In Meat We Trust (64 page)

It’s hard to imagine so shrewd a businessman as Phillip Best risking so much on chance. On the other hand, he never lost touch with the hard-driving roustabout within. On more than one occasion, he galloped his horse down East Water Street and charged through the doorway of the Menomonee Saloon, one of the city’s most popular watering holes. As the men draped across the bar or slouched in chairs watched, whooped, and hollered, the equally amused barkeeper shooed Best out the door. Phillip tied his horse at the rail outside and then strolled back inside, shouting an order to “‘set ’em up’ for the house.”

As with the dice-rolling partnership split, there’s no way to know if the horse tale is apocryphal. But both have a ring of truth: If we know anything about Phillip Best and the handful of brewers who laid the foundations of fortunes in those early days of the brewing industry, it is that they embraced risk. After all, Phillip had turned thirty the year he left Europe for the United States. By the late 1850s, he’d long since passed the first flower of youth and understood that this gamble might not pay off, especially given the number of players who crowded the table. Like him, ambitious brewers in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities were busy adding steam engines and larger vats to their brewhouses. Also like him, they relished the competition from the hundreds of new breweries that had opened to accommodate Americans’ new passion for lager.

Phillip’s choice, like his earlier decision to risk his adulthood on America, paid off. By the time he gained sole ownership of the brewery, he could measure his American success by more than his company’s profits. A Democratic governor honored his contributions to Wisconsin politics by granting him a commission in the Milwaukee Dragoons militia company, and a grateful Republican governor elevated him to the rank of brigadier general in a division of the state militia.

In 1857, Phillip reigned as Prince during Milwaukee’s first Lenten-season Carnival. He presided over a lavish reception on opening night and sat enthroned on the lead wagon of a parade that sashayed through the city’s streets the next day. Behind him marched horn-tooting musicians and beribboned stallions carrying local dignitaries. A river of wagons flowed behind, loaded with men and women attired in ornate costume and mask: A majestic King Gambrinus waved to the delighted onlookers; Bacchus greeted his subjects; two “apostles of Temperance” perched on another wagon, and the crowd roared when one fell off and into the muddy street.

By any measure, German or American, Phillip had succeeded. Among the city’s two dozen or so brewers, only Val Blatz produced more lager, and Best Brewing lagged by fewer than two hundred barrels. As the decade turned, the landscape that Phillip surveyed from his hilltop empire contrasted dramatically with the one he had first seen back in 1844. Then, he looked down on a sea of leafy green on one side and a small town on the other. Now Milwaukee, population forty-five thousand, sprawled in all directions. Rippling layers of forest had given way to houses and roads. Phillip owned not just two small lots, but several city blocks. And beneath his feet lay thousands of barrels of German lager, the stuff of his American dreams.

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About the Author

M
AUREEN
O
GLE
ais a historian and the author of several books, including
In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America
and
Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer
. Her website can be found at
www.maureenogle.com
. She lives in Ames, Iowa.