the brewery himself. In order to do this, Anheuser partnered with his old friend and business associate William D’Oench. The business was renamed E. Anheuser & Co. Although the burden of running two separate businesses was draining, Anheuser continued his role with Schaeffer, Anheuser & Co. If Anheuser was already a successful businessman, why take on this extra responsibility? If it was because he sensed that economic and demographic trends were creating a more favorable business climate for breweries, he was correct.

Ref159-1, CD261

Illustration of Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch’s Bavarian Brewery, ca. 1878. The illustrator documents the brewery’s expansion over the past two decades (when compared with the 1860 image) and its access to both railroad and river transportation, which would have been used to ship barrels of beer. The illustrator also shows that the rail cars in the foreground are owned by E. Anheuser Co., as well as the steamboat, which is named Adolphus Busch. The drawing does not completely correspond to reality, however, since the illustrator has removed the U.S. arsenal, which would have stood between the brewery and the railroad track and Mississippi River, from the drawing. From Joseph A. Dacus and James William Buel, A Tour of St. Louis: Or, The Inside Life of a Great City (St. Louis, Western Publishing Company, 1878).

Riding the Amber Wave

Whether he knew it or not, Anheuser was riding the wave of the future. Between 1840 and 1860, annual per capita beer consumption in the United States tripled from 1.3 gallons per capita to 3.8 gallons per capita. A massive decline in the consumption of hard liquor, ostensibly due to the rise of the American temperance movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, was one of the reasons for the emergence of beer drinking during these years. Reformers linked crime and other social ills with the consumption of hard liquor, and fought to curb its use. At peak consumption in 1830, Americans consumed an average of 5.2 gallons of whiskey and 15 gallons of hard cider per capita, resulting in a per capita absolute alcoholic intake of 3.9 gallons. By 1845, whiskey consumption had declined to 2.1 gallons per capita, cider consumption had become negligible, and the absolute alcoholic intake dropped to only one gallon per capita. As the American temperance movement began to lose steam near midcentury, due in part to disagreements between those who favored temperance (the limited and responsible use of some alcoholic beverages) versus prohibition (the prohibition of all alcoholic beverages), lager beer was perceived as a compromise drink. Although the German population in America was growing rapidly, beer was becoming widely embraced outside of this group. It was marketed as a healthful, less-intoxicating alternative to the hard liquors that reformers attacked as dangerously intoxicating, immoral, and unhealthy.

This was seemingly the trend in St. Louis, as well. According to one article from 1857, beer was now “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 those who have introduced it.” The article concludes that lager beer’s “general adoption in the place of spirits has been a benefit, both to the health and to the morals of the community.” National statistics also speak to this trend. Before 1840, per capita beer consumption in America had been negligible. It increased exponentially afterwards. From 1855 onward, beer reigned undisputedly as America’s drink of choice. While per capita hard liquor consumption remained stable and relatively low over the next several decades, per capita beer consumption increased greatly. Between 1863 and 1880, the year of Eberhard Anheuser’s death, per capita beer consumption tripled again from 2.1 gallons per capita to 7.4 gallons per capita.[30] Simply put, due to a combination of the rapidly increasing German-American population, a trend toward greater urbanization (beer was primarily an urban drink), the business savvy of German-American brewers, the American public’s increased demand for lager, and the emergence of beer as a compromise drink for temperance advocates, Anheuser took over the Bavarian Brewery in a booming market for beer. All he had to do to be successful was to secure a share of this market.

anheuser_busch_02

Ethnic and Family Networks

Anheuser made several contacts within the German brewing community. Some became lifelong friends, such as William J. Lemp, the largest brewer in St. Louis at the time. Others became relatives. Anheuser met a young brewery supplier named Adolphus Busch, and his older brother Ulrich, who ended up marrying Anheuser’s daughters Lilly and Anna, respectively, in a double ceremony in 1861. The Busch brothers eventually joined Anheuser and D’Oench at E. Anheuser & Co. — Adolphus as a partner and Ulrich as a bookkeeper.[31] Perhaps Anheuser was trying to ease the complications of running two businesses at once when he brought in Busch at the brewery and Peipers at the soap factory in 1864. This would make sense, given the historic events that added further complications to Anheuser’s already complicated business situation.

The Civil War broke out in 1861, the year after Anheuser took over the brewery. While many aspects of business were disrupted in St. Louis during the Civil War, there were certain advantages to selling beer there at this time. For example, many Union troops were stationed in the city. Although intoxicating beverages were banned from army camps, lager beer was not considered intoxicating by Union doctors. It was therefore a product sought after by Union soldiers. Also, the Federal arsenal was right down the street from the brewery (hence the name “Arsenal Street”), which probably gave Anheuser and D’Oench access to sell their wares to Union troops in the area, many of whom happened to be German. Even Anheuser’s soap business benefitted from the Union Army’s presence. For example, Anheuser was awarded an army contract for 100,000 lbs. of soap in 1865. Economic factors aside, many Germans felt the need to prove their loyalty to the Union. In fact, militias comprised mainly of German volunteers played a pivotal role in keeping St. Louis from falling to the Confederacy. Throughout the war, Germans continued to serve as a solid backbone for the support of the Union and the Republican Party in St. Louis. Eberhard Anheuser, his sons, and his sons-in-law were part of this backbone of support.

