Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (9 page)

The production outstripped the capacity of the old brick-lined lagering caves. Construction crews built a new kind of “refrigerator”: a windowless, vertical brick shell divided horizontally by iron floors. Racks stacked with puncheons of beer filled the first and second floors, or “cellars,” as the brewers still called them, even though the chambers stood above ground. Chilled air streamed down to the beer through vented sidewalls thanks to a twenty-foot heap of ice that covered the top floor.

The company consumed some fifteen thousand tons of ice annually. Icehouses lined riverbanks and the shores of upstate lakes and ponds. In January, February, and March, dozens of harvesting teams guided horse-drawn cutters back and forth over the surface, slicing a grid of six- to ten-inch trenches into the glistening white expanse. After scoring the ice, the harvesters pried huge sheets free from the larger mass, and then sawed and hacked those into blocks about twenty-two inches square and ten to thirty inches thick. Winch arms swung some of the blocks to a loading chute for storage in the icehouse. Workers loaded part of the frigid cargo directly onto wagons headed to the brewery; waiting rail cars devoured the rest, transforming the cars into crude refrigerators.

Problems could slow the progress. In February 1872, a fire at the Chestnut Street facility destroyed the cooper house and everything in it. Two weeks later, a boiler exploded at the South Side plant. The vessel, five feet in diameter and eighteen feet long, blasted through the roof. The detonation ripped the eighty-horsepower steam engine from its bed, blew out windows and gaslights, and unleashed a downpour of brick, plaster, and metal on the neighborhood.

All in a day’s work for the bold and ambitious. Pabst and Schandein rebuilt the cooper house and ordered a new boiler and engine. In early 1873, Best Brewing’s output topped 100,000 barrels. Six years later, the upstarts temporarily toppled George Ehret from his throne, a stunning achievement for two men who had entered the industry with little business experience and even less knowledge of brewing. In between, they built a ninety-thousand-bushel malt elevator at South Side as well as a third set of tracks from that plant to the city’s main rail yards; began shipping to Colorado; and established a branch operation in New York City that included a capacious icehouse, several teams, and two agents.

The move to New York was particularly bold. But it was prompted by need as much as by ambition: In order to make their investment pay, the men had to brew at capacity. Milwaukee could not begin to drink all the beer they produced; hence the decision to try to grab a slice of the huge market in the fast-growing urban Northeast. Still, much of the company’s business centered on Chicago, where customers consumed about one thousand kegs of Best lager each day, so Pabst and Schandein enlarged their depot there; the new building held three thousand barrels and six hundred tons of ice. The company’s officers—Pabst, Schandein, and Charles Best (son of Carl and nephew of Phillip)—tracked the movement of materials, shipments, and agents by means of telegraph lines that ran from each of the breweries to the Western Union office downtown.

The men drove the fact of their success home in the spring of 1875 when they staged an elaborate procession through the streets of Milwaukee. Early May marked the unofficial opening of the new beer season in the United States, the moment when brewers tapped their first kegs of winter-brewed lager and unleashed the pleasures of malt-rich bock. On this occasion, Best employees decorated their horses with ribbons and their wagons with bunting and flags. Cockades sprouted from the teamsters’ hats. Poles lashed to the wagons’ sides anchored banners that flapped in the breeze, the company’s name emblazoned on each. As jolly Gambrinus, who still sat on his perch atop the archway leading to the loading yard, watched, twenty teams and wagons paraded along Chestnut Street toward the rail yards downtown, each bearing a small pyramid of lager-filled kegs destined for Chicago, a jubilant celebration of success and a blatant challenge to the rest of the city’s brewers.

T
EN DAYS EARLIER
, Joseph Schlitz had headed for Stuttgart and a sharpshooting tournament aboard the steamer
Schiller.
Just off the coast of England, the vessel’s captain lost his way in dense fog and heavy seas. As Best Brewing’s teamsters paraded toward the rail yard, the
Schiller
smashed into the Retarriere ledge near Bishop’s Rock, a jagged mass southeast of Land’s End, England. Only a handful of the nearly four hundred on board survived.

