Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (11 page)

The brew originated in the early 1840s in Pils, a city in the Bohemia region of the Austrian Empire, and spread across the Empire and Europe. Because most German-American brewers hailed from and trained in the brewing traditions of Bavaria and Prussia, Bohemian-style lagers took longer to arrive in the United States. A handful of New York liquor wholesalers imported some of it in the 1850s, though few people noticed, thanks to its high price.

But Bohemian lager’s stars aligned in 1873 at the Vienna International Exposition, one of many such events in the second half of the nineteenth century. Starting with the Crystal Palace Exhibition at London in 1851 and culminating in the spectacular World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, millions of people toured these grand fairs. Part sideshow, part trade show, 100 percent entertainment, the expositions spotlighted national progress through displays of food, crops, clothing, machinery, engineering, art, and architecture.

The expositions also featured brewing exhibitions and contests where brewers competed for medals and trophies. At the 1873 Vienna Exposition, Bohemian beers stole the show and captured top prizes. There is limited evidence that Adolphus Busch was there, but if he missed the event, he heard about it from Otto Lademan, who traveled to Vienna as the state of Missouri’s official representative. There Lademan tasted Pilsener and another lemony yellow Bohemian lager from Budweis (Ceské Budejovice), an ancient Bohemian city where an “official” court brewery produced the “Beer of Kings” (a slogan Adolphus Busch would later invert). Like Pilsener, Budweis contained Saaz hops and Moravian barley. But a slightly different mashing method and the unique local water resulted in a lager that was a shade lighter in color and slightly more effervescent than its Pils counterpart.

Lademan, Busch, and other brewing entrepreneurs had seen the future and it was Bohemian. They began fiddling with recipes and tinkering with malts and mashes in an effort to replicate this sparkling lager. Almost immediately, however, every brewer who attempted to duplicate Pilsener or Budweis collided with an incontrovertible truth: It was impossible. Or, more accurately, it was impossible using protein-rich American six-row barley. Bavarian lager’s amber, almost opaque, color and heavy body hid six-row’s deficiencies. A glass of sparkling, translucent Bohemian lager, however, functioned as a klieg light that illuminated every blob of unprecipitated protein, every tendril of undissolved yeast. Every flaw, every jot of unidentifiable
stuff,
hung there for all the world to see.

Anton Schwarz to the rescue. Bohemian-born Schwarz studied brewing at the Polytechnic Institute in Prague. His mentor there, Karl Balling, an influential nineteenth-century brewing chemist, recognized that Bohemia’s brewers labored under two handicaps: scarce land and low crop yields, both of which forced up the price of brewing materials. Balling thus focused his research on the use of adjuncts, which he believed would enable brewers to maximize their resources. Under Balling’s tutelage, Schwarz received solid technical training in the science and practice of adjunct-based brewing.

In late 1868, twenty-nine-year-old Schwarz emigrated to the United States and took a position writing technical and scientific papers for
American Brewer,
the nation’s first brewing trade journal, including ones that provided explicit instruction in how to create mashes using adjuncts. From Schwarz, American brewers learned how to fashion an American version of Bohemian beer by mixing either white corn (less oily than the yellow varieties) or rice into the barley mash. Rice worked particularly well: Like corn, it is rich in starch and low in protein, but unlike corn, it contains almost no oil.

But whether made from corn or rice, the result was a new and, because it contained adjuncts, a uniquely American beer and a triumph of brewing technique: The new lagers were yellow in color with a brilliant sheen, light-bodied with a foamy head, and a rich, almost creamy flavor. They cost more to make than conventional Bavarian all-malt beers, but as brewers soon learned, the new creations pleased American palates.

Some brewers, German themselves and fond of heavy all-malt lagers, scorned the new brew as a fad, but Adolphus Busch recognized that he was now an American brewer, and that in his adopted country, the era of heavy amber Bavarian beer had ended. He tackled this new opportunity with his usual thorough enthusiasm, studying the matter in books and the trade press and consulting with men who had worked in Bohemian breweries. He and his brewmaster, Irwin Sproule, created a new beer that they called “St. Louis Lager.” Sproule modeled the brew after the “highly esteemed”beer from Pils, using rice instead of corn. Then he and Busch created a second Bohemian beer, this one for Busch’s friend Carl Conrad, a St. Louis dealer of imported wines and liquors. Conrad knew nothing about making beer, but he knew a market trend when he saw one and asked Busch to create a “very pale, fine beer.” Busch would develop the recipe and brew the lager; Conrad would bottle and sell it under his own label.

