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PrintBarrel, Stein, and Bottle
Missouri's breweries build a foundation for modern beer
Courtesy Donald Roussin
Missourians played a key role in the way beer developed in the United States. Beer-drinking German immigrants here even helped along the idea of beer as a vegetable. Not only did immigrants at St. Louis operate brew houses, build the barrels, and tin the machinery, one developed his company into internationally renowned mega-company Anheuser-Busch. Though Anheuser-Busch sold to Belgium-based InBev on July 13, Budweiser remains its flagship brand and is headquartered at St. Louis. Before this, however, beer followed on the heels of German immigration to Missouri in the 1840s.
By the mid-1800s, there were nearly fifty breweries at St. Louis alone selling lager to neighborhood clientele. Among them were Lemp (Falstaff brand), Griesedieck, St. Vrain Brewery, Schnoor-Kolkschneider Brewing Co., and Brinckwirth-Nolker Brewing Co., according to the Missouri History Museum’s exhibit, From Kettle to Keg: Brewing in St. Louis, 1809-1909. Hundreds of breweries sprouted up in other cities where Germans went: New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Many failed, but these immigrant brewers introduced a new kind of beer to the United States: lager. Light in color and lively in the glass, lager was much different than the dark, still English ale of the time. German beer gardens drew families and young couples who congregated with steins in hand for music, dancing, and food. Old German folk wisdom points out beer is almost a food itself as it is made from barley malt, created once barley grain is soaked and allowed to sprout, and hops, the cone-shaped flower of the Humulus lupulus plant, which adds flavor, aroma, and bitterness to beer, as well as acting as a preservative. Like food, it can be filling, too. Lager was used to toast weddings, seal contracts, and settle arguments. The idea of an evening’s entertainment going hand-in-hand with beer was far from the typical Missouri tavern of the time where furtive patrons gathered to drink whiskey or rum in dark corners. The general populace was yet to be convinced of the difference, and lager was consumed almost exclusively by German-speaking immigrants, according to Maureen Ogle in Ambitious Brew, The Story of American Beer.
The backdrop to this was the heady times of the American nineteenth century where everything was possible and progress was king. Excitement spawned a cultural penchant for new things, money, self-indulgence, and whiskey, and America developed a drinking problem.
To counter this trend, the early temperance movement of the 1820s and 1830s was born. Intoxication was not to be tolerated as it hindered progress, the pursuit of happiness, and productivity. By 1840, in response to the influence of the temperance activists and the new alcohol laws, per capita consumption of alcohol in the United States had dropped to three gallons from seven in the 1830s, according to Ogle.
The price of the new alcohol restrictions was crime. Riots sprang up throughout the country when the mostly foreign-owned beer gardens and beer halls were targeted by the law, while “American” taverns stayed open. For the German immigrants, who were chiefly hardworking with honest reputations, the slur on their honor and tradition was loathsome. Angry mobs reacted to the tavern closings and arrests. The alcohol laws sparked the crime they had been drafted to curtail, and many Americans by the 1850s began to rethink the issue of drinking and temperance.
Court cases with German tavern owners in the defendant’s chair began around the country and marked a turn in public opinion on beer. The public heard tales of beer being good for you, healthy, relaxing, and that 3 percent alcohol content was not, in fact, intoxicating like whiskey. According to an article in Harper’s Weekly, “Good lager beer is pronounced by the [scientific] faculty to be a mild tonic, calculated, on the average, to be rather beneficial than injurious to the system.” Beer gained a reputation of being safe, wholesome even, compared to the alternative.
The status of beer, so long linked with immigrants, was mixed into a political brew of the times—the Civil War, land, and slavery issues—that encompassed what felt like anti-immigrant laws to beer-drinking Germans. The major parties, the Whigs and Democrats, responded. In general terms, the Whigs hated slavery but loved Prohibition (giving them an anti-immigrant flavor). The Democrats, Ogle says, championed immigrants, but unfortunately the party also supported slavery. Lager-loving immigrants, many who had just left oppressive homelands and were not supporters of slavery, were frustrated.
In response, a group of Wisconsin men in 1854, after presumably adjourning to a neighborhood tavern for a beer, organized a new political party—the Republicans—who gained the immigrant, German beer-drinking vote by shunning Prohibition.
Amidst this and the turmoil of the conflict in the 1850s leading eventually to Civil War, President Lincoln determined to hold Missouri. If it fell to the Confederacy, the Union would lose control of the Mississippi River—the main highway running into Confederate territory. St. Louis, with its wharves, warehouses, and rail links to the eastern United States, was critical to the war plan.
Consequently, the city swarmed with military, refugees, escaped and freed slaves, bricklayers, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and carpenters. Everyone, it seemed, wanted beer. It was the troops’ choice of drink as military commanders banned intoxicants, leaving lager—by then officially non-intoxicating—as the best option for camp and field. A physician who studied camp diets reported that lager drinkers suffered less from diarrhea than did non-beer drinkers, Ogle says. Lager, the physician noted, “regulates the bowels, prevents constipation, and becomes in this way a valuable substitute for vegetables. I encourage all the men to drink lager.”
