Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (32 page)

No one knew when rationing would end, but Elise and her nephew Fred C. decided that, scarcities be damned, it was time to get busy. Job one: Replace the brewery’s nearly prehistoric 700,000-barrel capacity. In March 1946, company officers broke ground on a new stockhouse, phase one of a grand plan to rebuild the plant from the ground up.

Having launched that effort, Elise stepped down as president. She was in her late sixties and in poor health. Her side of the family held the majority interest and she insisted on passing the post to her untrained, uninterested, unkempt son Harry John, Jr., known to all as Buddy.

Her reasons had less to do with the brewery than with Buddy himself. Like all of the Millers, a devoutly religious family, he practiced Catholicism. But during his years as a student at the University of Notre Dame, he had fallen under the spell of a priest who promoted an extreme, mystical version of the religion. By the time he graduated in 1941, Buddy had become convinced that his wealth, which was considerable, stood between him and salvation. He moved to a farm outside Milwaukee, but continued to visit his mystical mentor at Notre Dame. In the mid-1940s, he began a lifelong campaign to hand over his fortune, which then amounted to $2.5 million (about $20 million in today’s dollars), to Catholic charities, monasteries, and convents. Elise was none too pleased about the plan, but became nearly apoplectic when she realized that he intended to scatter his Miller stock, too, which amounted to a quarter share of the brewery.

Work, she decided, would set him free of what she regarded as an irresponsible-bordering-on-insane project. She installed Buddy in the president’s post. But Elise Miller John was no fool: She gave her son exactly one year to prove himself. If he failed, she warned, the job would go to his cousin, Fred C. Miller.

Buddy showed up at the office and attended board meetings, but he spent most of his time trying to separate himself from his assets. He emerged from that project on occasion in order to join his father, Harry Senior, Elise’s estranged husband, in an attempt to sell the brewery. Father and son kept their intentions secret until Harry Senior was discovered escorting executives from other breweries on guided tours through the plant.

Fred C. chastised his uncle and scrambled to assure his employees that the company was not for sale. And sighed with relief when, in May 1947, his aunt Elise kept her word. Buddy was out. Fred C. was in.

The second time, Elise made a wise choice. Her nephew was born to lead. He’d played three seasons of football under Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, serving as team captain and being named All-American (tackle) not once but twice. Fred had graduated cum laude in 1929, and returned to Milwaukee to run his parents’ sprawling lumber and real-estate interests. He was a big man—six feet tall—with big shoulders and an even bigger personality. He thrived on risk, danger, and Notre Dame football. Every week during football season in the 1940s and 1950s, he traveled to South Bend to serve as an assistant line coach to head coach Frank Leahy. Usually he flew, sometimes piloting the plane himself (by the early 1950s he’d survived three plane crashes).

One weekend he and a few friends headed for Philadelphia, where Notre Dame was to play Penn. Bad weather forced the plane down in Pittsburgh, so the group piled into a car, Fred navigating, another man driving. When the travelers discovered that the highway patrol had closed the road to Philadelphia, Fred hopped out of the car and shoved the barricade aside. The reluctant driver forged onward, but soon wearied of maneuvering around the stalled and snow-bound cars that clogged the road. He called it quits. “What do you mean we can’t get through,” Fred demanded. “Get out of there, I’ll drive.” He seized the wheel and plowed on, steering and veering his way through the maze of snow-covered mounds, rolling down the windows when fog clouded the windshield. His passengers froze and no doubt aged several years during the drive, but Miller got what he wanted: He arrived in time for mass and breakfast with the team.

As far as Miller was concerned, his appointment as president of Miller Brewing came not a minute too soon. His competitors were busy expanding into multiple breweries around the country—the next logical move in an industry where national markets had become the great prize each brewer sought. Multiple plants increased a brewer’s vat capacity, of course, but, more important, a second or third plant mitigated the costs associated with long-distance shipping. The Busch brothers, for example, had purchased fifty acres in Newark, where they planned to spend $20 million building a new, state-of-the-art brewery. Nothing said more about brewing’s future than this announcement; nothing did more to enable the industry’s largest beermaker to grow still larger.

