Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (2 page)

O
VER THE NEXT FEW YEARS,
Phillip Best would lay the groundwork for what stood, fifty years later, as the largest brewery in the world. But in 1844, he was just one anonymous drop in a stream of humanity that poured into the United States in the midnineteenth century. A mere 600,000 immigrants landed during the 1830s, but starting in 1840, that trickle swelled like a creek in early spring: 1.7 million in the 1840s and another 2.6 million the following decade. Seventy-five percent were Irish and German (the rest hailed mostly from England and non-German northern Europe). Many of the Germans were cut from the same mold as the Bests: They arrived in possession of a bit of money and a craft that would earn them more. Most of the Irish, however, were impoverished peasants fleeing the famine that destroyed that sad island’s main source of food and, before it ended, killed a million people. The million or so who survived the trip across the Atlantic (many succumbed to the vomit, feces, and filth of steerage) were mostly peasants, uneducated, unskilled, and carrying nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

The Bests had emigrated from a village called Mettenheim, where a Marley-like chain of war and poverty, taxes and regulations, shackled their ambitions. In the early 1800s, warfare and political turmoil left German-speaking Europeans, whether Prussian, Bavarian, Rhenish, or Austrian, exhausted, disabled, or angry. Explosive population growth and bad harvests added deprivation and poverty to the mix. Tyrannical princes and dukes suppressed political expression and individual ambition. Phillip and his countrymen yearned for a “true” Germany, a people united under one government that granted its citizens basic freedoms. No one believed it would happen anytime soon. The chain’s grip tightened in the 1830s, when the price of coffee and tea plummeted, and customers abandoned beer for the intoxicating novelty of caffeine. Others embraced potato-based
schnaps,
a throat-burning, alcoholic jolt that was cheaper than beer. Hundreds of brewers emptied their vats, damped their fires, and shut their doors.

So it was that in the early 1840s, Jacob Best, Sr., and his sons decided that it was time to choose: German Europe with tyrants and oppression, or the United States, where angels blessed the ambitious? Sometime between 1840 and 1842, Phillip traveled to New York, intent on developing the contacts needed to export the Bests’ wine to the United States. He failed in that mission and returned home so the family could plot its next move. By early 1843, Jacob, Jr., and Frederick (known around town as Carl) had settled in Milwaukee and opened a small vinegar manufactory, a common side venture of vintners everywhere.

The success of that experiment convinced them that their future lay in America. Carl retraced his steps, helped sell the Bests’ Mettenheim properties, and by mid-1844 was on his way back to Milwaukee with the rest of the family in tow.

They landed in New York and boarded steamboats that chugged up the Hudson River to the Erie Canal. For several days the travelers glided along its waterway, the scenery dominated by tidy farms and grain mills. At Buffalo, they trooped to the harbor, there to board one of the dozens of ferries that plied the Great Lakes between New York and the West—across Lake Erie, up the sliver of water that separated eastern Michigan from the jagged southern tip of Ontario, up Lake Huron, and down Lake Michigan to journey’s end, Milwaukee.

The nation where the Bests made their new home stretched from the Atlantic seaboard fifteen hundred miles to the Mississippi, from there hundreds more miles to the Rocky Mountains, and on to the border of unclaimed territory that included what are today Washington and Oregon. Within a few years of the Bests’ arrival, Americans would lay claim to that contested terrain and to another vast expanse that included what would become California and Texas.

In Mettenheim, the land’s potential might have remained cocooned in a web of restraints, dominated by lords and princes and worked by peasants burdened by illiteracy, heavy taxes, and impossible rents. Not so in the United States. Compared to people in the rest of the world, white Americans enjoyed extraordinary personal liberty and a short history: At the time Phillip commissioned his vat, the Revolution was still living memory for the oldest Americans. The nation was young in more ways than one: In 1830, to pick one year, about a third of the nation’s twelve million people were under the age of ten, and the median age was seventeen. The federal government did little more than manage the public lands and deliver the mail. Taxes were few, land was abundant and cheap, and the political system was stable. Several million blackskinned humans endured the agony of the “peculiar institution,” but already the paradox of slavery in the midst of such freedom had roused the forces that would eradicate that shame.

