Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (33 page)

Some critics denounced what a business reporter in 1952 described as “the dethronement of the old-time brewmaster,” but they missed the point: For nearly a century, American brewers had been accommodating the demands of the public’s palate. They’d done so in the 1860s and 1870s. Now a new generation of brewmasters heeded the insights gleaned from sophisticated consumer research that showed that the average American beer drinker disliked overtly malty or hoppy beers. The importance of the style of American beer at mid-century is that it was a response to demand.

Consider events that unfolded at Renner Brewing in Youngstown, Ohio, where sales had drifted downward from the moment of repeal. The company survived its first post-repeal decade largely because of the demand induced by war. But when peace returned, red ink again nudged black out of the company’s ledgers. In 1949, the board of directors hired new management and created a new beer, but to no avail. Renner’s executives turned to a market research firm for help. Its surveys revealed that people rejected Renner lager because it was “too bitter and strong.” Out went the old and in came a light brew, along with a new sales pitch and slogan. Renner’s sales soared.

Much the same thing happened at Fort Pitt Brewing in suburban Pittsburgh. In early 1952, that company responded to the demand for light lagers by introducing Fort Pitt Pilsener, a “pale, dry, less filling” beer. So, too, at Red Top Brewing in Cincinnati, where executives ordered their brewmaster to dump his old recipe in favor of an “extra-dry” light lager. The new beer went on the market in 1951 and sales rose 100,000 barrels over the previous year.

Lighter beer saved Ruppert Brewing. The company had drifted aimlessly since the death of Jake Ruppert in 1939. George Ruppert, Jake’s brother, stuck with dark, heavy beer sold mostly in barrels for the draft market. Sales plunged. When George died in 1948, the new management dumped the old brew and the emphasis on tap beer in favor of a light lager sold in bottles and cans. “The full flavor remains but the bulk is gone,” announced the company’s advertisements. Knickerbocker, “sparkling-clear” and “extra light,” was a “modern, low-calorie beer that’s far less ‘filling’ than beer of the past.” Ruppert would never regain its place at the top of the heap: During its years of drift, it had suffered fatal wounds at the hands of Anheuser-Busch and Pabst. Still, the decision to alter the beer in order to accommodate changing tastes staved off the inevitable and kept the company alive for another fifteen years.

Fred Miller was ahead of the game: He didn’t need to tinker with his recipe. Grandfather Frederick J. Miller had brewed a modern beer before Americans knew that they wanted one. Miller High Life, the “Champagne of Bottle Beer,” was light, pale, and dry. Very light. Very pale. Very dry. A beer best suited, sneered one competitor, for “women and beginners.” Fred C. knew better. High Life, he reckoned, was the perfect beer for a new, modern America, just as his sleek brewery and its highspeed, high-tech equipment was the right design for the times. Together the beer and the brewery would propel his company into the industry’s top rank.

So would the exquisitely fine-tuned business acumen that seemed to be imprinted in Miller’s DNA. Consider the way he averted what might have been a disaster of bad timing: The new brewery with its capacity of three million barrels had gone online in late 1948, the worst possible time of year in an industry where the average brewer sold about 80 percent of his beer during warm-weather months. Miller knew he had to sell beer and sell it now, not later, so he did what few of his competitors had ever tried: He unleashed a new sales campaign in the dead of winter. It paid off, and Miller Brewing could boast that it sold half its beer in what had been the “off season.” One reason was advertising, about $7 million worth a year (a breathtaking $54 million today), far more than most brewers spent. But the way he advertised the beer made more difference than the money he spent doing it. Yes, he geared some of his ads toward men, sponsoring sporting events on radio and television. But the family had long touted Miller High Life as the “Champagne of Bottle Beer,” so Miller carried that idea directly to a group of people most brewers overlooked: women. He ran full-page color ads in women’s magazines like
McCall’s
and
Vogue.
He hired Brooks Stevens, one of the most important industrial designers in the country, to create in-store displays aimed specifically at the women who spent their family’s food dollars. Miller even sold his beer in six-ounce splits, a dainty package aimed at women’s appetites.