Not surprisingly, those who could do so matched the maneuver. Perlstein and Pabst parried with the purchase of Hoffman Beverage in Newark. In June 1946, the first Pabst beer rolled off that line and onto grocery store shelves in the New York metropolitan area. The New Yorkers fought back: Rudy Schaefer spent $2 million enlarging his Brooklyn plant, and the Liebmann family, makers of Rheingold, purchased a local competitor’s 500,000-barrel facility.

Erwin Uihlein pondered the scene. Since war’s end, he had managed to push Schlitz Brewing into the number-one spot, a rare blow to Anheuser-Busch. He’d done so by expanding the brewery and spending millions on advertising. But if he wanted to stay on top, he had to keep moving, keep buying. In early 1949, Uihlein bought the old Ehret brewery in Brooklyn and spent $6 million modernizing the plant.

Fred Miller would not be left behind. Bulldozers and wrecking balls demolished large chunks of his grandfather’s nineteenth-century plant. Construction workers swarmed the newly cleared land and raised a brewhouse outfitted with three five-hundred-barrel vats, as well as a new bottling facility that could handle two million containers a day.

By the time the Miller family hosted Milwaukee dignitaries and press at the official dedication in July 1949, Fred had added a new warehouse, a second brewhouse, and a grain storage building. Gone were the dark brick, the turrets and castellation of his grandfather’s day. Gone the statue of Gambrinus, the Gothic windows and arched entryways. The new buildings loomed over the city’s western edge, a hulking, monolithic, anonymous mass of pale brick and blank facades, softened by rounded corners but not much else. Sleek. Streamlined. Modern.

The brewery exemplified the dynamic future that Miller and other beermakers saw before them. The top four—Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, Ballantine (an old Newark brewery reopened after repeal by two engineers), and Pabst—and those angling for a spot to dislodge them had expanded into a country flush with full employment, more than $100 billion Americans had socked away in savings during rationing, and a belief that war and depression were behind them. In 1948, Americans drank 86.9 million barrels of beer and their per capita consumption hit 18.5 gallons, the highest numbers since repeal. Surely a blissful era of nonstop growth and profits had arrived.

I
N ONE WAY IT HAD:
Between 1950 and 1960, the volume of American industry as a whole increased 54 percent. In the fifteen years after the war’s end, the gross national product rose 250 percent and per capita income a whopping 35 percent. Beer, however, would not keep pace. In 1949, beer sales dropped by more than a million barrels. In 1950 they plummeted another two million, and they slid again in 1951. Per capita consumption dropped to 16.8 gallons. For the rest of the decade, sales barely budged from the 84-million-barrel mark and per capita consumption drifted downward, falling below fifteen gallons in 1961. As the rest of New America roared into the future, brewing’s engine sputtered and stalled right out of the gate.

Thus began the era that many people now see as the age of corporate beer, during which, they argue, a handful of giants, Anheuser-Busch chief among them, elbowed their way into domination of the industry. A time when those same giants diluted their beer with cheap corn and rice, reducing once fine lagers to little more than yellow water. A time when, coupling that low-cost beer with millions spent on advertising to promote the swill, they systematically destroyed smaller beermakers who clung to honest traditions and pure barley malts.

The truth is more complex, and the era itself both short-lived and anomalous. The dynamics created by post-repeal laws and the switch to the home market favored brewers with deep pockets. Only they could afford the investment in multiple plants, the high-speed bottling and canning equipment, and the advertising campaigns in magazines and on television that allowed them to fully exploit a national market. But even the largest, healthiest beermakers struggled to make sense of a nation that had turned its back on beer.

One factor that haunted brewhouses large and small was demographics. The birth rate had plunged from twenty-eight births per thousand people in the 1920s to twenty-one in 1930 and a mere eighteen in 1936. In the 1950s, that demographic chicken came home to roost, as the number of Americans between the ages of twenty and forty—the prime beer-drinking ages—slid to historic lows.

Worse yet, those few adults turned their noses up at beer. They might have been willing to drink it during the war, when liquor was in short supply, but not any longer. Many drinkers celebrated the post-war return of spirits with martinis or the syrupy sweetness of Manhattans, Rob Roys, and Singapore Slings. Others had never given up their Prohibition-ingrained preference for sugary soft drinks. By 1960, consumption of spirits had risen by nearly a quarter of a gallon per capita, even as that of beer declined by nearly two gallons. Over the next decade, spirits consumption doubled but beer inched up a modest two gallons, thanks mostly to the first wave of baby boomers hitting the drinking age. But that jump in sales was too late for smaller, marginal players. During the 1950s, the environment for brewing was, in a word, brutal. If it is true that only the strongest survived, make no mistake: They earned their victories.