The Anheusers and Busches, like many German immigrants throughout St. Louis and the rest of Missouri, flocked to the Union cause. Many joined the Union Army to prove their loyalty to their new nation. This may have been a driving factor for Anheuser as well, as he had renounced his identity as a Prussian subject and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1848. Anheuser joined his son William and son-in-law Adolphus Busch in a three-month enlistment in the Union home guard stationed in St. Louis, which was composed mainly of German immigrants. Missouri was a border state, where much of the native-born, white, American population was split on the issue of secession. About a month after the Civil War started, a company of several hundred secessionists formed in St. Louis at an encampment they named “Camp Jackson” after Missouri’s secessionist governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson. The secessionists at Camp Jackson surrendered after being surrounded by a large Union force which predominantly consisted of Germans in the home guard, including the regiment of Private Eberhard Anheuser and Corporal Adolphus Busch. Although the secessionists gave up without a fight, the Union soldiers were harassed by an angry mob as they marched their captives back to the federal arsenal. Shots were exchanged between the soldiers and the crowd, which set off a period of mob violence lasting through the next day, resulting in several troop and civilian casualties. Although it aroused anti-German sympathies among some of the city’s population, the capture of Camp Jackson helped save the city of St. Louis, and therefore a sizeable portion of the state of Missouri, for the Union.[34]

After his enlistment was up, Anheuser served on a committee that promised the support of the German Americans in St. Louis to General John C. Fremont, the Union military leader of Missouri in 1861. Anheuser also supported Fremont’s presidential bid in 1864, and contributed money publicly to help citizens suffering from the effects of the war in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama.[35] After the war, Anheuser and his sons, like many St. Louis Germans, kept up ardent support for the Republican Party.[36] Therefore, when the Republican-led federal government called for a one dollar per barrel tax on beer, Anheuser and many other German brewers felt obliged to accept this measure as an act of loyalty, which substantially affected their profit margins, even if business was increasing. However, taxes were raised on other alcoholic beverages as well, so beer remained relatively cheap in comparison.

Production at Anheuser’s brewery more than doubled between 1862 and 1863, from 2,500 to 6,000 barrels. While this speaks to Anheuser’s managerial prowess, this level of growth was more than likely directly related to consumption by the Union troops garrisoned at the nearby federal arsenal. The brewery’s sales had been less than stellar thus far, causing production to stall between 1863 and 1864 and D’Oench to leave the partnership sometime during the latter year. Luckily, Anheuser already had a suitable replacement in Adolphus Busch, whose presence immediately changed the fate of the underperforming brewery.

e-anheuser-1876

Keeping It in the Family

Family connections were important to Eberhard Anheuser. After immigrating to America, he maintained a relationship with his relatives in Germany, and visited them often. One of Eberhard Anheuser’s nephews, August Anheuser, stayed with him while studying business in America. August later went on to start a wine exporting company with Adolf Fehrs, named Anheuser & Fehrs, and used his American business connections with the Anheuser and Busch families to set up a thriving wine export trade to the United States. Along the same lines, Eberhard sent his son Adolf to Rohrer’s Commercial College in St. Louis, then gave him a position at the E. Anheuser & Co. brewery. Adolf served in the brewery until his death in 1886. As William was groomed by his father to serve in the soap business, it seems Adolf was groomed to serve in the brewery. He was employed by the brewery as a bookkeeper as early as 1865, and eventually served as a board member after inheriting some of his father’s stock from the brewery’s incorporation.[40] Unlike William, Adolf received a full share of his father’s estate. However, he never took over leadership of the brewery as William had in the soap factory. That role was filled by Adolphus Busch.

In the 1864 St. Louis City Directory, Adolphus Busch, Anheuser’s son-in-law, was listed as an owner alongside D’Oench and Anheuser. Although it is unclear how much of the brewery Busch owned or how active his partnership was at that point, it seems that he bought out D’Oench’s share fully by 1865. Like Anheuser, Busch was from a well-to-do family that did business on the Rhine. He hailed from Kastel (today known as Mainz-Kastel), in the province of Hesse, about forty miles upriver from Kreuznach. Busch’s merchant business, Wattenburg, Busch, and Co., specialized in providing brewery supplies, such as hops, malt, and barley to the breweries in St. Louis. Aside from this, Busch possessed a certain dynamism that made him an ideal candidate to revitalize Anheuser’s brewery. While many other businesses in St. Louis floundered due to the disruption of trade along the Mississippi River during the Civil War, Busch’s business flourished by engaging in the high risk/high reward cotton trade with steamboats making the dangerous trip between St. Louis and ports farther south.

Anheuser seems to have let Busch run the brewery, but the old man’s influence was still felt. He reportedly provided steady, sober advice and leadership that came from his years of experience, and possessed technical skills stemming from his education as a chemist. Busch was also an effective leader, but more of a salesman, innovator, and risk taker than Anheuser. Still yet, Anheuser seems to have been supportive of Busch’s new strategies, such as expanding the market into the Southwest to places like New Mexico and Texas, far away from the brewery’s staple customer base. He also allowed Busch to invest company money in important new innovations, like pasteurized bottled beer and refrigeration systems. Anheuser and Busch incorporated their business in 1875 as the E. Anheuser Brewing Association, Inc., which increased the amount of capital available and brought the prestige of a corporate title to the business. The partners agreed to expand the brewery continually with reinvested money from increased sales, so that the 8,000 barrels produced in 1865 shot to 141,163 by the time of Anheuser’s death in 1880. Using this strategy, the brewery grew so much that it received notice as a local landmark during Anheuser’s lifetime.

