Travels with Barley (23 page)

In 1879, the brewery changed its name to Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association and a year later, after Eberhard died, Adolphus became president. “He stayed in this position for thirty-three years and is considered the founder of our company,” Bethany tells us, adding, “today, August Busch III is the chairman of the board and he's also credited with transforming our company into an international corporation with business and marketing activities throughout the world.”

She then prefaces Bud's enviable perch atop the U.S. beer world—citing the fact that one of two beers purchased in America is an Anheuser-Busch product—by saying: “Now, we've come a long way from 1852. This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of our company.”

Now, as a scribe of some seasoning, I knew Bethany didn't write this script that she had so ably recited. But I did wonder, as she tugged us toward a meeting with the Clydesdales, about a few things. One: if Bud was dating its history from the time that Eberhard bought into the Bavarian brewery, why isn't Eberhard considered the founder of the company, since Adolphus didn't come aboard until years later? And as for how Adolphus “coined” the term Budweiser because of its Germanic sound, I knew that simply wasn't true. Anheuser-Busch, in fact, has been locked in a running 100-year legal dispute with a brewer in the Czech Republic, Budejovicky Budvar, over the right to use the Budweiser name in Europe and other countries around the world where the Budvar beer has long been called and marketed as Budweiser. The name comes from Budweis—essentially the German appellation for the Czech town, Ceské Budejovice, where the Budvar brewery was founded and where beers similar to Budvar have been brewed since the Middle Ages. The style came to be called Budweiser the same way beers brewed near Pilsen came to be called Pilsners.

Beyond that, a 1991 book by two
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reporters called
Under the Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty
, suggested it was most likely that Carl Conrad, not Adolphus Busch, invented or acquired the Bud recipe, noting that the beer was contract-brewed by Anhueser-Busch until Adolphus bought the recipe from Conrad, a wine merchant, after he went bankrupt in 1882. (That book, the reporting of which was bitterly contested by the Busch family, portrayed the Busches as an autocracy of controlling and ambitious German bluebloods, whose stewardship over Anheuser-Busch for over a century was a tale of “opportunism, unbridled power, family conflicts, sex scandals and violent death.” The Busches, unsurprisingly, were said to hate it.)

At any rate, I wasn't going to quiz poor Bethany over these trifles. Not when we had horses to meet.

The Clydesdales, in their stunningly beautiful, arched stable, perfumed with a curiously mixed aroma of hay, horse manure, and beer, are impressive. And among the fun details Bethany tells us is that the first Bud Clydesdales, a Scottish draft horse breed, were hitched up to the Bud wagon just after the repeal of Prohibition, where they delivered beers of thanks to politicians who had supported repeal, among them President Franklin Roosevelt. We also learn that Clydesdales at birth are already three feet high at the shoulders and weigh 125 pounds (poor Mom!) and that grown ones in the Bud stables grow to six feet high at the shoulders and weigh a ton. And boy, do they eat: twenty-five quarts of mixed feed, fifty to sixty pounds of hay, and thirty gallons of water a
day
.

Bethany also reveals that it is not easy for a Clydesdale to make the grade at Bud, since every horse with ambitions to pull the ornate, fire-engine red Budweiser beer wagon must be at least four years old and must have the following four attributes: four white feet, a white blaze on the forehead, a black mane and tail, and be of a dark brown bay color. Furthermore, females need not apply: only males can pull the hitch.

We then move on to the brewhouse and beer making where, among other things, we get a gander at those (infamous) beechwood chips, which we are told come primarily from trees grown in Kentucky and Tennessee. (This, after one baffled tourist brings laughter by asking how on earth Bud collected so much “beachwood.”)

