Where the Budweiser Flows

In South St. Louis, near the bleak and dreary Mississippi riverfront, there stands a gingerbread jumble of 100 buildings which form a city in themselves. They cover an area larger (72 city blocks) than Chicago's Loop, contain a spic & span power plant big enough to serve a city the size of Dallas, and are surrounded with as much rail trackage as Indianapolis. Each year, the buildings consume 3,522,980,000 gallons of water, 4,500,000 bushels of malted barley and the entire output (192,000 tons) of a nearby coal mine. Over them all hangs the sick-sweet smell of malt and hops. The name of the city-within-a-city: Anheuser-Busch, Inc., largest U.S. brewery (by area) and maker of famed Budweiser and Michelob beers.

Despite its size, Anheuser-Buschmen think that their empire is not yet big enough. This week the company will break ground for a new $20 million plant in Newark, its first eastern brewery. When it is completed in 1951, the new plant will turn out 1,000,000 barrels of beer a year, and put Newark close to the nation's biggest brewing centers--Milwaukee, St. Louis and New York. With its new plant, Anheuser-Busch will save on shipping costs to the East Coast. It also hopes to regain its place, lost a few years ago to Milwaukee's Schlitz, as the nation's biggest beer producer.*

Enter Adolphus. The Anheusers and the Busches got together in St. Louis before the Civil War, when Adolphus and Ulrich Busch, young sons of a vast family (21 children) of German immigrants, married two daughters of Erberhard Anheuser, a small and not very successful brewer. Son-in-law Adolphus, who combined a Teutonic genius for organization with the salesmanship of a pitchman, soon built up annual production to 25,000 barrels. In 1876, he got a new and better beer formula from a local restaurateur and called the new brew Budweiser.

He was one of the first to use the new discovery of pasteurization to keep bottled beer from spoiling, and thus was a jump ahead of most U.S. brewers, in national distribution. By 1901, Anheuser-Busch, Inc. was turning out more than 1,000,000 barrels a year. Adolphus also took some sidelines: he built the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, and brought the first diesel engine patents from Switzerland to the U.S.

Just outside St. Louis, he also built himself a turreted, U-shaped mansion with an armor-filled hunting room and a kitchen that could serve a 40-place dinner at the drop of a bottle cap. One story has it that once, when driving in his open coach near the brewery, Adolphus waved graciously back to admiring friends and retainers on the sidewalk and said to a friend: "You see, choost like a king!"

In his later years, old Adolphus began to spend more time abroad, kept in touch with St. Louis by cable from his luxurious "castle on the Rhine" (cable tolls often ran to more than $100 a day). In 1913, his son August Sr. took over the old family company.

Exit Beer. When Prohibition came, President August said: "We'll make shoelaces if we have to, but I'll never close this plant." Anheuser-Busch never had to make shoelaces, but it made "Bevo" (an unfermented, nonalcoholic drink that was supposed to taste like beer), near-beer, ginger ale, Grape Bouquet, root beer, "Kaffo" (a syrup for iced coffee), Busch "Tee," Carcho (a chocolate drink), starch, dextrine, corn products, malt syrup (for home brewing), and even refrigerator truck bodies and ice cream freezing units. In the end, it was yeast that pulled the company through, and today its yeast production is second only to that of Standard Brand's Fleischmann.

When Prohibition ended, Anheuser-Busch was ready: the day after Repeal, more than 3,500 barrels of beer rolled out of its St. Louis plant. Two months later, President August, long in poor health, shot himself.

Families & Fermentation. Present boss of the company is August Jr., who started as a worker in a malt house in 1921 and reached the top four years ago when his older brother, Adolphus, the company president, died of cancer. A barrel-chested World War II colonel, "Gussie" Busch, now 51, is a throwback to Grandfather Adolphus. He has a shrewd eye for horses, a nose that can sniff the quality of hops, and he likes nothing better than the periodic Schlachtfeste at which the family, clad in Bavarian costumes, consumes quantities of sausages, pork cuts and ribs washed down with Budweiser.

Gussie does not lack for family help around the brewery: there are no less than eleven Anheusers and Busches who are now officers, directors, or otherwise active in the company. Between them, the two families own 85% of the 4,500,000 shares of common stock, which sells at around $25 and pays $1 a year. Last year, on net sales of $135 million, Anheuser-Busch had net earnings totaling $14,500,000, up 7% from 1948.

Gussie Busch, who still refers to good beer as "the workingman's champagne," attributes much of Budweiser's success to its lengthy and more costly brewing process, in which it is fermented twice. Although the company has spent $64 million since Repeal to expand plants and boost production, Gussie Busch says it is still a race between the architect and the brew-master--and the brewmaster is in the lead.

* Though exact production figures are secret, industry estimates put Schlitz first in output, followed by Anheuser-Busch, Ballantine and Pabst. If Pabst's production of another brand by a Los Angeles subsidiary company were included, Pabst would top them all.

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