The way the shares were divvied up in the new corporation speaks to Busch’s dominant role. Although technically Anheuser was the president and Busch was the secretary of the new firm, Busch effectively served as the company head. Of the 480 total shares of stock, Anheuser kept 140, while Busch had 238, Lilly (Anheuser’s daughter and Busch’s wife) held 100, and their brewmaster was awarded 2. In 1879, the corporation was renamed the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association to reflect the reality of Busch’s leadership role.

When Anheuser died on May 2, 1880, after a long struggle with throat cancer, these stock shares were valued at $500 apiece (approximately $11,300 in 2011$). Anheuser left 23 shares, worth $11,500 (approximately $261,000 in 2011$), and a total of $7,426.07 in cash (approximately $169,000 in 2011$) to his children Anna, Lilly, Minna, and Adolf. He set aside the same amount to Gustava Klier, the only child of his late daughter, Hermine. As previously mentioned, William received only one dollar in cash, while the full share of cash and stock that would have been his was eventually passed on to his children by two trustees, Eberhard’s sons-in-law Adolphus Busch and Peter Schoettler (minus the undisclosed amount Eberhard gave William earlier and the $5,000 that had been earmarked for the trustees to help care for William and his children).[44] While it was a common practice in the nineteenth century to subtract prior gifts to an heir from the total of his or her inheritance, the fact that Eberhard kept the remainder of the share out of William’s hands is evidence that the difficulties between the two went beyond mere matters of financial indebtedness.

1904__man_riding_goats

Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Between Two Worlds

Eberhard Anheuser reportedly had a significant presence in the brewery until 1877, when he retired due to mounting health problems. He apparently possessed an “old world” mentality when it came to advertising, which impacted how his brewery conducted business. While advertising in print was unfashionable with many of the older, more firmly established breweries, the developing trend among modern brewers was to flood the pages of newspapers with ever more elaborate advertisements. Anheuser preferred to advertise the old way. According to this way of thinking, visuals, such as posters, were meant to be kept onsite at cooperating drinking establishments, where they continually advertised for free, as opposed to appearing in recurring newspaper ads, which cost money. Although Adolphus Busch would eventually alter the company’s advertising formula in the years after Anheuser’s death, it seems he at first agreed with the older man’s policies concerning print advertising. Until the turn of the century, the company focused more on advertising in person. They used fine horses (although not the Clydesdales associated with the corporation today) and freshly painted wagons to make a public spectacle of the delivery of Anheuser-Busch beer, handed out trinkets, and exploited publicity from the awards their beers won in the numerous fairs and expositions that erupted throughout major American and Western European cities from the 1870s onward. Most importantly, though, Anheuser and Busch hired talented and well-compensated beer agents who treated patrons to free drinks and offered credit to proprietors in drinking establishments in order to secure outlets for their product and develop a loyal consumer base at the personal level.

It would not be accurate to say that Anheuser-Busch did not utilize the power of print advertising effectively during Anheuser’s lifetime. The company just harnessed this power in unique ways that kept advertising expenses down. For example, on the day Anheuser died, the weekly copy of the leading German newspaper was flooded with advertisements from the city’s breweries. Some of these advertisements were quite large and ostentatious, and most likely cost a fair amount to keep running constantly in print. Yet, an ad from Anheuser-Busch is nowhere to be found. Instead, the company appears in an article in the main text of the paper. It reads, “Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association is without a doubt on the same level as the most important breweries in the city after this year’s demonstration. The unparalleled success of this brewery is most strikingly demonstrated by the following figures….” The article then goes on to show that the brewery’s sales had more than quadrupled to 112,145 barrels in the year between April 30, 1879, and April 30, 1880, when compared with the 26,639 barrels sold in the year between April 30, 1875, and April 30, 1876. The release of these newsworthy statistics basically resulted in free advertising.[46] Likewise, although the brewery sometimes ran ads for short stints publicizing awards won at certain expositions, it relied mostly on the free attention generated from such accolades, such as newspaper articles. It was not until after Anheuser’s death that Anheuser-Busch began to run newspaper ads more regularly, and began to place ads in national magazines. Even then, it was a slow transition. The one exception to the advertisement policy was Anheuser and Busch’s mutual friend Tony Faust, a restaurateur who advertised regularly in the papers and sometimes included advertisements (which were probably paid for jointly by Anheuser-Busch) promoting Anheuser-Busch beer at his establishments. In sum, though, print advertisements for the brewery remained irregular and small in scale until several years after Anheuser’s death.