Though Bethany refers to the brewery's “Beechwood Aging Cellars,” she offers an explanation that might have satisfied Fred Eckhardt. She tells us the chips, once boiled and sanitized, are layered at the bottom of the lagering tanks and that “the chips don't have any flavor or taste to them. They don't give the beer anything” but merely aid in fermentation. Once the beer is drawn off, the chips are mulched and spread by Bud maintenance people around various nearby parks, “which is the main reason,” Bethany tells us, “you'll find the happiest squirrels in the region in this area.”

Since I've already taken the reader on one brewery tour, I won't belabor the entire process again. But I will say that the Bud plant is a place of grand scale and superlatives, a veritable Goliath of a brewery: eighteen gleaming mash tanks, each holding 18,900 gallons, and bathed in the light of what's known as the Hop Vine Chandelier, a massive, ornate fixture that was part of the Belgian exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair; six imposing copper brew kettles, each capable of brewing 19,215 gallons of beer at a time; a clamorous twenty-five-
mile
-long bottling line, filling 980 bottles a minute; a clattering canning line running at 2,000 cans a minute (all under the roof of a building covering twenty-seven acres); a warehouse holding 500,000 cases of beer, which seems like a massive amount but which Bethany tells us “only keeps our Midwestern distributors happy for eighteen hours.”

Before our tour is over, Bethany drops a few other tidbits that I find interesting. One: among the “all natural ingredients” used to brew Bud and its cousins is “drinking water.” Bethany also tells me that spent mash (used-up malt or other grains) recovered from the bottom of mash tuns makes good cattle feed, and that the brewery produces enough spent mash each year—1.5 million tons, to be precise—to feed an estimated 4 percent of the nation's cattle.

I ask where all that grain comes from in the first place and Bethany says, “Oh, we grow a lot of it ourselves.” She then goes on to explain that Anheuser-Busch's economies of scale are such, and its need to obtain highly consistent ingredients so important, that it had some time ago formed the beer world's only agricultural division devoted solely to growing, processing, acquiring, and researching hops and beer-useful grains. I puzzle over this and realize that somewhere in Anheuser-Busch is a high-ranking executive who runs this operation and who, for lack of a better term, might be the world's chief beer farmer.

I decide that a visit to the world's chief beer farmer would be a highly worthy stop along the River of Beer, assuming it could arranged.

Then we're off to the hospitality suite, where we queue up to claim the two free Anheuser-Busch beverages of our choice. (As a matter of full disclosure, I stop at one: a Michelob Amber Bock.) I ask the guy in line just ahead of me what he thought of the tour. He smiles and says, “Hey, that Bethany—she's all right!”

He introduces himself as Kent. He's a lanky guy in sneakers, jeans, a Garth Brooks T-shirt, and a Bud Light cap. He says he works in lawn maintenance and comes by now and then when things are slow.

He points to his cap and says, “That's my beer. I've been here before and, actually, seeing how it's kind of noisy and all, I don't really pay that much attention to the tour anymore. Honest? I just come for the beer.”

The Bud plant sits on the edge of Soulard, a charmingly funky neighborhood on St. Louis's near south side. Named for a Frenchman who surveyed the area for the king of Spain, its original boundaries date to the 179Os, making it one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. As I walked around, it reminded me vaguely of certain precincts of New Orleans, with its period row houses, Victorian town houses, and the occasional mansion undergoing (or in need of) renovation; its gorgeous, turn-of-the-century churches, lively public spaces, corner grocery stores and ethnic restaurants.

There are reasons the Bud plant is here. One is geology: numerous natural caves run beneath Soulard and caves, nature's own temperature-controlled refrigerators, made ideal places for early German lager makers to store their temperature-temperamental beer. Another is real estate. In the mid-1800s, Soulard, with its affordable housing and central location, became the portal neighborhood for large numbers of Germans like Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch who had been steaming to the U.S. Recall that beer was local then and breweries were basically neighborhood affairs; Eberhard invested in the original Bavarian Brewery because it was where the drinkers were. (One footnote, which I credit solely to
Under the Influence
, the unauthorized Busch family biography, was that the pre-Budweiser that Eberhard made was so dreadful that bar patrons would occasionally spit it back over the counter to show their disgust. But Eberhard's energetic and talented son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, was such a gifted marketing man that he sold barrels and barrels of it anyway.) Many of the Germans moved on, to be followed by several ethnic waves of working-class newcomers: Lebanese, Slovaks, Croatians, and Bohemians, to name a few. These days Soulard, people I met told me, was slowly being gentrified, but it still had a diverse, energetic, blue-collar feel about it.

