Travels with Barley (21 page)

Logsdon had a slightly better story. “It becomes more of an issue to us when we sell yeast to a commercial brewery—one that eventually buys more and more yeast because they are successful. They become so successful, they eventually build their own lab, hire a microbiologist—and reculture
our
yeast themselves. Now, how is that for helping put someone on the map only to be eliminated once you have?”

Before I left, I asked Logsdon about the homebrewer speculation that the commercial yeast labs were selling the Budweiser yeast under another name. He demurred but did say Wyeast and the Bud folks had collaborated on yeast research not that long ago and that his lab had sent Anheuseur-Busch clones of all of its yeast samples—save one.

When I checked back with Maribeth Raines-Casselman several months after I'd first interviewed her to see if she could impart any knowledge on this matter, she told me, “Oh, yeah. We got it twice. Once from a guy in a Bud plant who gave us some. And once from scrounging some discarded beech wood chips.”

St. Louis, Mo.
—“Hello, My name is Bethany and I'll be your tour guide today.”

And a winsome tour guide Bethany is: young, fresh-faced, smiling, articulate; attractive in her uniform of knee-length jean shorts and red polo shirt, but not so alarmingly attractive that she would draw attention from her purpose. If you've been to Disney World and been greeted by the scrubbed, buttoned-down, and rigidly polite ticket takers, you've met Bethany before. This is how some of the flower of American youth helps pay its way through college. (In fact, Bethany later told me she was a public relations major at a school in neighboring Illinois.)

But this isn't the Magic Kingdom with Mickey patrolling the litter-free ramparts, though there is something Disneyesque about the place, what with its spacious mall-styled gift shop, its posh horse stables holding imposing show horses, its cutesy trolleys, and its razzmatazz video displays in various media-wired lobbies. Having executed the two-and-a-half hour drive from Hannibal to St. Louis, I am standing at the portal of the Kingdom of Budweiser, by trademark “the King of Beers.”

Bethany's job is to take about 100 other visitors and me on the 2:30
P.M.
tour of the massive Bud brewery on the banks of the Mississippi River. This gathering point is reached by way of the aforementioned gift shop, where almost every conceivable item that could be inscribed with Bud or Bud Light or Michelob or other Anheuser-Busch brands or trademarks, including the famous Clydesdale horses, is on display and for sale. The $161.95 Bud Light golf bag caught my eye, as did the $14 Clydesdale flannel boxer shorts, as did the $15 Budweiser workout T-shirt and the $75 Budweiser hammock. (The boxer shorts were tempting but there was nary a horse on them—just the Clydesdale name stitched into the waistband.) More than 300,000 visitors annually wander through this shopping opportunity en route to the tour, which is free.

And the bonus at the end of the one-hour walk-through, Bethany tells us up front, is “two free Anheuser-Busch products of your choosing”—that's tour-speak for two free beers. (This is a judicious limit designed to keep Bud pilgrims out of trouble with St. Louis's Finest, who staff a handsome brick police substation just across from the brewery.) Bethany also admonishes us to “stay with me at all times. There are no hidden six-packs along the tour so if you go wandering off from me you won't find any.”

This, plus Bethany's other warning that we not reach over into the bottling line to snatch a Bud clattering by, as this would have the deleterious effect of shutting down the line while rewarding us with an unrewardingly warm beer, brings gleeful laughter from a fair number of the tourists-in-waiting. Judging from the proliferation of Bud T-shirts and ball caps adorning the attendees, this isn't a gathering of dubious Beer Geeks come to snoop and ask tricky questions of the King's minions. These are mostly Budweiser groupies eager to get an inside look at the machinery that produces their favorite beer.

Without even having peeked inside the plant, I've already recognized that this is beer on a scale I hadn't yet encountered. Looming up from the freeway approach, the redbrick facade of the brewery was seriously imposing, especially after the mom-and-pop breweries I'd seen so far on the River of Beer. Page Brewing's entire operation in Minneapolis wouldn't have filled the Bud gift shop. The whole enterprise straddles 100 acres; it is the biggest of Anheuser-Busch's twelve regional brewing plants, not to mention the location of the original Bud plant, not to mention Anheuser-Busch's world headquarters where August Busch III, great-grandson of the founder, Adolphus Busch, plots daily to keep the King of Beers the king of beers while preparing to hand the company over to his son, August Busch IV, currently president of domestic beer operations. It thus amounts to both the historical and beating heart of what can be persuasively argued is the most successful commercial brewing enterprise of all time.