Anheuser seems like a man caught between two worlds. Both of the industries in which he participated remained relatively small-scale, local concerns through the 1860s. Although Anheuser left the soap industry before much had changed, the brewing industry changed mightily between when he took over the Bavarian Brewery in 1860 and his death in 1880. Improved technology, massive immigration, rising urbanization, the growing network of interconnected shipping and rail lines, and the embrace of modern industrial processes led to a trend of increased production, competition, and continuous expansion among the nation’s top breweries. What started off as a small-scale industry dependent on a locally-based, ethnic clientele, where competition was often limited to individual saloons and restaurants near neighborhood boundaries, was morphing into an increasingly national and international industry composed of a dwindling number of rapidly expanding breweries locked in an increasingly competitive struggle to secure as much of the market as possible. The national statistics give evidence of this pattern. In 1870, 3,286 brewers produced 5,093,300 barrels of beer in America. In 1880, 2,266 brewers produced 12,800,900 barrels. In 1900, 1,751 brewers produced 39,330,000 barrels. The same trend seems evident in St. Louis. The production statistics of Anheuser-Busch alone show that the 2,500 barrels produced in 1862 had grown to 141,163 in 1880, and 939,768 in 1900. Likewise, the city had forty-three breweries known to be in operation in 1860, twenty-five in 1880, and twenty-three in 1900.

Anheuser-Busch did not begin to compete seriously at the national level until after Anheuser’s death. At the time of Anheuser’s retirement in 1877, his brewery was not yet even in the top twenty largest national brewers, and was only the second largest in St. Louis. It was not until 1885, five years after Anheuser’s death, that Anheuser-Busch finally outpaced its closest local competitor, Anheuser’s friend William J. Lemp’s Western Brewery, to become the largest brewer in St. Louis. Yet, the industrial changes that Anheuser-Busch embraced to become the undisputed leader in American brewing by the turn of the century, such as aggressive expansion of the brewery’s production capacity, the adoption of innovative new technologies, and the development of new markets, were already having a major impact during Anheuser’s lifetime. The keys to national and international competition between shipping brewers were in the utilization of refrigerated railroad cars (pulled by a train) and railcars (self-propelled individual train cars) on the ever-expanding American railroad network, and the mass production and shipping of pasteurized bottled beer. By the late 1870s, Midwestern shipping brewers from St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati were competing in various cities as far apart as Los Angeles, Dallas, New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. By 1878, Anheuser-Busch was regularly shipping kegs of beer to various places around the country in refrigerated railroad cars on various railways, and also had a private fleet of 110 refrigerated railcars, which at any time could deliver beer to any place in the country connected to St. Louis by a rail line with ice depots along the route. On the other hand, pasteurized bottled beer could be shipped anywhere, and the marketplace became international for any brewery with access to a bottling works and reliable trade links to a major port, such as New Orleans. In 1878, Anheuser-Busch and Lemp were already competing on a limited scale in various port cities in South and East Asia, Australia, Hawaii, South America, the Caribbean Islands, and Western Europe.

Only about a year after Anheuser’s death, the consequences of all this increased production and competition hit Anheuser-Busch and the rest of the St. Louis brewing industry. In June of 1881, overtaxed workers initiated the city’s first brewery strike for better wages and shorter hours, which set the tone for the decade. A few months later, the Winkelmeyer brewery, one of the largest and most important in the city, cut its price from eight to seven dollars a barrel, due to pressure from rising competition with other brewers in the city. This violated a long-running price setting agreement among the cities brewers, and started a domino effect of retaliatory price-cutting that involved almost all of the city’s breweries within a day. Although the strike failed and the price agreement was soon restored, these events, which occurred so soon after Anheuser’s death, bear witness to the trends that had begun during his career in the brewing industry.

Social Status and Personality: They Called Him Papa

Because of his economic position, Anheuser had a significant presence in the German community near his brewery. German immigrant laborers, who provided almost all of the workforce in the city’s breweries, tended to cluster together in small ethnic communities, often living in boarding houses or apartments within walking distance of where they were employed. The salaries paid to Anheuser’s employees helped fund the churches, schools, and social institutions that strengthened the cultural bonds among the German community in this area. Anheuser himself also supported these institutions. For example, he invested in the local Germania Club and the Concordia Turners Hall that was located just down the street from his brewery. This helped make Anheuser a prominent social figure in the community.

Anheuser was also socially prominent among St. Louis’s German population as a whole. This was common for brewers. The consumption of beer was one of the culturally uniting factors in the scattered and divided St. Louis German-American ethnic community. While many Anglo-Americans promoted a somewhat Puritanical view of Sunday Sabbath observance, German Americans were conspicuous in their penchant for Sunday parties, organizational gatherings, picnics, and social engagements in local saloons. Because of the Sunday “blue laws” which restricted public gatherings deemed disruptive to the observance of the Sabbath and the sale and public consumption of alcohol in the city limits, many in the German-American ethnic community either headed to the outskirts of the city to parks and other open places to drink and recreate freely, or openly flouted the laws by going to a saloon. Many of these parks, open spaces, and saloons were owned and operated by German-American brewers. Consequently, several brewers became prominent leaders and organizers of recreational events and organizations in the German-American community.[54] Many St. Louis Germans saw Anheuser as a paternal figure, and referred to him as “Papa Anheuser.” E. Anheuser & Co. was the biggest financial supporter of the city’s Saengerfest, an immensely popular singing competition held between ethnically German singing groups. Anheuser was a supporter and the oldest member of the Modoc Club, a rowing club filled with German citizens who honored Anheuser by naming a barge after him and providing an expensive floral work at his funeral. He also held a position of notability and respect among the brewers in St. Louis and in the national community of brewers. When Anheuser was too ill to attend the annual convention of the United States Brewing Association in 1879, a unanimous resolution of regret was passed.