Americans even derived inspiration from the obstacles they faced: Overland travel over such enormous distances destroyed farmers’ and merchants’ hopes of profit; and, youthful energy and a parade of immigrants notwithstanding, there weren’t enough people to do the nation’s work. New Yorkers devoted the first half of the 1820s to constructing one grand solution to the transportation problem: the 350-mile Erie Canal, which linked New York City’s harbors, the Hudson River, and the Great Lakes. In one swoop, the canal lopped weeks off the journey from east to west and dollars off the cost. That experiment’s success launched canal mania: Between 1825 and 1840, Americans built three thousand miles of waterways, including one that ran from Chicago to the Illinois River and so connected that city—and thus Milwaukee—to the Mississippi. Canals proved a short-lived wonder, as other investors plowed their money into iron rails and steam locomotives. By 1840, three thousand miles of rails connected city and canal, canal and hinterland, hinterland and harbor. Over the next decade, Americans laid another six thousand miles of rail, and, in 1845, began stringing telegraph wire alongside the tracks.

Immigrants provided much of the labor for laying the rails and digging the canals, disseminating their ambitions and energy deep into the frontier, but Americans also invented their way out of the labor shortage, unencumbered by the guild and apprentice systems that hindered innovation in Europe. Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, to name just one example, allowed one farmer to do the work of many hands. Talented artisans and tinkerers scattered along the eastern seaboard designed machines that replaced skilled craftsmen, such as automated devices that cut gunstocks or ax handles and so reduced the time and money needed to manufacture goods. In 1800, a New England clockmaker built perhaps a half dozen clocks in a year: fifty years later, a single factory turned out 150,000 clocks a year and at a price nearly any family could afford.

A man could make a fortune on Monday and lose it all by Friday. No matter. The era’s byword—progress—rolled off every tongue. There was room for everyone and every idea. True, the pace of industrial change ground slow and uneven: In densely populated and increasingly urban Massachusetts, young women and immigrants operated clattering machinery that wove millions of yards of fabric each year, while in Milwaukee, A. J. Langworthy could not lay hands on enough metal for one brewing vat and Phillip Best employed a horse to grind his malt. But by midcentury, Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world.

Critics complain about its uneven distribution—the wealthy few possessed an oversized chunk of the bounty—but no one could deny that in the United States, even a common laborer ate meat every day and owned a change of clothes, two facts that left his European counterpart gaping in awe. The young men and women who tended machines and shops—unmarried and still unfettered by responsibility—invested their meager wages in fine caps and jaunty jackets, beribboned bonnets and factory-made dresses. Immigrants watched and yearned as Americans in the burgeoning middle class devoted their cash to comfort: Oilcloth floor coverings gave way to rich woolen carpets; iron stoves replaced pots hung over open flame. Families scrabbling for a living on the frontier crowded into country stores to trade corn and homemade whiskey for hair ribbons and top hats, tea sets and button boots. Singer’s sewing machine allowed women to transform machine-made fabrics into dresses and shirts. All of it—the hats and shoes, John Deere’s plows and Samuel Colt’s revolvers, factory-made clocks and soaps, wallpaper and candles—provided pleasure twice: first in the buying and then in the using.

No surprise, émigré letters to family back home praised an otherwise unimaginable paradise. “[O]ne cannot describe how good it is in America,” reported one awestruck transplant. “In America one knows nothing about taxes. Here one does not need to worry about beggars as we do in Germany. Here a man works for himself. Here the one is equal to the other. Here no one takes off his hat to another. We no longer long for Germany.” “Every day,” he added, “we thank the dear God that he has brought us . . . out of slavery into Paradise,” a sweet fate he hoped to share with the millions still suffering, still living back in Germany “as if under lions and dragons, fearing every moment to be devoured by them.” Another new arrival spoke for thousands when he wrote, “We sing: ‘Long live the United States of America.’”

The Bests’ new home provided inspiration aplenty. Milwaukee sat out in the frontier in what was still a territory rather than a state, but in the decade since the town had been founded, the American passion for converting land into profit had transformed a moribund trading post of a few hundred into a lively metropolis, vibrant testimony to the infinite possibility of America in the 1840s.