And much of the company's success and growth to a position of utter dominance in the world's biggest beer market has been won in the past forty to fifty years, as it set out single-mindedly, against many worthy, well financed, and like-sized competitors such as Schlitz, Falstaff, and Pabst, to win the Lager Wars. “People find it hard to believe now, but back when my father took on the Budweiser distributorship down here, nobody particularly wanted it,” I recalled Herbert Schilling, a longtime Bud distributor in Lafayette, Louisiana, telling me during an early interview for this book. “In 1950, Budweiser wasn't a substantial player where we were—Falstaff, Schlitz, and Regal, those were the big players. I recall my father telling me, ‘People can't even pronounce Budweiser, much less me sell it.' In fact, a lot of people hadn't heard of it.”

Nowadays, it might be hard to find someone, save in one of the shrinking number of unwired outposts of the planet—perhaps among the bushmen of the deep Kalahari desert in Namibia—who
hasn't
heard of Bud. Along with brands such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Mercedes, it is considered one of the most valuable trademarks on earth. Weighed against year-end 2003 results—U.S. market share (50 percent), wholesale beer revenues ($16.3 billion), annual volume of beer produced (111 million barrels worldwide in 2003), number of employees (23,000)—almost any way you wish to measure commercial success—Anheuser-Busch sits atop the U.S. and global brewing world. Its advertising spending in 2002—$413.4 million—was about $180 million
more
than the annual
revenues
of craft brewing giant Boston Beer. It sold a respectable 8.4 million barrels of its own beer abroad in 2003 (Budweiser is the bestselling lager in Ireland) and, owing to equity stakes in Mexico's Grupo Modelo (Corona), Tsingtao of China, and Compañía Cervecerías Unidas of Chile and Argentina, it racked up another 22 million barrels of foreign sales on its way to a record $797 million in international beer sales in 2003. And again, with Corona soaring ahead as the leading U.S. import, the Grupo Modelo/Corona investment (a 50 percent nonvoting stake) has proved a valuable hedge against imports, which now claim almost 11 percent of the U.S. market.

And it wasn't lost on Bud watchers that the company in the spring of 2003 unveiled with much fanfare a new beer called Anheuser World Select—a kind of malty Pilsner in a green bottle that some see as a belated direct riposte to Heineken, which also happens to be a malty Pilsner in a green bottle. So, let's see: not so long after Corona surpasses Heineken as America's leading import (and Anheuser-Busch benefits from this with its 50 percent stake), Anheuser-Busch introduces a beer it hopes will further erode Heineken sales.

Not for nothing has Anheuser-Busch been compared with a certain software company that is often accused of seeking nothing less than total world domination of its particular market: Microsoft.

In fact, as I traveled down the River of Beer, I found Bud to be a kind of obsession, a kind of spectral elephant in the room. Homebrewers would deride it one moment, then spend an hour talking among themselves about what brewing alchemy was responsible for that “little green apple bite” that is part of Bud's taste profile. (Yeast, recall, was Jim Koch's answer.) Several homebrewers even told me they made Bud—from recipes floating around in homebrewing circles and on the Internet (and, of course, as explained earlier, using what is considered to be the real Bud yeast). In fact, I was able to find at least two purported Bud recipes with a quick Google search.

Well, actually, what some homebrewers told me was that they usually didn't make Bud as it is today, but Bud as it used to be, before, as they put it, the company “diluted” the beer with ever more rice and other adjuncts and greatly reduced its hoppiness, (which had the effect of lowering its IBUs). Now, whether in fact pre-Prohibition Budweiser or even 1950s Bud was actually a fuller-bodied lager than modern Budweiser; whether Bud went to adjuncts to shave brewing costs (as some homebrewers claim) or because Adolphus Busch simply thought rice made better—and easier drinking—beer, or both, remains a matter of debate and conjecture. Anheuser-Busch won't comment on such matters beyond insisting that rice has always been part of the master taste plan that makes Bud so popular, adding that as “one of the world's most coveted recipes, we jealously guard it and consider this information confidential and proprietary.”