Conclusion

In some ways, Eberhard Anheuser seems stereotypical when compared to other German-American immigrants and entrepreneurs in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Although he was middle-aged and married upon immigrating, which was uncommon, Anheuser, like most German immigrants in this period, likely left Germany for economic reasons, and ended up settling in areas with large populations of ethnic Germans. Although he had business contacts outside of the German community, most of his business partnerships in St. Louis were with other ethnic Germans, and he depended on German immigrants for his labor pool. Anheuser’s children all married spouses of German descent, and nearly all had business ties with him. Like many of his contemporaries, Anheuser’s economic and social status made him a leading figure in the local German community.

On the other hand, Eberhard Anheuser epitomizes a time of transition in an important American industry. Anheuser made the fortuitous decision to become a brewer shortly after American consumer trends changed to embrace the product he was making. As a response to the increased demand for lager beer after 1840, several little breweries, like the one Anheuser took over, were started in German communities, which provided the workforce and the initial consumer base for the industry. While the industry’s labor force and leaders remained predominantly ethnically German, beer was changing from a niche product aimed at local ethnic consumers into a widely embraced, nationally and internationally marketed product. The industrial processes that promoted the expansion of large-scale operations in other industries altered powerfully the brewing industry during the time of Eberhard Anheuser’s career. Adolphus Busch was more personally responsible for the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association’s transition into an industrial giant, and thus is a symbol for the new era in the brewing industry. However, Eberhard Anheuser was at least part of the process, and serves as a symbol of the transition between the two eras in American brewing. His tenure as an entrepreneur is exemplary of a changing business climate, in which increased production and growing competition between firms expanding continually made it harder for smaller businesses, like the one he took over in 1860, to compete. In short, Anheuser began his American entrepreneurial career in one era and ended it in another.

E-Anheuser-1879
An ad from 1879.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Breweries, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, Germany, History, Missouri

Historic Beer Birthday: Lilly Anheuser

August 13, 2024 By Jay Brooks

a-b
Today is the birthday of Lilly Anheuser (August 13, 1844-February 25, 1928). She was born in Mainz-Bingener Landkreis, in Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, one of three daughters of Eberhard Anheuser. Eberhard was originally a soap and candle maker, but had had also invested in the Bavarian Brewery Company, in St. Louis, Missouri. When it went through financial troubles in 1860, he took over control of it, buying out the other creditors, and renaming it Eberhard Anheuser and Company. “Lilly married Adolphus Busch, a brewery supply salesman, in a double wedding with Anna Anheuser (Lilly’s older sister) and Ulrich Busch (Adolphus’ brother) in 1861.” Her husband was running the brewery even before her father died in 1880, and the year before, 1879, the corporation was renamed the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association to reflect the reality of Busch’s leadership role.

lily-anheuser

Here’s a short biography from Find-a-Grave:

Lilly was one of six children of Eberhard and Dorothea Anheuser. She and her family lived in Cincinnati, Ohio for a time before moving to St Louis, Missouri.

Lilly, who was blonde and called “curly Head” was courted by and married to Adolphus Busch, who sold brewery supplies at the time, to her father at the E. Anheuser Brewing Company. She was married to Adolphus in a double wedding; her sister Anna married Ulrich Busch on March 11, 1861. Anna was dark and known for her sophistication.
Lilly was the mother of thirteen children. Nine lived to adulthood. Along with her social life, Lilly cooked for her husband and to an extent remained a “house wife.”

With the success of the Brewery, She and her husband and children traveled extensively. They owned Villas in Germany. Both were confiscated by Hitler. They traveled by private train car. A favorite group of homes for them was Ivy Wall, and The Blossoms, Busch Gardens in Pasadena,CA. They had an estate in Cooperstown, NY, and Germany.

Upon reaching their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Lilly and Adolphus presented a home to each of their children.
One was given a French chateau manner on a farm near St. Louis once owned by General U.S. Grant. It is now known as Grant’s Farm and is open to the public. Other Children were given homes in St Louis, New York, Berlin, Germany, Chicago,IL,and Stuttgart, Germany.

It was reported Lilly was given a gold Crown by her husband to commemorate their golden Anniversary. Amidst the celebration was sadness because the health of her husband was failing. He passed away at Villa Lilly, in Germany with Lilly at his side.

lilly-anheuser-mid

The Anheuser-Busch website gives this account:

Eberhard Anheuser, who left Germany in 1843, settling first in Cincinnati and before moving to St. Louis. Trained as a soap manufacturer, he eventually went on to own the largest soap and candle company in St. Louis. Although he had no brewing experience, he became part owner of the Bavarian Brewery, which had first opened its doors in 1852. By 1860, Anheuser had bought out the other investors and the brewery’s name was changed to E. Anheuser & Co.

Adolphus Busch was born in 1839, the second youngest of 22 children. At age 18, he made his way to St. Louis via New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Adolphus began working as a clerk on the riverfront and by the time he was 21, he had a partnership in a brewing supply business.