Everything Miller touched turned to profit. In the space of just five years, the brewery’s sales soared 275 percent in an industry whose overall increase amounted to 2 percent in a good year. By 1951, he’d spent $25 million on his new brewery; he was selling High Life in all forty-eight states and Hawaii; and he’d pushed Miller Brewing into the number-eight spot. In late 1952, his employees bunged their three-millionth barrel of the year, a new company record and enough to push it from sixth place to fifth nationwide behind Schlitz, A-B, Pabst, Ballantine, and Schaefer.

But that was not enough for Fred Miller. Barrel three million had no sooner been packed off for sale than he announced another $20 million worth of expansion. “Our goal,” he told reporters, “is to be the largest producer of the best beer.”

He faced a steep climb. Impressive as those three million barrels were, they amounted to only half the annual output across town at Schlitz or down in St. Louis at Anheuser-Busch. Still, for a guy who’d been number twenty just a few years back, he was doing fine. And no, he told reporters and employees who asked, he did not plan to buy or build outside of Milwaukee. That likely struck many observers as an odd decision. After all, Milwaukee almost seemed too small for a man of such oversized ambition and energy. But Miller insisted: One plant had been good enough for his grandfather, and it was good enough for him. He would stay right where he was.

Among the major players, he was alone in that decision. In the early 1950s, it had become clear to ambitious brewers that a stronghold in the eastern United States was not enough to guarantee brewing supremacy. The future of New America lay in the other direction, in the golden West in general and in California in particular.

In the fifteen years after the war, a combination of Cold War politics and warm sunshine enriched California to the tune of millions of people—five million new residents between 1950 and 1960—and billions of dollars. Gigantic aircraft factories sprawled out into the desert, along with thousands of new housing and shopping developments, all of it embroidered with ribbons of interstate and freeway. Magazines and newspapers raved about the California lifestyle with its backyard swimming pools (40 percent of the nation’s total), lush lawns, and year-round sunshine. The Dodgers and Giants exchanged creaky, bleak New York for youthful California, and in the space of a year,
The Mickey Mouse Club,
a California production populated by wholesome California kids, forced the New York-based
Howdy Doody Show
out of its Monday-through-Friday slot. A reporter for
Life
magazine was not far off the mark when he predicted that California would “radically influence the pattern of life” in post-war America.

Twenty years later, California would “radically influence” American beer culture, but in those first years after the war, Big Brewing knew only that the Golden State was the place to be. In 1948, just three years after his Newark purchase, Harris Perlstein negotiated to buy the 600,000-barrel Los Angeles Brewing Company. A few months later Tivoli Brewing of Detroit bought Aztec of San Diego, a purchase that promised to push tiny Tivoli, ranked thirty-fourth, up into the top fifteen. In the summer of 1952, Erwin Uihlein announced a California acquisition of his own: thirty-five acres in the rapidly growing Van Nuys section of the San Fernando Valley not far from Los Angeles.

Uihlein’s news release came just days after a similar bulletin out of Anheuser-Busch headquarters in St. Louis: Gus Busch had purchased sixty-five acres in Van Nuys; there he would spend $15 million to build a 750,000-barrel brewery.

It was the shrewd move of a man with Busch blood in his veins. For the last five years, he and Anheuser-Busch had suffered the ignominy of sitting in second place, having been ousted from first by the Uihleins. Busch was determined to regain the throne. No one doubted that he would succeed. “Being second,” he once said, “isn’t worth anything.”

August A. Busch, Jr., began working at the brewery in 1922 and was promoted to general superintendent in 1924, when he was just twenty-five years old. After his father’s suicide in 1934, he became second vice-president and the brewery’s general manager. He’d been the number-one man since the death of older brother Adolphus III in August 1946.

Gus was every bit as flamboyant as his grandfather Adolphus, perhaps even more so. Like Adolphus, he oozed self-confidence. He was any situation’s center of attention, just as Adolphus had been, and exuded the same irresistible charisma. There, perhaps, the comparisons peter out. Gus, an “almost defiantly uninhibited” man, was a bit more crude, a bit more blunt than Adolphus. He was less educated than his multilingual grandfather, but he compensated for a lack of book learning with a universe-worth of street smarts that were unexpected in a man born into unbridled wealth.