Indeed, no matter where I went, questions about Bud seemed always to generate a lot of heat and passion and debate, not unlike the heat and passion and debate you get when you toss Microsoft into a dinner party conversation. I'd get fierce adulation from the committed Bud Heads who would lash Bud critics as snobs and elitists; I'd get scorn of a kind that was pretty much summed up by Ian Baumann's critique of Bud back in Minneapolis and the anti-Bud manifesto I'd read at the Casino bar in La Crosse. I'd get wary admiration from free-thinkers like Jim Massey in Dubuque and, among Bud's competitors, the craft beer people in particular, I'd pick up a mixture of fear and disdain, sometimes bordering on loathing—all usually anchored by grudging admiration. Brewmasters, especially, would tell me that lack of consistency is the hobgoblin of all brewers and breweries. Thus what Bud is able to do—make beer in twelve gigantic, far-flung breweries that comes out so consistent in taste, color, and aroma that only an expert palate or two, or an extremely sensitive machine, can measure the difference—is a brewing feat of the highest order.

Of course, some couldn't resist throwing in: “But considering the beer they make, why would they bother?” This would usually be followed by a lecture on how, given that all mass market lager tastes pretty much the same, Bud really is a triumph of mass marketing, not mass brewing. And its hard to argue that the billions of dollars that Bud, Miller, and Coors have thrown into advertising in the past decade alone haven't had a profound impact: they have.

But the underlying thesis of the anti-Buds is that beer consumers in general are unsophisticates who can be gulled into drinking swill and vinegar if the drumbeat of advertising is steady enough and clever enough. I'm simply not convinced of that. Recall that high-flying Schlitz lost the farm when it chemically shortened its brewing cycle to hasten production and as a result changed the taste of its product. Schlitz drinkers could
certainly
tell the difference and abandoned it en masse almost overnight; all the advertising in the world couldn't bring the label back to its perch. It seems more likely to me that Bud, like Coca-Cola, has found a seam into mass tastes—among its qualities is that it is inarguably inoffensive to most palates—and has expertly exploited that seam through a variety of methods. Shrewd and heavy marketing is certainly one. But the company has built an aggressive distribution network and spent heavily and passionately on quality control, making huge investments in things like regional breweries and refrigerated warehouses. And let's not forget its application of bare-knuckled business practices, which I deal with in a moment.

The flip side of this, of course, is Budweiser's riposte to the craft beer crowd: if your beer is so good, then why can you only manage just over three percent of the market? Putting aside for the moment Bud's ability to outspend every other beer company on the planet, the most candid assessment I got of that was from Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing. Maytag is an articulate, plain-speaking man who could never be mistaken for a fan of Anheuser-Busch or middle-of-the-road lagers (or even most British ales or supposedly hearty German lagers). But he told me bluntly: “Look, the truth is most people
don't like
hoppy, malty beer,” and lagers like Bud predominate because “most people want a light, refreshing drink” and lager can certainly be that. Maytag went on: “Ninety percent of the beer drinkers want that all of the time. Ten percent of beer drinkers want that some of the time and they want the beer we make some of the time. To get that 10 percent to drink what we make all the time is probably not realistic now, though things do change.”

The other Bud undercurrent I was picking up from its rivals, big and small, was that it wasn't so much the company's size and spending power per se that rankled but its style—the words “bully” and “arrogant” were often used, together or just a few sentences apart, to describe the company's rough-and-tumble business attitude. To be fair, the very size and nature of certain big corporations make them lightning rods for all kinds of critics. Go ask the antiglobalists about Nike and they will do their best to convince you that Nike is a corporate Satan out to exploit vulnerable Third World workers in sweatshops; Nike prefers to think of itself as a shrewd and successful purveyor of high-quality athletic gear, doing the Third World a favor by putting its people to work. Similarly, when I asked some Bud distributors and other Bud folk about their corporate critics, they would parry pejoratives such as “arrogant bully” with “hard-nosed business opportunist.”

Whatever the case, Anheuser-Busch's response to the microbrew-craft-beer incursion is certainly illustrative of the Bud Way. Lest you think that the Bud people have let the craft beer movement go unnoticed—after all, what's a measly 3.4 percent of the market to the 900-pound gorilla?—think again. Anheuser-Busch has rolled out its own version of craft brews. Currently, under the Michelob label, it makes an American interpretation of a Hefeweizen, a German wheat beer, plus three other craft-styled beers: Michelob Amber Bock, Michelob Black and Tan, and Michelob Honey Lager. It makes and distributes out West, where craft brewer Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has won legions of fans with a hot-selling pale ale, a beer called Pacific Ridge Pale Ale. And it has bought minority interests in two respected craft brewers, Redhook Ale Brewery in Seattle (a 30 percent stake) and Widmer Brothers in Portland, Oregon (a 36 percent stake), in exchange for agreements to give those beers access to Bud's vaunted distribution network.