It was through this enterprise that Adolphus Busch met Eberhard Anheuser, and soon Adolphus was introduced to Eberhard’s daughter, Lilly. In 1861, Adolphus Busch and Lilly Anheuser were married, and shortly after that, Adolphus went to work for his father-in-law. He later purchased half ownership in the brewery, becoming a partner.

lilly-anheuser-photo
Lilly Anheuser later in life.

In 1897, famed Swedish artist Anders Zorn painted portraits of Lilly Anheuser and her husband Adolphus Busch. They were recently sold through the auction house Christie’s. The winning bid for Busch’s portrait was $207,750 and Lilly’s went for $123,750.

Zorn-lilly-anheuser-1897
A portrait of Lily Anheuser, painted by Anders Zorn in 1897.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, Germany, History, Missouri

Beer Birthday: George Reisch

July 20, 2024 By Jay Brooks

a-b

Today is the 67th birthday of George Reisch, who’s now retired as the brewmaster of Anheuser-Busch. George had worked for A-B since 1979, but his family roots in brewing run far deeper. His great-great-great-grandfather Franz Sales Reisch founded the Reisch Brewing Co. in 1849, in the city of Springfield, Illinois, which operated until 1966. I have had the pleasure of judging at both GABF and the World Beer Cup over the years with George, and he’s an amazing person. Join me wishing George a very happy birthday.

At World Beer Cup judging in Minneapolis.
Lester Jones, of the Beer Institute & George Reisch, of Anheuser-Busch @ GABF Saturday
Lester Jones, currently with the NBWA, and George at GABF in 2009.
George-Reisch-uber-tubers
At CBC in Nashville, TN, Pete Slosberg, Marty Velas, George and Mitch Steele waiting for our amazing Uber-Tuber Hand Cut Fries at the Riverside Grillshack Fries and Burgers.
george-resich-medal
George drinking a beer behind a beautiful skyline and rocking his medal (the one they give you in Belgium when the Brewer’s Guild there knights you).

Filed Under: Birthdays, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, Missouri

Historic Beer Birthday: Frank Selinger

July 8, 2024 By Jay Brooks

schlitz2

Today is the birthday of Frank J. Selinger (July 8, 1914-June 15, 2000). He was born in Philadelphia and was trained as a chemist and later became a brewmaster, first with the Esslinger Brewing Co. in Philadelphia, but later with the Burger Brewing Co. and Anheuser-Busch. But in 1977, he accepted the position of CEO for Schlitz Brewing and even appeared in television commercials for them in the early 1980s.

frank-sellinger-tv

Here’s an obituary of Sellinger, from the Williamsburg Daily Press:

Francis J. Sellinger, a former brewing executive in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Philadelphia, died Thursday, June 15, 2000, at Williamsburg Community Hospital. He was 85.

A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Sellinger graduated in 1936 with a degree in chemistry from St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia. According to his son, Joseph Sellinger, he initially wanted to become a doctor but took a job in a brewery in order to help support his family. He began his career in the brewing industry in 1936 as chief chemist and assistant brewmaster with the Esslinger Brewing Co. in Philadelphia. In 1952, he joined the Burger Brewing Co. in Cincinnati, and he became vice president and general manager in 1956.

Mr. Sellinger joined Anheuser-Busch Inc. in St. Louis, Mo., in 1964. During his 14 years with the company, he held many senior executive positions, including vice president of engineering, and was a key figure in the company’s rapid brewery expansion during the 1970s, with the construction of breweries in Columbus, Ohio; Jacksonville, Fla.; Merrimack, N.H.; Williamsburg, Va.; and Fairfield, Calif. Mr. Sellinger was also heavily involved in the promotion of new technological advances within the company.

“He was the one that understood the direction the economics of the industry were going in,” said Patrick Stokes, president of Anheuser-Busch Inc.

He also played a key role in the development of the company’s Busch Gardens-The Old Country theme park and the Kingsmill Residential Community and Resort, both in Williamsburg.

In 1978, he became the vice chairman and chief executive officer of Schlitz Brewing Co. in Milwaukee. According to Joseph Sellinger, one of his first tasks at Schlitz was to turn the image of the company around. He worked to accomplish this by returning the company to a traditional brewing process. In addition, Mr. Sellinger appeared in the “Taste My Schlitz” television advertising campaign that began in 1978. Joseph Sellinger said that the locales for his father’s commercials ranged from barley fields to bars. Mr. Sellinger continued his career at Schlitz until his retirement in 1983 to Kingsmill in Williamsburg.

After his retirement, Mr. Sellinger became involved with the Anheuser-Busch Golf Classic, now the Michelob Golf Classic, and worked for St. Bede’s Catholic Church.

Mr. Sellinger will be remembered for his integrity, caring and generosity toward his family, friends and employees. He came from very humble beginnings, said Joseph Sellinger, yet gave so much to others.

BurgerSoftTopIntro
Frank Sellinger (left), when he was Vice-President and General Manager of Burger Brewing.

And this is from the New York time, from March 1, 1981, an article by Ray Kenny entitled “Trying to Stop the Flight from Schlitz.”

MILWAUKEE SHORTLY after Frank J. Sellinger went to work at the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company in November 1977, he faced the first in a long list of problems.