Schlitz would have enjoyed the challenge posed by the colorful cavalcade. After running a consistent fourth among the city’s brewers during the 1860s, he and the Uihleins greeted the new decade by setting sail on the hazardous seas of large-scale brewing. In 1870, the men razed what was left of the old Krug brewhouse, purchased the rest of the block at Third and Walnut, and launched themselves toward fame with a new brewhouse and 125-barrel kettle. A 64,000-square-foot icehouse cooled two storage racks and expanded cellars. All told, they could lager seven thousand barrels.

The storage capacity lasted a mere two years. In 1873, Schlitz built a second, larger icehouse; a year later, laborers excavated a new six-thousand-keg cellar. “Schlitz has loomed into prominence . . . within the past year,” commented a reporter for the local newspaper. Indeed, and not just in Milwaukee. Schlitz and the Uihleins had been shipping to Chicago for several years, but that market no longer satisfied their ambitions. By the time Schlitz’s body drifted to the floor of the Celtic Sea, he had shipped small quantities of his beer throughout the Midwest and Deep South, and to California, Tennessee, New York, Mexico, Brazil, and parts of South America. The beer traveled in corked bottles and only small quantities made any one trip—as much as could be packed into a wooden, ice-filled cask. But as for Pabst and Schandein, it was these first few forays into long-distance shipping, more than any of the new buildings and larger vats in which Schlitz invested, that laid the foundation for the brewery’s growth.

D
OWN IN
S
T
. L
OUIS
, Adolphus Busch embraced his new venture with equal parts fervor and imagination. When he joined Anheuser & Co. in 1865, the brewery contained one twenty-five-horsepower engine and produced, in a good year, about four thousand barrels of mediocre lager. But Busch knew that even if he improved the beer, St. Louis represented a small market. To satisfy his ambition, he had no choice but to develop a clientele far beyond that city. Milwaukee’s brewers already controlled Chicago, its hinterlands, and the shores of Lakes Michigan and Erie. Rather than muscle his way into that crowded pack, Busch cast his canny eye in another direction: He would conquer the Southwest.

The decision was at once both daring and logical, and typical of the man. During the Civil War, the demands of conflict had hindered ready access to the Mississippi River and routes south to New Orleans, as well as the rail lines that carried beer to Chicago and other eastern locations. Forced to adapt to these closed doors, St. Louis merchants and manufacturers had developed new relationships in the growing Southwest as an alternative market for their goods. By the late 1860s, they controlled lucrative routes that stretched from St. Louis to Nebraska and down into Texas. In the early 1870s, a group of businessmen pooled their funds and laid a rail line across Missouri and through the sparsely populated hills and plains of Kansas and Oklahoma to a terminus in Texas.

Adolphus Busch, as brilliant an entrepreneur as brewing or any other industry would ever know, recognized the opportunity immediately. There were already small breweries in Texas, thanks to German settlements founded there back in the 1840s. But the state was vast and the breweries were small. Here was an opportunity to capture and hold a wide-open market.

Striking into that distant territory posed considerable risk. It was one thing for, say, Pabst to ship beer to Chicago, a short day’s trip away, or for Joseph Schlitz to supplement his local sales with a few bottles sent hither and yon. It was another matter to gamble a brewery’s future and reputation on regular, large-scale shipping and to send beer, a fragile product with a relatively short life, on a thousand-mile journey.

That didn’t faze Busch, who never met a challenge, scientific innovation, or labor-saving device he didn’t like. He also never lost his passion for learning, and his curiosity led him far afield from brewing. He co-founded a Crop Improvement Bureau in Chicago, monitored developments in agricultural science and farming, and bred a particularly fine strain of chicken. He read scientific literature in English, French, and German, and could provide any listener with detailed assessments of the latest inventions, patents, and technologies. He would conquer the risk with technology and science.

Busch planned to ship some of the beer in wooden kegs, as was standard for brewers at the time, but he calculated that bottled beer would provide greater profit and enhance his reputation as well. As he knew, one glass of beer looked like any other, so unscrupulous saloonkeepers routinely purchased barrels of cheap draft swill and passed it off to unwitting customers as the more expensive lager of a superior brewhouse. They could not do that with a bottle, whose label announced the brewer’s name in bold lettering, simultaneously advertising and protecting the brewery’s good name. He decided to embark on large-scale, assembly-line bottling (and was first among American beermakers to do so), and nothing says more about the man’s ambition, entrepreneurial genius, and passion for gambling than this foray into the unknown.

