Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (16 page)

Then how, Cox asked, could Miller be sure that his brewmaster was making Budweiser and not some other kind of beer? Because, the brewer replied, he had obtained information on the subject from Schwarz, the “greatest authority in the brewing business in America.”

So Miller agreed that there was such a thing as the Budweiser process? “I am not quite sure as to that,” responded an exasperated and perhaps exhausted Miller. “I am no brewer.” He wanted to use the name Budweiser, and he had sent away for information, and he had told his brewmaster to make the beer, and as far as he, Ernest Miller, was concerned, that was that.

But why Budweiser?, Cox persisted. Why not some other name? Had Miller’s clientele demanded a Budweiser beer? Did Miller know that Budweiser was popular with a “better class” of customers? “No sir,” Miller responded. “Our customers asked for something different and we got it up.” So the name is “just a matter of accident—is that what you mean to say?” queried Cox, who must have been weak-kneed from astonishment. “That is pretty near it, yes sir,” replied Miller.

This was too much even for the unflappable Cox. “You did not know that the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association were at the time you got up your beer selling millions of bottles of Budweiser annually? You didn’t know that?” Miller responded with another verbal shrug: “Once in a while we heard of it up in this section, but it is not sold much.” “I never traveled much down” toward Missouri, he explained. “I was only once in my life in that section of the country, and up in our section there was very little of Anheuser-Busch beer.”

What about Chicago, Cox inquired. Surely Miller had seen or heard of Budweiser in a city where the Millers had sold beer for decades. “I know,” insisted Miller, “it has only been sold there for a few years in medium quantities, and before that but very little.” And, he added, as if to seal the point, he had laid eyes on a Budweiser bottle but one time. Miller Brewing had bought out the Anheuser-Busch agency in Duluth, including the agent’s stock of Bud. Miller had taken a bottle back to Milwaukee and shipped it off for analysis, he explained in a statement that effectively undermined most of his previous testimony.

The addlepated Milwaukee David would never slay the selfassured St. Louis Goliath. “Miller Bros. are really of very little consequence now,” Nagel wrote to Rowland Cox in late 1896. “They never were formidable competitors.” He concluded, “As to the question, whether or not the case shall be finally pressed, we feel clear that really the main purpose of the suit has been accomplished; as competitors Miller Bros. sink into nothingness.”

Nagel overstated the case, but on October 17, 1898, a judge ordered Fred Miller Brewing Company to stop using the name Budweiser. A century later, Miller Brewing would stand as Anheuser-Busch’s most formidable competitor, but as far as Adolphus Busch and his crew were concerned in the 1890s, the enemy possessed all the menace of a housefly. Most interesting is what the case reveals about Adolphus Busch’s understanding of the essence of entrepreneurial greatness. The threat in this case was not the Miller brothers’ prowess—Busch’s legal fees surely cost more than whatever piddling market share the Millers might have managed to steal—but the damage that a bottle of inferior Miller Budweiser might inflict on the reputation of Anheuser-Busch beer, which was among the finest in the world. The power and strength of the world’s second-largest brewer, Adolphus Busch understood, lay not in the number of brewvats or refrigerated rail cars he owned, but in the public’s perception of his beer. Only that mattered; only that guaranteed future prosperity.

B
Y THE EARLY
1890s, the brewing industry had sorted itself into three tiers: hundreds of tiny local independents; dozens of medium-sized American- or British-owned corporations, almost none of which would survive Prohibition; and a handful of family-owned behemoths: the world’s three largest breweries, Pabst, Anheuser-Busch, and Schlitz, and slightly smaller but still huge giants like Ruppert, the Schaefers, and Ehert in the urban Northeast.

Frederick Pabst rested secure in his position as the largest beermaker in the world. He had much to show for a good life’s work. “We have done & are doing a good deal of Building,” he wrote to Charles Best in early 1891, “but we are in Shape now to sell 1,200,000 Bbls by only putting in 2 more kettles in the Brew House, which will be done this fall.” “Our Sales this year will
very likely
reach 800,000 Bbls.,”he added, a comment that no doubt provoked a shudder of apoplexy in Best, who would have calculated immediately the gap between capacity and actual sales. As it turned out, Pabst counted his barrels before they sold. “We will not quite reach the 800,000 Bbls,”he told Best in December, “but will get within about 10,000 Bbls of it . . . ” He blamed labor issues—striking brewery workers were boycotting Pabst-owned saloons. But the missed sales goal mattered less than the other, more important figure in the Pabst ledger books: “We will lead Busch over 100,000 Bbls.”