A daughter, who then lived on the West Coast, telephoned and confessed: “Daddy, I don’t like that beer.” She had a lot of company. Schlitz, which had reformulated its flagship brand in a disastrous economy move in the 70’s, has been fighting a steady decline in sales ever since. Earnings plunged from almost $50 million five years ago to a $50.6 million loss in 1979 when it sold its newest brewery.

Said Mr. Sellinger: “I told my daughter, ‘Honey, do me a favor. Try Schlitz Malt Liquor. If you still don’t like it, go back to Budweiser.'”

After all, Mr. Sellinger said, “Anheuser-Busch put bread and butter on the Sellinger table for a lot of years.” Mr. Sellinger was an executive there all those years. Now, as vice chairman and chief executive at Schlitz charged with getting people to drink Schlitz again, he has reworked its taste, pitted it against the major beers in taste competitions televised live and gone on television commercials himself as the company’s down-to-earth pitchman. He has also pared expenses, cut excess brewing capacity and tightened quality control.

For all that, Schlitz is still losing sales position. In its best year, 1976, the company sold 24.2 million barrels. In 1980, shipments declined 11 percent on the year, to 15 million barrels. The company lost its fingertip hold on third place in the industry, behind the Anheuser-Busch Companies, which sold 50.2 million barrels in 1980, and the Miller Brewing Company, a subsidiary of Philip Morris Inc., which shipped 37.3 million barrels last year. Schlitz dropped to fourth place, behind its crosstown rival, Pabst, which shipped 15.1 million barrels.

“This company faced the toughest marketing problem you’ve ever seen,” an outside director said. “Beer drinkers are intensely loyal and we drove them away. Getting them to switch back is a horrendous challenge.”

Despite the continued falling sales, the company managed to show a profit last year of $27 million, or 93 cents a share, on revenues of $1 billion. Mr. Sellinger’s efforts apparently have paid off, along with gains by Schlitz’s container division and some profits attributed to nonoperating areas of the business. Clearly, corporate executives and members of the Uihlein (rhymes with E-line) family, who continue to hold the controlling interest in the company, were buoyed by the earnings swing.

“When sales are falling, the first thing you do is arrest the decline,” Mr. Sellinger said. “We’ve slowed things down but it’s too early to tell whether we’ve turned it around. Ask me again in June.”

Mr. Sellinger, 66, was named vice chairman and chief executive officer at Schlitz last April after coming on board in 1977 as president. One of the first things he did in an attempt to slow falling sales was to formulate what he calls “one helluva good brew.” He assembled technical personnel and urged them to create a flagship beer that would appeal to the eye as well as the taste.

“It has to look good,” he said. “Americans drink with their eyes. Beer has to be rich in flavor and hold its head. “There is just so much you can do. You can increase the barley malt and change the amount of hopping – the ratio of hops to corn. But the malt is the soul of the beer.

“From January of 1978 until July, we conducted test after test after test. Finally, we all agreed, and I’ll tell you, if we can get people to taste the beer, we’ll keep ’em.”

Then he sought to improve quality control. “If the quality guy at a plant says it doesn’t go, it doesn’t go,” he said. “He reports to headquarters, not to the plant manager, and if that means we dump 5,000 cans because of high air content, then we dump 5,000 cans.”

Mr. Sellinger pared the payroll to 6,100 employees, eliminating 800 to 1,000 jobs. “I believe in paying fair wages,” he said, “but I can’t afford two workers for one job. We eliminated a lot of people. We sacrificed a few for the good of the many.”

As for expenses, he said, “We had grown fat. Lax. I mean, how many WATS lines do you really need? How many copies do you have to make? There a million ways to save.”

He cut deeply into excess capacity when he closed the company’s newest brewery – a six-year-old facility in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1979. The move, together with the closing of a small brewery in Honolulu, trimmed production capacity by 5.4 million barrels. But the company is still swimming in capacity. Last year it was capable of turning out 25.6 million barrels while it sold 15 million.

A year ago, the Syracuse plant was sold to Anheuser-Busch for $100 million. The company absorbed a $44.3 million loss in the process. “That was a beautiful brewery,” Mr. Sellinger said, “but it was an albatross. That doesn’t mean the decision to build it wasn’t right at the time. If your sales trend is a plus 12 percent a year, then you know that in three and a half years – the time it takes to construct a brewery – you will need so much beer to satisfy demand. The 1974 trend told us we would have to spend $157 million for the beer we would need by 1977.”

B REWERIES are built with the wholesalers in mind, Mr. Sellinger said. “We pressure them to sell Schlitz and they want to know whether Schlitz will have the beer if the business continues. We can’t say, ‘we have no beer.’ That takes all their incentive away.”

But if the customers leave, there’s no need for a brewery. “That’s the chance business takes constantly,” Mr. Sellinger said. “Look at our friends at Miller. Their trend line has been a plus 24 percent a year, but now it’s 3 1/2 percent.” Between 1954 and 1964, no breweries were built in the United States, the Schlitz chief recalled.

“Only Anheuser-Busch and Schlitz had the guts to borrow the money at 9.2 percent interest and build new plants. We didn’t have a ‘cash cow,’ ” he said, using his favorite description for Philip Morris. “What would Miller’s profit be if they paid even 8 percent interest on that Philip Morris investment?”