To the north and west of the family’s Chestnut Street property lay a thick forest that stretched for miles. Concealed beneath the leafy mass, crude wagon tracks led away from the town and into the western hinterland, where dwindling forest eventually gave way to rolling hills and then the vast grassy sweep of the Iowa Territory, acres of soil that could be planted with barley. To the south and east lay the town itself, visible from atop the Chestnut Street ridge as a mosaic of roofs, chimneys, and steeples, their textures and colors interlaced with a mortar of muddy streets that teemed with people, horses, and wagons. “A fellow . . . can hardly get along the sidewalk,” grumbled one visiting farmer. “[E]very kind of Mechanism is a going on in this place from street hawking to Manufacturing steam Engines and every kind of citizens [sic] from the rude Norwegian to the polished Italian.”

Carpenters, metalworkers, and bricklayers hustled from one job to another, busy converting the city’s vacant lots into hotels, houses, law offices, workshops, and taverns. Farmers, shoppers, and newly arrived émigrés thronged the plank walkways that bordered muddy thoroughfares. Lawyers bustled in and out of the courthouse, signing contracts and settling land claims. Carts laden with produce, building supplies, and grain rumbled through the streets. A clatter of languages and dialects filled the air: German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, and Welsh; the New Englander’s flat, clipped twang; the southerner’s softer drawl.

Thanks to its location on the shore of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee was one of the most accessible of the nation’s far western settlements. In the 1840s, it served as a gateway through which migrants passed on their way to the vast stretch of rich soil in the territories beyond, or to find work in the Wisconsin Territory’s booming mining and timber industries. Every day, steamers spewing gritty clouds of black smoke and cinder chips belched human cargo onto the wharves.

The lake itself could not be seen from the Chestnut ridge, thanks to the sharp ascent of the Milwaukee’s eastern bank. But when Phillip climbed the steep bluff that hugged the lake’s edge, he marveled at the vast sheet of rippling gray silk that stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there, jagged tripods of canvas-draped uprights sliced the horizon. Closer at hand, a jumble of masts cluttered the harbor. Bundles of wheat and timber dangled from the slender arms of cranes, then disappeared into waiting hulls. Grunting stevedores trundled carts filled with the multifarious tools needed to convert a wilderness of river and forest into a respectable example of American civilization: plowshares, iron plates, and saddles; boots, stationery, and shawls; casks filled with raisins, nuts, and oils; crates containing bottles of wine from France and porter and stout from England; dictionaries and primers; gloves, yarn, and fabric.

“The public houses and streets are filled with new comers and our old citizens are almost strangers in their own town,” marveled the editor of one of the city’s newspapers. “One hundred persons, chiefly German, landed here yesterday,” another resident wrote to his brother during the summer of 1842. And more were on the way: In the early 1840s, Germans poured into the territory. Some came after reading a pamphlet published in 1841 by a German-speaking visitor who praised the climate, soil, and opportunity. Those first settlers in turn wrote laudatory letters of their own back home, which fueled still more migration to Wisconsin. By the time the Bests arrived, about one-third of the town’s population spoke German.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
of 1844, with Langworthy’s copper vat installed, Phillip and the two Jacobs, father and son, began brewing, likely with recipes and yeast carried with them to their new home. They had been winemakers back in Germany, but Americans drank almost no wine and so the United States had no tradition of viniculture. Beer would provide the substance of their American dream.

They followed the practices of most German brewers of that time, relying on strong backs and shoulders to brew by hand rather than machine. At the new brewery, an L-shaped, one-story brick structure that also served as the family’s residence, they trundled wheelbarrows of grain, either purchased in town from a farmer at market or ordered from Buffalo, into the shop and dumped it into a capacious wooden steeping vat to soak for a day or two. Then they spread the sodden grain on the floor and waited for the kernels to sprout. The acrospire, the quarter-inch sprout that emerged from the base of each kernel, contained the enzymes (diastase) that would convert barley’s starch into sugar. Germination typically required two or three days, depending on the humidity and the age and quality of the grain. Phillip kept close watch on the pile, stirring and tossing it regularly to add new oxygen and ensure that all the heads sprouted at more or less the same time. A fruity aroma filled the brewhouse (much like the odor of rotten apples, critics complained) as nature conducted the business of turning barley into malt.