Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (12 page)

Lademan had been brewing the new style beer for several years, but he had discovered the power of Budweiser in particular a year or so earlier during a trip to Denison, Texas, where he maintained an agent and a sales outlet. A bartender there tried to pass off Conrad’s brew as an imported Budweiser to the tune of a dollar a bottle, a shockingly high price at a time when customers paid a nickel for a schooner (and more shocking still when translated into today’s money: seventeen dollars). Lademan handed over his dollar, examined the label, took a sip, and informed the bartender that the stuff was a fake, an imitation of the foreign brew. Imitation or not, Otto Lademan recognized a good idea when he saw one.

Back in St. Louis, other reports trickled in. An Anheuser salesman working the Galveston territory ran into one of Lademan’s travelers, a Mr. Lippenberg. When the conversation turned to Budweiser, Lippenberg boasted that he was the brains behind the Uhrig imitation. He had spotted Budweiser in California and promptly telegraphed his boss, urging him “to put up a similar label to Conrad’s and make it look like Budweiser Beer.”

More news, none of it good: V. H. Stum, Conrad’s San Francisco agent, complained that his trade was being stolen by Uhrig’s people, who promised barkeepers Budweiser at cheaper prices than Stum offered. Stum slashed his price by fifty cents, ran newspaper advertisements warning of the fraud, and devoted the rest of his time to trying to persuade beer drinkers that only his Budweiser was the real thing. The clientele at one bar also insisted on Conrad Budweiser, but when the owner tried to replenish his supply, he ended up with a case of triple-B. A customer took a sip, pronounced it a fraud, and refused to drink the rest of it.

Matters came to a head on a fine day in early May as Conrad and Adolphus Busch enjoyed a buggy ride through downtown St. Louis. Not far from the Union Depot (then located at Eleventh Street and Chouteau), they spotted Lademan in his buggy. Conrad hailed the man. “We stopped,” Conrad reported later, “and commenced talking about his imitation Budweiser Lager Beer. I told him that he was doing very wrong in making his imitation . . . ” Lademan “indignantly repelled the accusation,” pointing out that his triple-B trademark was “entirely different” from his rival’s triple-C and that Conrad was not entitled to “claim the whole alphabet.” Whereupon Conrad warned that Lademan “would have to stand the consequences” of a lawsuit. Lademan told him to “go ahead and crack the whip.” He, Lademan, “had as good right to manufacture Budweiser Beer as anybody in America.” Conrad’s was nothing more than a “counterfeit,” he added, and his own Uhrig brand “was not any better.”

On May 15, 1878, Carl Conrad filed suit, charging Joseph Uhrig Brewing Company with “pirating” the Budweiser label and name in order to defraud the public. Joseph Uhrig Brewing, in the person of Otto Lademan, denied the charge. The word “Budweiser” could not be trademarked, he argued, and if anyone was defrauding the public, it was Carl Conrad: His beer contained not one ounce of Saaz hops or Bohemian barley; it was not brewed “according to the Budweiser process”; and the beer’s label perpetrated those falsehoods for the sole and “fraudulent purpose of deceiving the public.”

The parties met in court in late October. Today, such a case would drag on for months and require the services of a horde of lawyers and expert witnesses, but Conrad and Lademan were in and out of the courtroom in two days. Conrad marched to the witness stand first and bumbled his way through an explanation of why he chose the name “Budweiser”—“the Budweiser process makes the finest beer”—and why his beer differed from all others—its unique qualities rested on a bottling method known only to himself and his foreman. Adolphus Busch and Irwin Sproule followed him to the stand; both insisted that the Budweiser brewing process—based on double vats and mixed mash—was unique. Over a dozen of Conrad’s dealers and salesmen testified, too, each claiming that Lademan’s inferior imitation damaged Conrad’s business and reputation.

Lademan’s lawyer called Lademan, William Lemp, and several other St. Louis brewers to the stand. One, the brewmaster for Wainwright and Co., summarized their collective testimony: “I don’t know anything about any process called the Budweiser process of brewing—never heard of such a process until I heard of this case.” Lademan was even more dismissive: “I know the process that was described by Mr. Busch this morning called the Budweiser process. It is a process used by everyone who uses rice in brewing. We make a water mash first, then a thick mash, & afterwards a water mash. It is no particular process at all.”