But between idea and reality lay obstacles. Brewers had bottled some of their stock for years, using primitive equipment: a hand-held siphon tube and a hand-operated cork tamper. Busch had to hire an engineer to design and build automated equipment that would permit large-scale bottling. He had to find a manufacturer willing and able to produce enough glass, a feat in itself given the limitations of manufacturing technology.

And large-scale, long-distance shipping depended on more than bottling. Busch also had to protect the beer during its long journey south, through frigid temperatures in winter and blistering heat in summer. He turned to science, and Louis Pasteur’s discovery that heat killed bacteria. Busch, fluent in French, had read Pasteur’s work in the late 1860s, and so knew of the Frenchman’s discovery. He tackled the task of translating that theory into practice, systematizing the task of heating the beer and bottles so that he could process enormous quantities each day.

By 1872, Busch and Anheuser were shipping pasteurized bottled beer to the Southwest, making them the first Americans to exploit the commercial possibilities of Pasteur’s ideas. It’s not clear who designed and built their first bottling equipment, or “line,” as brewers called it, but it was a pioneering piece of machinery. Thanks to it, eighty employees and two stories of automated equipment cranked out forty thousand bottles of beer a day, an unprecedented achievement in brewing. Keg beer traveled with the bottles, thanks to another Busch innovation: refrigerated rail cars, which he introduced to the company sometime around 1874 or 1875, shortly before meatpacker Gustavus Swift, typically credited as the godfather of refrigerated rail shipping, began using them.

In between, Busch equipped his father-in-law’s brewery with the latest, newest, and most efficient machinery. In his first few years, he installed a mechanized barley cleaner, a 450-bushel malt hopper, new brewvats, and above-ground cold storage. By 1879, the newly renamed Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association was shipping its products to every state in the union and in small quantities to India, Japan, Central and South America, Mexico, the West Indies, Hawaii, Germany, England, and France. Anheuser-Busch beer had won competitions in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Texas, and Paris. The brewery filled seven acres of south St. Louis, and forty-year-old Busch, his mostly-retired father-in-law, and 250 employees produced more than 100,000 barrels of a half dozen or so styles of lager.

T
HE TITANS' AMBITONS
exacted a toll on those around them, as Charles Best discovered in early 1884, when his nervous disposition and frail health collided with the weight of his responsibilities as secretary of Phillip Best Brewing Company. His employer and cousin-by-marriage, Frederick Pabst, had glanced at a piece of his correspondence on its way to the out-box and, finding some sentence, some word, or some bit of punctuation out of order, had grabbed the letter and scrawled on it comments of a “humiliating nature.” Furious at this assault on his competence and the intrusion into his realm, Best penned an angry letter of his own: “To Fred Pabst President Phillip Best Brewing Company: I do not know whether it was your intention to humiliate me like a schoolboy before my subordinates in the office, . . . but whether intentional or not, you surely have done it and in the most remarkable manner.” Charles reminded Pabst that his duties as secretary left him “pushed & rushed” to that point that many days he simply could not find the time to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” “[M]any a night I have left here with a burning head glad only to have the letters go away . . . If . . . you desire to sign the mail hereafter & to permanently assume the management of this office, be kind enough to say so in plain & direct words . . . ”

Best, the nephew of brewery founder Phillip Best, had worked for Pabst and Schandein since 1872, first as cashier, now as secretary. In the early years, he arrived at work at four
A.M.
to tally beer kegs as the drivers hoisted them onto delivery wagons. These days he settled in at the office at eight and remained there until at least six o’clock, six days a week, keeping the brewery’s complicated books and managing its voluminous correspondence. He took “an extraordinary interest” in the company’s affairs, dithering over every dot and comma, fretting over every unaccounted-for penny, and agonizing over every expensive new machine. It is not surprising that the self-imposed pressure created “a worried, vexed & troubled state of mind.”