The king of brewers ruled a brewhouse that dwarfed in every way the one he had first entered as a young man years earlier. Every remnant of Phillip Best’s old brewery had vanished, replaced by a gargantuan fermentation factory where capital and labor paid homage to the gods of mechanization and automation, mass production and efficiency.

In the powerhouse stood fire-eating, smoke-breathing steam engines whose compressors, pulleys, and pistons harnessed more than a thousand horsepower. Their flywheels were sixteen feet in diameter, with three-foot-wide shaft belts and pulleys ten feet in diameter. The engines drove five, six, even seven thousand feet of shafting that coursed from floor to floor and building to building and powered the machinery that transformed barley into beer.

Mechanized hoists lifted the grain from street level to the upper reaches of three- and four-story elevators—massive upright brick rectangles that warehoused a quarter million bushels. Inside, conveyor belts transported it to machines whose gears, paddles, disks, and levers graded, separated, and ground the kernels. More belts and hoists whisked the barley from elevators to eight- and nine-story malthouses, where whirring mechanical arms washed and rinsed it, preparing it for germination. Atomizers sprayed jets of water over the golden heaps. Turning machines chugged along an endless loop of iron track: rectangular frames armed with giant screws whose threaded shafts burrowed into piles of grain, tossing and lifting the damp heaps, silent warriors that replaced the labor of dozens of men grown old before their time from the strain.

Conveyors fed the grain into the top floor of four-story kilns. Pumps spewed hot air that gently roasted it, and when it had partially dried, a solitary man cranked a handle fastened on the wall outside the drying room. Magic! The seemingly solid floor separated into ten-inch slats that rotated 90 degrees and dumped their loads onto a similar floor below, where more dry air flowed over the freshly turned grain. Massive grinding wheels—as large as old Phillip Best’s first brewhouse—crushed the malt to a granular powder. Then to the brewhouse, a shrine of glass and light, gleaming copper and steel. Six or eight burnished brew kettles dominated the space, while another half dozen mash tubs stood sentry nearby. Ornate stair rails and balustrades guarded walkways that ran overhead and alongside the vats, all of it illuminated by enormous skylights and stained-glass windows.

As the wort simmered and the paddles, gears, and flywheels whirred, the temple’s priests—university-trained chemists imported from Europe—worshipped at the altar of science. Their incantations produced pure yeasts that ensured the beer’s stability or guaranteed a specific color or body. In the fermentation cellars, flywheels and pumps, gears and belts, transformed four- and five-story brick caverns into refrigerators fit for giants. This, the first successful application of mechanical refrigeration, freed brewers from the vagaries of weather and hulking mounds of expensive ice. It freed them, too, from the dank brick-and-flagstone caves that now lay empty save for bats and rats.

The crude “bottling” line of the 1870s—a handful of employees siphoning beer from vats into bottles—had been replaced by bottle-washing and capping machines, rackers and pasteurizers, siphon fillers and labelers, all of them automated. By the 1890s, bottles rattled through the washers’ ninety-six spindles at a rate of 75,000 bottles an hour per spindle; Pabst needed nine hundred employees just to monitor the bottling operation, a far cry from the two hundred workers employed plant-wide twenty years earlier. Nine hundred barrels of beer flowed into the packaging department each day, and marched back out as orderly rows of bottled beer.

A century later, a new generation of beer enthusiasts would scorn “factory beer,” but late-nineteenth-century Americans thrilled to the sights and sounds of the massive hulks that populated their landscape, whether steel mills, textile factories, or breweries, and found poetry in crankshafts and piston rods, cylinders and flywheels. Pabst and Schandein identified themselves not as brewers but as “manufacturers of lager beer.” They and other beermakers advertised with “show cards,” cardboard plaques that contained finely detailed images of their grand plants. These men prided themselves as much on the mode of making beer as on the beer itself. Their factories stood as monuments to their business acumen and to an era of unprecedented mechanical progress. True, many then (and now) also criticized the power and scope of the “machine,” as if all the new factory tools, large or small, were appendages on the body of a sentient being intent on seizing control of humanity. But steel rails made it possible for families to migrate safely and quickly to cheaper western land, and machine-made clothes eased the housewife’s burden.