Lademan should have tried harder. The jury ordered him to pay Conrad $4,175 in damages (approximately $73,000 today). Lademan appealed, but the new judge concurred with the original jury: Lademan, he said, intended to deceive, and did deceive; he ordered the brewer to stop using the copycat labels.

T
HAT
L
ADEMAN WAS
willing to risk so much speaks well not just of Budweiser, but of the new lager, which threatened to elbow allmalt lagers right out of existence. Beer aficionados today scorn lagers made with corn or rice as inferior to all-malt products, believing that brewers adopted the use of other grains only to save money. That was not true: It cost Adolphus Busch more to make his adjunct-based beers than his all-malt brews, and those lagers sold for higher prices than did their conventional Bavarian-style counterparts.

Nor were the beers inferior. If any one fact lies at the heart of the stunning success of Busch, Pabst, and the Uihleins, it is that by the 1880s, they were brewing some of the finest beers in the world, beers that stood up against competition with anything made in Europe. The Uihleins knew that: In the fall of 1880, they shipped some of their bottled Bohemian to relatives of a Schlitz employee in Zeitz, a city in north central Germany. The recipients took the beer to a local chemist for analysis. The man expressed astonishment at its purity. Its flavor and character, he reported, compared with the finest Bohemian lagers.

While that might be dismissed as salesmanship on the part of the Uihleins, it’s not so easy to dismiss the grand gold prize that Anheuser Brewing won at Paris in 1878, where its beer faced off against one hundred other lagers and ales from France, Britain, Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia. The brewery’s St. Louis Lager generated an “immense sensation” among the competition’s jurors, reported a correspondent for the
New York Times,
especially after the supervising chemist reported that the beer contained rice.

But the three great brewing concerns also succeeded where others failed because they recognized what is fundamental to any brewer’s success: the need for consistency. Pabst and Schandein invested in a laboratory and a European-trained chemist because they knew that they could not afford to sell a single batch of bad beer. They employed prime ingredients, hired the finest brewmaster they could find, and spared no effort in creating fine malt and yeast, all for one end: so that each glass of their beer tasted the same every time, whether on tap or in a bottle; whether sold in Milwaukee, Chicago, or San Francisco.

Not all the other American brewers cared as much or understood brewing fundamentals. The fact is that much of the local beer sold in the nineteenth century was of poor quality, inconsistent, sour, or flavorless. And many of those other brewers never grasped the care, time, and money that stood behind the beers coming out of the titans’ breweries. One of those lesser brewers inadvertently admitted as much, when in 1881 he wrote to the editor of
Western Brewer
to ask a question. How, he wondered, did Best Brewing give its beer such a sturdy, long-lived head? “We use bi-carbonate,” he wrote, “but the beer won’t carry like the Milwaukee.” The editor’s reply was a masterpiece of tact and restraint. Foamy head, he replied, “depends not so much on addition of foreign substances as on the quality of the malt, the mode of mashing,” and a long, slow, secondary fermentation. Best Brewing’s “superior article is due to the superior facilities which they enjoy in their manufacture.”

But whether it was made in Milwaukee or St. Louis, New York or Cincinnati, nineteenth-century Americans embraced the new beer with open hearts—and mouths—because, explained a reporter for the
New York Times,
they disliked the “ ‘sour’ and ‘bitter’ ” taste of all-malt beer, preferring instead the “sweeter” taste of light-bodied Bohemian brews. The nation’s brewers, “recognizing the fact that one American beer-drinker consumes more, on an average, than three Germans look out to please the greatest number—particularly when it pays them the best.” And as long as the “greater part” of the nation’s beer “flow[ed] down American gullets,” the mostly German-born and bred brewers had no choice but to “modify the flavor of their beer to suit American palates” rather than those of their fellow émigrés.

So the Schaefer brothers of New York discovered in 1875 when they “tried the experiment of sending out to their customers genuine old lager.” Their effort to turn back the clock produced “a general growl over the hard, bitter, hoppy taste, and the absence of the rich, creamy broth” found in pale Bohemian beers. Americans had become “so accustomed to a light colored beer that a beer colored somewhat darkly is considered of inferior or indeed bad quality.” One hundred years later, another group of innovators would turn back time with greater success. But the late nineteenth century belonged to pale, adjunct-based lager. The barons built their fortunes on the foundation of its golden broth.