Schlitz embarked on an expensive campaign featuring live taste tests on television, pitting its product, at various times, against Miller High Life and Anheuser’s Budweiser and Michelob. Half the 100 Budweiser drinkers pulled the lever for Schlitz in one test supervised by Tommy Bell, a widely recognized referee in the National Football League. Other scores were respectable. But some critics said that the nature of the tests gave Schlitz the advantage. (Since the participants in a given test were all, say, Budweiser drinkers, Schlitz could claim victory if any favored its beer.)

Concluded Joseph Doyle, a brewing industry analyst at Smith Barney Harris Upham & Company: “All the media coverage (of the taste tests) is giving Schlitz a big bang for their buck. I’d count the campaign a huge success if it arrests the decline of the brand, and it looks like it is doing that.”

The company trumpeted the results in follow-up newspaper ads, but there are no current plans to continue the live taste tests. Nevertheless, Mr. Sellinger’s desk is piled with letters and comments. “Here’s one from five students at Holy Cross – Bud drinkers – who have started a Tommy Bell/Schlitz fan club,” he said. “The young drinkers are the ones you want to win.”

The company has not disclosed sales figures related to the television campaign but some distributors reported sales gains. “We doubled our January sales in the first week,” after the commercials began, reported Jack Lewis, a distributor in Cleveland. Joe Scheurer, in Philadelphia, said his sales were up 10 percent. Other distributors reported gains.

Mr. Sellinger, who prefers the term “beer tasting” to beer guzzling, will drink to that.

Here’s one of Sellinger’s TV ads, this one from 1981.

And here’s another one.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Breweries, Just For Fun Tagged With: Advertising, Anheuser-Busch, History, Milwaukee, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Schlitz, Video, Wisconsin

Historic Beer Birthday: August A. Busch III

June 16, 2024 By Jay Brooks

a-b

Today is the birthday of August Anheuser Busch III (June 16, 1937- ) He is the great-grandson of Anheuser-Busch founder Adolphus Busch and was the company’s Chairman until November 30, 2006. August Busch III is informally known as “Auggie” and as “The Third,” “Three Sticks,” or “Triplesticks” by subordinates and employees at Anheuser-Busch. I’d actually heard “Triple Sticks” as a nickname.

august-a-busch-iii

Here’s some biographical information from his Wikipedia page:

August Anheuser Busch III was born in St. Louis, Missouri on June 16, 1937. He attended the University of Arizona, but dropped out after failing. His father then gave him an ultimatum, and he began working in an entry-level position in Anheuser Busch.

August Busch III served as President of the Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. (ABC) from 1974 until June 2002, and Chief Executive Officer of ABC from 1975 until June 2002. He was Chairman of the Board of Directors of ABC from 1977 to 2006.

He was succeeded as the day-to-day operational head of Anheuser-Busch by Patrick Stokes. Stokes’ tenure marked the first time in the history of the company that a non-Busch family member ran the day-to-day operations. Busch also conferred the chairmanship to Stokes effective December 1, 2006. He retired from their executive functions at the company on November 30, 2006. He will continue to serve on Anheuser-Busch’s board.

U1805263

He has been married twice. His first wife, Susan, is the mother of his two older children August Anheuser Busch IV and Susan Busch-Transou. His second wife, Virginia, who is a practicing attorney, is the mother of his younger two children, Steven Busch and Virginia “Ginny” Busch.

Unlike his father Gussie Busch, August III has been a lifelong supporter of the Republican Party, and a friend, ally, and financial supporter to Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and President George W. Bush. August III’s eldest son, August A. Busch IV, is a strong supporter of Democratic Party politics, just like his grandfather Gussie.

augie-rawls-sinatra
Lou Rawls and Frank Sinatra sharing Budweisers with Triple Sticks in 1982.

Filed Under: Birthdays, Just For Fun Tagged With: Anheuser-Busch, Big Brewers, History, Missouri

Beer In Ads #3653: Budweiser Saturday Afternoon

February 28, 2021 By Jay Brooks

Sunday’s ad is for “Budweiser,” from 1963. This ad was made for Anheuser-Busch, and was part of their series using the tagline “this calls for Budweiser,” which ran during the 1960s, and replaced the earlier “Where there’s Bud” campaign. This one features three men playing pool on a Saturday afternoon with a few beers. The text begins “saturday afternoon….”

Filed Under: Art & Beer, Beers Tagged With: Advertising, Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser, History

Next Page »

Find Something

Northern California Breweries

Please consider purchasing my latest book, California Breweries North, available from Amazon, or ask for it at your local bookstore.

Recent Comments

  • Return of the Session – Beer Search Party on The Sessions
  • Scoats on Beer Birthday: Scoats
  • You're Not From Around Here - Food GPS on The Sessions
  • Mark Smith on Beer In Ads #4778: Rheingold Can Quench A Dragon’s Thirst
  • Getting Ready to Celebrate St Patrick’s Day – The Blessing of Beer | Red Panda News on Beer Saints

Recent Posts

  • Historic Beer Birthday: Joseph Schlitz May 15, 2025
  • Beer Birthday: Shaun O’Sullivan May 15, 2025
  • Beer In Ads #4969: It Deserves First Prize May 14, 2025
  • Beer Birthday: Brian Stechschulte May 14, 2025
  • Beer Birthday: Dan Carey May 14, 2025

BBB Archives