By the mid-1870s, many brewers had succumbed to Pilsener fever, so Conrad, hunting for a way to make his product stand out in an increasingly crowded field, decided to model it after the style of Bohemian beer brewed in Budweis, a lager of which he was particularly fond. Neither Busch nor Conrad had visited Budweis, but they had toured Bohemia during trips to Europe in the late 1860s and early 1870s and tasted Budweis beer in other German and Austrian cities, including Mainz and Geisenheim. Conrad asked Busch to use imported barley if possible. He also wanted Busch to use hops from Saaz, a region of Bohemia known for the fine character and quality of its hop plants, which imbued the beer with an “exquisite aroma” and “special . . . bouquet.” But, he added, if those were not available, well, Busch was to make do. Conrad mainly cared that the final result look, taste, and feel on the tongue like the lovely lager he had drunk in Europe.

After some months of experimentation, Busch and brewmaster Sproule settled on a combination of technique and ingredients. They began with a mixture of high-grade North American barleys, germinating the grain for six days at temperatures ranging from 55 to 60 degrees and then roasting it for forty-two hours at 144 degrees Fahrenheit. To make the wort, brewery employees soaked the grain for about an hour in hot water. Then they transferred the mash to a second tub, boiled it, and returned it to the first vat. The mash contained about eight pounds of rice to every five bushels of barley, but it’s not clear when they added the rice or how long it cooked. Nor were Busch and Conrad inclined to reveal the details of what they regarded as a priceless trade secret. When questioned, Busch would only say that after the initial soak, “we take the malt & water out of the first mash & put it into a tank & boil it for a certain time—the length of time depends upon the malt[;] then we let it go back to the first mash.” He was less reluctant to explain his reasoning: “Taking [the grain] out of the water mash & boiling it & putting it back in the water mash again makes a much better mash, & gives the Beer a better flavor.” When the wort was ready, the brewmaster added Saaz hops, about twenty to twenty-four ounces of hops per barrel—less than the thirty or so ounces used in the company’s other beers—and pitched the lager with another import, a Bohemian yeast that gave the beer “a peculiar, fine flavor.” Beechwood strips lined the bottoms of the aging vats, rough-textured traps for impurities and bits of flock or yeast that drifted their way. Then workers transferred the beer to special kegs coated with an “aromatic” pitch made from fitchen pine; this, claimed Busch, endowed the beer with yet another “special characteristic.”

The result, which Conrad named after its place of origin, was a masterpiece of brewing prowess. Budweiser “is . . . very fine and elegant,” he once boasted. “It has a very pretty flavor, it sparkles better [than other lagers] & [is] not so heavy.” He also decided to bottle the beer rather than sell it in barrels. The label would advertise the beer and protect its reputation and his from crooked tavern owners who might otherwise try to sell another brewer’s inferior lager under the Conrad Budweiser name. It’s not clear what the original label looked like, but the man who created and printed Conrad’s second label claimed that the first version included the word “champagne.” That would not be surprising, because effervescent Budweiser looked more like Champagne than it looked like other beers. At least Conrad thought so, because he fostered the comparison by corking the lager in Champagne bottles. Alas, the point was lost on customers: The glass was so dark that they could not see and enjoy the beer’s sheen and brilliance. About a year after Budweiser’s 1876 debut, Conrad switched to a translucent green bottle.

Whether Budweiser, St. Louis Lager, or some other brand, the new brew changed the face of American brewing for all time and did so almost overnight. Pabst and Schandein learned that lesson the hard way. Their brewmaster, Phillip Jung, launched the brewery’s experiments with rice and corn in late 1873 and early 1874, mixing the adjunct grains with barley imported from Italy. But Jung’s considerable skill and ambition outweighed his loyalty to the company, and in late 1879 he left to open his own brewery. His first replacement lasted less than a year. The next man, August Olinger, knew how to make old-style, dark Bavarian, but floundered when it came to lighter Bohemian lager. Olinger slashed the amount of corn and added more barley, with disastrous results. In Chicago, customers deserted Best’s too-dark beer in favor of competitors’ offerings. “Can’t you give us a paler, purer beer,” pleaded the branch manager. “Our customer Shaughnessy out on Graceland Road, sent us word he could not use our beer any longer, it being so dark.”

