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Beer In Ads #3601: Budweiser With A Steak

January 6, 2021 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment

Wednesday’s ad is for “Budweiser,” from 1959. This poster was made for Anheuser-Busch, and was part of their series using the tagline. “Where there’s Life … there’s Bud,” which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s, and features Budweiser with a steak being grilled on what looks like an outdoor porch. The woman reaching for a beer has a very odd expression on her face. What exactly is she trying to say?

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

Beer In Ads #3600: Budweiser With A Sandwich

January 5, 2021 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment

Tuesday’s ad is for “Budweiser,” from 1958. This poster was made for Anheuser-Busch, and was part of their series using the tagline. “Where there’s Life … there’s Bud,” which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s, and features Budweiser with a sandwich on what looks like a bicycling picnic of sorts.

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

Beer In Ads #3599: Budweiser With Spaghetti

January 4, 2021 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment

Sunday’s ad is for “Budweiser,” from 1959. This poster was made for Anheuser-Busch, and was part of their series using the tagline. “Where there’s Life … there’s Bud,” which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s, and features Budweiser with spaghetti. Coincidentally, today is also National Spaghetti Day.

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

Beer In Ads #3598: Budweiser With Popcorn

January 3, 2021 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment

Sunday’s ad is for “Budweiser,” from the late 1950s. This poster was made for Anheuser-Busch, and was part of their series using the tagline. “Where there’s Life … there’s Bud,” which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s. I believe I’ve shared a number of these before, but I hadn’t seen the one featuring popcorn before.

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

Beer In Ads #3597: Budweiser With Pizza

January 2, 2021 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment

Saturday’s ad is for “Budweiser,” from 1959. This poster was made for Anheuser-Busch, and was part of their series using the tagline. “Where there’s Life … there’s Bud,” which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s. I believe I’ve shared a number of these before, but I hadn’t seen the one featuring pizza before.

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

Historic Beer Birthday: Carl W. Conrad

April 1, 2020 By Jay Brooks 9 Comments

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

Beer In Ads #2840: Ice Gave All 48 States A Seashore …

November 30, 2018 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment


Friday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1948. This post-World War 2 ad features a crowded sea with a fishing board in the foreground and then the text segues into how ice and refrigeration brought the seafood the fishermen were catching into everybody’s homes.

Bud-1948-ice-shore

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

Beer In Ads #2839: Remember The Sunsets … You Could Never Describe?

November 29, 2018 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment


Thursday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1945. This World War 2-era ad features a beautiful view of the Grand Canyon and text extolling how hard it is to describe such vistas, comparing that to trying to describe their beer.

Bud-1945-grand-canyon-2

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

Beer In Ads #2838: Our Third President Was Our First Spaghetti Maker

November 28, 2018 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment


Wednesday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1948. This ad features Thomas Jefferson serving up a bowl of spaghetti in the White House, and although it’s unlikely he was actually the first person to bring pasta to our shores, he did really help to popularize it. And it wasn’t spaghetti, either, but macaroni.

Here’s what Mental Floss has to say about it:

Though he probably wasn’t the first person to introduce Americans to the ooey gooey goodness of macaroni drenched with cheese, Jefferson did have a hand in popularizing it. As with ice cream, he discovered the dish while living in France and became so enamored with it that he sketched a “maccaroni” machine. He first served the delicacy at a state dinner in 1802—and back in those days, anything served at the White House became the talk of the town. People were soon clamoring for the dish, though what they ate probably didn’t much resemble today’s good ol’ Kraft.

Bud-1948-spaghetti

And at the website for Monticello, they’ve reprinted this entry from the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia:

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Macaroni and the Macaroni Machine

In February 1789, William Short wrote to Thomas Jefferson that, at Jefferson’s request, he had procured a “mould for making maccaroni” in Naples, and had it forwarded to his mentor in Paris.1 The macaroni mold probably did not reach Paris until after Jefferson had departed. His belongings were shipped to Philadelphia in 1790, and the machine was probably included with those items. We know that Jefferson did have the machine in the United States eventually, as it is mentioned in a packing list with other household items shipped from Philadelphia to Monticello in 1793.2

Jefferson-macaroni

Jefferson’s notes on the macaroni machine read as follows:

The best maccaroni in Italy is made with a particular sort of flour called Semola, in Naples: but in almost every shop a different sort of flour is commonly used; for, provided the flour be of a good quality, and not ground extremely fine, it will always do very well. A paste is made with flour, water and less yeast than is used for making bread. This paste is then put, by little at a time, viz. about 5. or 6. lb. each time into a round iron box ABC, the under part of which is perforated with holes, through which the paste, when pressed by the screw DEF, comes out, and forms the Maccaroni g.g.g. which, when sufficiently long, are cut and spread to dry. The screw is turned by a lever inserted into the hole K, of which there are 4. or 6. It is evident that on turning the screw one way, the cylindrical part F. which fits the iron box or mortar perfectly well, must press upon the paste and must force it out of the holes. LLM. is a strong wooden frame, properly fastened to the wall, floor and cieling of the room.

N.O. is a figure, on a larger scale, of some of the holes in the iron plate, where all the black is solid, and the rest open. The real plate has a great many holes, and is screwed to the box or mortar: or rather there is a set of plates which may be changed at will, with holes of different shapes and sizes for the different sorts of Maccaroni.

Macaroni Recipe

Jefferson was most likely not the first to introduce macaroni (with or without cheese) to America, nor did he invent the recipe. The most that can be said is that he probably helped to popularize it by serving it to dinner guests during his presidency. There survives, however, a recipe for macaroni in Jefferson’s own hand:

6 eggs. yolks & whites.
2 wine glasses of milk
2 lb of flour
a little salt
work them together without water, and very well.
roll it then with a roller to a paper thickness
cut it into small pieces which roll again with the hand into long slips, & then cut them to a proper length.
put them into warm water a quarter of an hour.
drain them.
dress them as maccaroni.
but if they are intended for soups they are to be put in the soup & not into warm water

One diner at the White House, Rev. Manasseh Cutler, a member of the United States House of Representatives. from Ohio, wrote about his experience with it in 1802:

“Dined at the President’s – … Dinner not as elegant as when we dined before. [Among other dishes] a pie called macaroni, which appeared to be a rich crust filled with the strillions of onions, or shallots, which I took it to be, tasted very strong, and not agreeable. Mr. Lewis told me there were none in it; it was an Italian dish, and what appeared like onions was made of flour and butter, with a particularly strong liquor mixed with them.”

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

Beer In Ads #2837: Americans Are Going To Eat Better .. Feel Better .. Look Better

November 27, 2018 By Jay Brooks Leave a Comment


Tuesday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1945. This World War 2 ad features a laboratory with a view overlooking the Anheuser-Busch brewery far below, meaning this is one seriously tall ivory tower. But this one seems to be an overview, or summation, of several of their previous ads about all the research they carry out to improve their beer, with lots of side benefits to general health and, of course, the war effort.

Bud-1945-eat-better

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

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