Into this milieu, Adolphus Busch played his hand. Busch arrived at St. Louis from Mainz, Germany, in 1857, at the age of eighteen. By 1859, he and a partner opened their own brewing supply company, a good move in a German-rich city.
St. Louis was already knee-deep in breweries, with forty producing two hundred thousand barrels of beer each year, Ogle writes. Among the many, St. Louis’s oldest lager house, Western Brewery, owned by Adam Lemp and son William, was on Second Street. Lemp’s brewery opened in the early 1840s with a small twelve-barrel vat. By the 1850s, the Lemps were making about five thousand barrels a year and had purchased land that held an extensive natural cave that he used as cool storage for his product.
Between Seventeenth and Eighteenth streets on Market Street, Julius Winkelmeyer’s Union Brewery ranked as one of the nation’s largest, making about fifteen thousand barrels of beer each year. The Winkelmeyers also relied on lagering caves beneath their property.
Just a mile south on Eighteenth Street was Phoenix Brewery, the city’s second-largest operation, where twenty-five employees made thirteen thousand barrels of lager a year. Across Market Street was Uhrig’s, a twelve-thousand-barrel-a-year operation, along with a beer hall and dance room.
Busch met Eberhard Anheuser, owner of the troubled Bavarian Brewery on the city’s far south side. Anheuser, a soap manufacturer, acquired Bavarian in 1859 as payment for debts owed to him. In 1860, the brewery sold three thousand barrels of beer. Then, Busch married Lilly Anheuser, and in 1865, he purchased a share of the company, according to Ogle.
In the mid-1860s, Anheuser-Busch was a brewer among many such houses using a steam engine, some wagons, a dozen men, and a few horse teams. Forty years later, it was among the largest in the world. Several factors aided this growth: The leading brewers of the day, Busch, Pabst, and the Uihleins (Schlitz Brewing) changed small-batch, labor-intensive workshops into sprawling, automated assembly-line factories, forty years before Henry Ford. McCormick reapers and Deere plows made the labor of thousands obsolete, bringing a ready workforce into St. Louis. An inexpensive process for making steel came about in the 1850s, and 150,000 miles of track began to be laid by Chinese laborers, making trains a viable option for quick transport of fresh beer.
Busch was the first of the big three to push into the southwest, deciding the future lay in expanding his market out from St. Louis. He used what was then the new Missouri-Kansas-Texas (MKT) rail line to reach Texas. He calculated that bottled beer would provide greater profit and enhance his reputation since unscrupulous saloons routinely substituted cheap draft into the barrels of reputable brewers. Bottles would advertise his label prominently as well as protect his product. He was the first, Ogle writes, to use Louis Pasteur’s discovery and apply it to beer, using heat to kill bacteria and protect his beer during shipping through icy temperatures in winter and intense heat in summer.
In addition to transporting beer out of the neighborhood and into a national market, Busch took a look at its recipe. At that time, lager’s popularity strained the U.S. farmer’s ability to produce enough barley. Plus, American six-row barley, what most brewers used to make their malt, was exceptionally high in protein, which made hazy brew that soured easily. By eliminating excess proteins, the beer would be more stable, and shipping longer distances would be within reach. In the early 1870s, as more non-Germans began drinking beer, there was a growing interest in a brew that sat light on the stomach.
The brewers discovered Bohemian lager—translucent and lighter-bodied, with lower alcohol content. This style of beer originated in the early 1840s in the Czech city of Pilsen. Because most German-American brewers hailed from the brewing traditions of Bavaria and Prussia, not Bohemia, Pils-style lager took longer to arrive in the United States. But in 1873, Bohemian beers took top prizes at the Vienna Exposition. Ogle writes that a Bohemian lager from Budweis, a Bohemian city where an “official” court brewery produced the “Beer of Kings,” came to the notice of Busch. It had a slightly different mashing method, and its unique local water resulted in a lager that was lighter in color and more effervescent than its Pils counterpart.
However, it was impossible to make in the United States with six-row barley. Every blob of protein and yeast not absorbed in the process hung in the glass for all to see. But in late 1868, twenty-nine-year-old Anton Schwarz, who had trained in Prague, brought the idea of using white corn or rice, both lower in protein than American barley, to the United States. Schwarz wrote in American Brewer about using adjuncts in the barley mash to make a uniquely American beer, Ogle says.
Many scorned the new lager as a passing fad, but Busch and his brewmaster Irwin Sproule settled on a recipe for a beer modeled on the taste of Bohemia and its Budweis. The new lager soon threatened to elbow all-barley malt beers off the table. In 1878, the Anheuser Brewing Company won the grand gold prize in Paris, where the new beer faced off against one hundred other lagers and ales from France, Britain, Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia, Ogle writes. Americans embraced the sweeter taste and lighter body of Bohemian brews, eschewing the sometimes sour and bitter taste of all-malt beer. For more than a century, Americans never looked back at old-world style beer.