Pabst penned a note of his own to Olinger and his assistant. “There is no doubt in my mind if that kind of beer keeps on, we will lose a great deal of trade which had cost us a great deal of trouble and money to get . . . We surely furnish everything necessary to make good beer,” he pointed out, “and I can only look at this as either carelessness or not the necessary knowledge of the business.” “I want to be understood,” he added, in case his employees had missed the point, “that we
cannot afford
to have anything of this kind repeated . . . ”

Olinger either ignored the warning or, more likely, lost his footing under pressure. In March 1882, the manager at Best Brewing’s Kansas City branch received a shipment of Bohemianstyle beer that had turned hazy in transit. He refused to send it out with his salesman and complained to Pabst. “Now Charley,
I believe you are wrong
!,” Pabst replied. “The Beer is undoubtedly all right . . . . Take your Beer give it the right Temperature & I’m satisfied you will find it all right . . . . I
never
felt so confident of good Beer as I do
now
. We have the best we ever had, we use the best Material we could buy, & we have taken every Precaution to make good Beer and you will find it so.”

Pabst’s soothing words belied the turmoil back home. Olinger had left, although whether for the firmer footing of greener pastures or because fired is not clear, and his replacement, John Metzler, would not start until April. Metzler brought European training and considerable skill to the brewhouse, but two years later, he, too, departed Milwaukee.

This time Pabst and Schandein asked for help. Charles Best penned one of his meticulous letters to Anton Schwarz in New York, requesting recommendations. Schwarz dispatched salvation in the form of J. F. “Fritz” Theurer, one of the most important names in late-century American brewing, a skilled and imaginative man who created superb beer and invented a string of money- and time-saving technologies. These included a yeast-pitching machine, filters, various beer coolers, and a barley washer. His most important contribution to brewing, however, was the creation of a new way to krausen beer. When brewers krausen, they add fresh, still-fermenting wort to already fermented lager. The young wort generates a secondary fermentation and enlivens the lager with natural carbonation. Unfortunately, the fresh wort often contained impurities that contaminated the beer. Theurer developed a method of capturing the carbon dioxide that generates during the initial fermentation, scouring it to remove impurities, and then injecting it under pressure into the beer in cask.

Two years later, Pabst and Schandein supplemented Theurer’s talent with the addition of Otto Mittenzwey, a German-trained chemist hired to explore the possibilities of hard science, and especially the cultivation of “pure” yeast strains developed in a laboratory specifically for beer. Pabst also ensured that his successors, sons Gustav and Fred Junior, would enjoy what he and Schandein had not: formal training in the art and science of brewing. He sent both boys off to New York to study with Schwarz. It was decisions like these that separated Pabst—and Busch and the Uihleins—from most other brewery owners, who relied on brewmasters schooled in trial-and-error rather than science.

Carl Conrad fared better with his new beer, thanks to the meticulous care and skill of Anheuser Brewing’s Irwin Sproule. Conrad sold 250,000 bottles of the lager in just twelve months, and two years after its debut on the market, Busch and Sproule had brewed six thousand barrels of Budweiser. “I never found a business so easy as this Budweiser,” raved one of Conrad’s agents, and that despite its being “sold at a higher price than any other Beer in the country.”

Easy to sell and easy to steal. It is a measure of Budweiser’s superb flavor and character that, almost immediately, someone tried to capitalize on Conrad’s investment. In April 1878, Conrad received disturbing news from a brother who lived in New Orleans: Another version of Budweiser had arrived in town bearing a label virtually identical to the one Conrad used on his beers. The mock-Budweiser label was blue and white rather than red, but, like Conrad’s original, consisted of two parts: a rectangular main label and a bow tie around the bottle’s neck. The latter featured a diamond-shaped knot, crowns in the neckbands, an oblong laid over the bow, and the words “The World Renowned Budweiser Lager Beer.” Diamond and rectangle both sported a manufacturer’s trademark: “B. B. B.,” a near-duplicate of the “C. C. C.” on Conrad’s label. By that time Conrad had identified the perpetrator of the insult: Otto Lademan, president of Joseph Uhrig Brewing Company.