Beer suffered another blow as the diet craze of the 1920s and 1930s blossomed into full-blown mania in the fifties. Magazine editors stuffed their pages with weight-loss plans and publishers grew rich on mountains of diet books. The food industry crammed grocery shelves with low-calorie jams and peanut butters, frozen dinners and salad dressings. The easy-pour artificial sweetener Sucaryl adorned kitchen tables from coast to coast. Dieters dumped money and time into programs like Slenderella and TOPS (“Take Off Pounds Sensibly”). Beer had never lost its reputation as a fattening beverage favored by beefy men; the contest between dieting and beer was no contest at all.

But beer also fell victim to a national palate that, since the 1920s, had gravitated toward the sugary and the bland, both of which can be seen as hallmarks of a modernizing society. Historians mark the decade of the 1920s as the true beginning of the twentieth century. It was then that Americans shrugged off the values and ideas that had characterized the nineteenth century in favor of those that can be regarded as “modern.” Americans embraced a more casual attitude toward sex, to name one example. Thanks in part to the automobile, they expanded once small boundaries of sociability—islands, one historian has called them—and abandoned a local outlook in favor of a more national view. Advertising became more ubiquitous, and its content changed. Nineteenth-century advertising focused on the object itself and its qualities: This is fine soap. This is a well-made chair. But in the early twentieth century, advertising targeted not the object but the person buying it: This soap will make you beautiful. This mouthwash will make you popular. This car will enhance your virility.

One of the most important changes of the first half of the twentieth century was the way in which Americans associated modernity with convenience, most especially in food. Adults living in the 1920s remembered watching mothers and grandmothers spending hours preparing food—and they rejected that hard labor, which had devoured women’s energy, in favor of convenience: soups, vegetables, and fruits from cans; factory-made bread; store-bought mayonnaise. Washing machines. Detergents in boxes. These modern conveniences evoked a new age a universe away from the old days when women had worn skirts to their ankles and had hands scuffed by harsh soaps.

But the more processing that food endures, the more flavor it loses, so the generations born in the 1920s and 1930s grew up eating a blander diet than their parents had and a more limited one as well. It was also a sweeter diet, as processed foods tend to contain more added sugar than unprocessed. In the 1970s, Americans would rebel against soft, tasteless breads, “instant” coffee, and even corporate beer, but in the early and mid-twentieth century, the American palate favored the light, the bland, and the flavorless. Consider cigarettes: Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the percentage of rich, full-flavored Turkish leaf tobacco in cigarettes dropped from about 20 percent to less than 6 percent. Distillers diluted their liquors with neutral spirits in an effort to please customers on the hunt for a light liquor. Vodka, virtually unknown in the United States before the 1950s, became one of importer Heublein’s best sellers, thanks to the spirit’s lack of color and flavor.

But nothing exemplified Bland America like TV dinners and canned soups, instant coffee and packaged pudding, dehydrated potatoes and instant rice—all flew off grocery store shelves and into the nation’s kitchens. Americans liked it that way. They scorned homemade breads in favor of light-as-air, textureless Wonder Bread. When the kitchen at a posh Boston restaurant switched from fresh beans to frozen, customers raved about their flavor.

Beer? Too bitter. Too hoppy. Too flavorful.

Brewers struggled to adjust to these unexpected and confusing developments. Some gambled on new recipes. They had to if they wanted to please a bland-happy public. Back in the 1870s, Americans had demanded a less malty, less hoppy version of European lager, and brewmasters had accommodated their new countrymen’s tastes by developing a unique American version of Bohemian-style lagers. Now a new generation asked for—and received—an even less demanding version of American lager: a sexy, vibrant beer that went down as easily as instant mashed potatoes or pudding and never asked much of its recipient. The president of the Master Brewers Association of America urged his membership to brew “streamlined,” “modernized” beers with a pale color, “an agreeable, mild hop flavor,” and no “bitter aftertaste.” The president of the Wahl-Henius Institute, one of the nation’s leading beer schools, warned brewmasters to pay heed: They might prefer full-bodied, hoppy brews, but they weren’t the ones buying the beer. The public preferred “blandness,” and so blandness it must have.