CHAPTER THREE

“Masters of the Situation”

T
HE
G
ILDED
A
GE
was an era of unrivaled wealth, obscene poverty, lung-scarring pollution, and epic struggles for power. But it was also the golden age of American public life, when men and women gathered at cafés and amusement parks, saloons and beer gardens, to enjoy dancing and dining, roller coasters and bowling. Back before the Civil War, the brewers’ gardens and beerhalls had been snug affairs: The one Jacob and Phillip Best opened above their brewery accommodated perhaps fifty to seventy-five people, and in the green spaces behind the brewery wooden tables were crammed elbow-to-elbow if more than one or two hundred people gathered. But like so much else about that era of nearly theatrical extremes, beer gardens swelled to enormous proportion in the late nineteenth century and became playgrounds of unrivaled comfort and modernity, while the saloons served as havens for the era’s masculinity, poverty, and corruption.

Consider the drama that unfolded in Milwaukee on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1880. Thousands of good folk passed the morning in church where they sat and listened, stood and sang, kneeled and prayed. But as the sun rose toward midday, the citizenry stashed its prayer books and spiritual obligations for another week, and the various rivulets of Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians merged into a river of humanity streaming toward a single destination: Schlitz Park. This particular Sunday marked the grand opening of Milwaukee’s newest and most elaborate attraction, and no one wanted to miss the excitement.

Schlitz Park rose out of the ruins of Quentin’s Park, a moth-eaten seven-acre lot a few blocks northwest of the brewery. After the Uihlein brothers purchased the land in July 1879, a small army of carpenters, bricklayers, laborers, and landscapers had refurbished the site, a $75,000 project designed to provide Milwaukeeans with a good reason to drink Schlitz beer.

Now it was time to see where the money had gone. Thousands of people pushed through the main gate, where a life-sized statue of Joseph Schlitz surveyed the throng. Some strolled meandering ribbons of gravel. Others lounged on the veranda of the two-story building that housed a restaurant and lavatories outfitted with marble fixtures. Still others hunted for seats inside the park’s centerpiece, an octagonal pavilion that accommodated five thousand people. A multifaceted glass ball hanging from the twenty-eight-foot ceiling sparkled with the light reflected off the horns and tubas in the twenty-five-piece orchestra seated below. On this special day, the brothers Uihlein even allowed competitors’ wares into the park, “all the leading brewers having contributed some of their choicest stock.” With four bowling alleys, a first-class restaurant, lighted fountain, sixty-foot lookout tower, plenty of lawn where children could play, and Milwaukee’s finest lager, Schlitz Park offered something for everyone.

A reporter who ambled the grounds in search of a story ruminated on the larger lessons of this particular day of rest. The jostling crowd included many of Milwaukee’s “best citizens,” upstanding men and women who scorned the old-fashioned idea that it was “sinful to go out and enjoy the bright sunshine” on Sunday. “There is no mistaking the fact,” he observed, “that a more liberal spirit pervades the mind of the public of the present day.” He attributed this sea change to the city’s large population of “foreigners” whose long years of respectability had convinced even “Orthodox Christians that Sunday may be A DAY OF REST and of harmless relaxation and recreation as well.” Even the formerly puritanical “New Englander . . . now feels that his fellow citizen who sticks to his business through the week and gives three feet of honest measure to a yard, is NEITHER A HEATHEN NOR A TURK if he takes a few hours of innocent and instructive amusement on Sunday.”

And not just on Sunday. Over the next twenty years, hundreds of thousands of Milwaukeeans flocked to Schlitz Park. In summer, they danced and watched polo matches, applauded operas and orchestras, rode the carousel, and howled at the antics of acrobats and vaudeville performers. In winter, they skated to the accompaniment of live music. One memorable January, the park’s manager hosted a carnival. Colored lights and Chinese lanterns illuminated the parade that glided across the ice: ten horses adorned with ribbons and wreaths, an enormous boat, two icebergs, a troupe of clowns, and ten ornately attired elephants.

Not to be outdone, Frederick Pabst and Emil Schandein acquired Bielefeld Garden, a dilapidated mid-century vestige of a garden on North Third Street. They invested $30,000 transforming the site into a mirror image of Schlitz Park. A few years later, the partners bought seven oak-strewn acres on a bluff overlooking Whitefish Bay just north of Milwaukee, purchased an excursion steamer, laid trolley tracks between the park and the city, and welcomed the multitudes to their first-class resort.