The vast army of labor that toiled long days tending furnaces, lathes, and looms often resisted the factory’s brutal regimen, lashing out at the growing power of white-collared owners and managers who toiled in clean, quiet offices. Millions of workers struck in the 1880s as employer and employee wrangled over the terms of engagement in the new economy. Brewery workers were among the highest-paid industrial employees in the country, but that did not stop them from calling strikes and boycotts, less over money than over their demands for union recognition and their brutally long working hours—as much as fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. As both sides knew, beermaking was a continuous process, and owners often granted concessions in order to keep the vats full. By the turn of the century, most brewery employees were working shorter hours and for more money than they had two decades earlier.

B
UT THE
“R
ACKET
,” as Pabst called it, required to build the monument had taken its toll. By the early 1890s, the empire-builders were tired. The life was hard, the hours long. Pabst had managed much of the burden of the hectic 1880s on his own, because Emil Schandein’s health, never good, had deteriorated markedly in that decade, thanks in part to the scandal that ravaged his family.

During an 1874 trip to Germany, Emil and wife Lisette, daughter of brewery founder Phillip Best, met a sixteen-year-old named Jacob Heyl and invited him to return to Milwaukee with them. In 1886, Heyl married the Schandeins’ oldest daughter, Louise, but Milwaukee gossips whispered that the union only provided a front for the affair between Mrs. Schandein and the young man.

In 1888, father and daughter died, both succumbing, perhaps, to broken hearts. Emil passed away while traveling in Europe and upon hearing the news, Lisette and Heyl set off across the Atlantic, ostensibly to arrange for the shipment of Emil’s remains to the United States. They stayed six months. When the pair returned to Milwaukee, Lisette married Heyl off to her oldest living daughter, all but abandoned her other two children, and installed the newlyweds in her sprawling Grand Avenue mansion.

The ménage shocked Frederick Pabst and his family, but he and they had no choice but to endure the embarrassment: Emil’s death elevated Lisette to company vice-president, and Heyl owned more shares of company stock than either Gustav or Fred Junior. “I often think,” Frederick’s wife, Maria, wrote in her creaky English to Lisette’s daughter Ella, that Heyl, “the miserable one, should live in fear of your father’s shadow in the house from which he pushes you children, like from the heart of your mother.”

No doubt Frederick Pabst uttered a silent prayer of thanks that he had married a “good” Best. Maria; her father, Phillip; and her uncle and company secretary, Charles, had proved the few good seeds in a family otherwise gone very bad. Two of Charles’s brothers were in prison; Lisette orchestrated not one but two sham marriages. Other Bests died young at their own hands. Henry Best, Phillip’s only son, had long since taken his company shares and retired to a life of leisured wealth in Germany. Those familiar with the Best family history were not surprised when, less than a year after Schandein’s death, Pabst persuaded the board of directors to abandon “Phillip Best Brewing Company” in favor of “Pabst Brewing Company.”

Nor was Frederick Pabst about to let his own sons go awry. Gustav Pabst and his brother, Frederick Junior, had been prodded and pulled into the brewing life by a father who tempered discipline with trust and love. On Christmas Eve 1888, Frederick Senior gave Gustav, then twenty-two, $50,000 of company stock. “Now my dear Boy,” he wrote in the letter that accompanied the gift, “you can be proud to be a Stockholder of the Ph. Best Brewing Co., and I hope you will use all your energy, to farther [
sic
] the interest, and promote the standing of the Company for which I have spend [sic] the best part of my life and whose Reputation
is
, as far as I know without Reproach. I wish you all Succes [
sic
] imaginable,
and sincerely
hope, that our feeling towards each other, and our Confidence
in
each other, will remain in the Future as they have been in the past . . . . [M]y dear Boy be reassured, and
never forget
that your Parents are
allways
[sic] your best Friends in time of Need or Trouble and never hesitate to come to us for advise [sic] or Consolation . . . . as ever your loving Papa.” Pabst tested his sons’ ability to “promote the standing of the Company” with more than just stock. In the spring of 1890, he considered canceling a planned trip to Germany in order to oversee a necessary overhaul of the malthouse and extensive remodeling at two of his downtown Milwaukee properties, the St. Charles Hotel and the Opera House. Instead, the Captain seized the opportunity to test his sons.