“He rarely talks in a normal voice,” a reporter once observed. He “sounds more like a hoarse lion” and “lopes in a half-walk, halftrot, arms pumping like a sprinter,” all the while shouting orders to the flunkies racing to keep up with their full-speed-ahead boss. He indulged in frequent fits of rage, especially when encountering fools, a species he did not suffer gladly—or, for that matter, at all. In short, Gus was the right Busch for the moment. If he couldn’t bring Anheuser-Busch out of its slump, no one could.

In 1953, Gus regained the number-one slot during a lengthy brewery strike that shut down his Milwaukee competitors. For decades, brewing had been one of the most unionized of American industries, and prior to World War II, relations between employers and employees had been friendlier than most, perhaps because labor and management shared the same burden of persecution by a dark force that was always trying to put the brewer out of business and the worker out of his job. But in the decade after the end of the war, union workers nationwide, sniffing the opportunities of a go-go economy, embraced a new militancy that resulted in tens of thousands of strikes and affected nearly every industry. Brewery workers and owners squared off repeatedly in contests over working conditions and pay scales.

Most walkouts ended within a week or two, but the Milwaukee strike that began in the spring of 1953 dragged on for seventy-six days. All told, the city’s residents lost $100 million in income and the breweries three million barrels of beer during the peak selling season. Pabst and Schlitz both owned other plants and could keep making beer. Fred Miller could not, and for the first time, brewing’s Golden Boy conceded that his one-brewery, one-city strategy might be a mistake. He put plans for another $20 million expansion at State Street on hold and told reporters that he was thinking of spending the money on a new facility elsewhere.

When the picketers returned to work, Miller and Milwaukee’s other major brewers, Schlitz and Pabst, raised their prices in an attempt to recapture lost profits. Down in St. Louis, Gus Busch had escaped the labor bloodbath, but he joined them in raising prices anyway, presumably because he thought he could get away with it.

Customers balked. No one knew why. Perhaps it was because brewers had done such a good job of accommodating the nation’s taste buds. One pale, light lager tasted much like another, so why pay more? Whatever the reason, for the first time since repeal, consumers deserted the premiums for cheaper regional brands like Falstaff and Hamm’s. Gus Busch missed the point and raised his prices again in 1954. Disaster ensued: Anheuser-Busch sales plunged 15 percent, and A-B handed the number-one slot back to Schlitz. Gus apologized to stockholders, calling it the “worst mistake” he’d ever made. Then he took off on a cross-country tour, visiting every wholesaler who handled Anheuser-Busch products, explaining his error and urging them to fight the good fight. Back home, he invited eleven thousand wholesalers, retailers, and tavern owners to his home, a thousand each night, greeting each one at the door with a welcoming handshake. “When midnight came,” he said later, “my hand would be so swollen I couldn’t move my fingers.”

All told, 1954 was not a particularly good year for Gus Busch, and not just because of his pricing blunder. He had acquired the St. Louis Cardinals a year earlier, and winced at the attacks the purchase earned him. A Colorado senator who was also president of a minor-league baseball association introduced a resolution that would have banned A-B from owning the team and added insult to injury by holding hearings on the matter. Gus showed up and defended himself, but the assault was humiliating. He shrugged off criticism that he’d bought the team only for its salespitch potential, but he and everyone else knew that it wouldn’t hurt to have Anheuser-Busch signs plastered all over the infield and scoreboard. Nor did it hurt that baseball fans were choosing to stay home and watch on television rather than take themselves out to the ballpark; Gus’s advertising would reach them there, too. The new owner knew little about baseball, but he dived into this new adventure with the same gusto with which he grabbed everything else in life. “We hope to make the Cardinals one of the greatest baseball teams of all time,” he announced.

A few weeks later he traveled to Milwaukee, where Fred Miller had just persuaded the Boston Braves to move to Wisconsin. A bemused Gus posed for pictures at a celebratory luncheon, standing behind the seated Fred with his hands on Miller’s shoulders, as if to say “Down, boy, down!” In the center of the table sat a cake decorated with small figures of two baseball players, one in a Cards’ uniform, another dressed as a Brave, foreheads touching, leaning into an imaginary shouting match as a tiny plastic umpire stood nearby.