I was walking around not to sightsee, pleasant as it was, but in hopes of finding a bar—well, actually, what I wanted to find was
the
bar closest to the Anheuser-Busch brewery. I was curious whether the castle of the King of Beers cast a particular spell on a place so near it; at the very least, I thought I might run into some Bud workers taking a break from making beer to drink some. (Not that I expected to find them drinking Miller Lite or anything.) So I'd walked north and, well, about a block later, there was a bar: the Cat's Meow.

It sat in a pleasant, brick-front two-story building and it had not one but
two
Bud signs: one hanging from brackets above the door and, in the window, a bright and clever neon sign depicting a green-glowing cat lounging atop the red-glowing word “Budweise”, his tail curling around the “r.” I must also report that a lighted Pabst Blue Ribbon sign, not nearly as clever, hung in the top of the window. I didn't enter immediately; it was 4:00
P.M.
and the place looked empty, so I decided to take my exploratory walk-about and return later.

Later, I found Deanna Springer, a cheerful twenty-something, pouring $1 glasses of Bud draft for a gathering crowd of happy hour regulars. The Meow inside pretty much matched the outside: a long bar to the right and clusters of tables to the left and rear. This was all stuffed into a relatively compact and austere space, with the usual bar clutter about: beer signs, bric-a-brac, photographs of regular customers, promos for the frozen pizza you could order, and a bumper sticker on the wall that read, “I Love Cats.” Deanna told me she was a former customer who'd crossed over to the serving side about a month before to help pay her expenses at a college she attended in Illinois. She'd admired the Meow as a customer because it was friendly, cheap, and a nice mix of neighborhood folk, young and old, working people and drinking age college students who swarmed into Soulard on the weekends to visit its plentiful bars and thriving live-music scene.

When I told her about my mission and why I'd specifically picked the Meow—its prospect in the shadow of the King of Beers—she laughed and said she couldn't think of any particular advantage to being the King's neighbor. “It's not like we get the beer from the back door of the plant or anything. It goes to a distributor before it gets back to us.” Then, she did think of one advantage: “We do get a lot of brewery guys in here.” She looked around and said, “Hmm, I don't see anybody. Maybe later tonight.”

I, of course, had to ask what they drank. She laughed again and rolled her eyes: “Bud, what else!”

But the Meow, I noticed, wasn't a Bud monopoly: among the beer taps I saw Miller Lite poking its head up among the Bud brands. Deanna told me she also served Heineken in bottles, along with Labatt Blue, a Canadian lager. “Actually,” she said, “we sell a lot of Miller Lite.”

I wondered whether this might be a revelation that would alarm August III and August IV.

I was sorry that the Bud guys were a no-show but I struck up a conversation with a woman on the bar stool next to me who, from the snippets of conversation I'd overheard, seemed to know every person who entered the door. The place now was about three-quarters full and getting noisy.

Her name was Brenda Kreitz. Dressed in black and, I'd guess, in her middle forties, she knew a lot about Soulard and a great deal about the bar, which had been in business at least since 1945. Soulard, at the moment, she said, was a good real estate play, having come from being “one of the poorest places in the city” to having been one of those up-and-coming neighborhoods that the press likes to write about and say it discovered.

Brenda and her husband, Paul Kreitz, were, in fact, in real estate themselves, having just moved into a renovated four-bedroom house a block from the Meow that they'd snagged for $100,000. Lots of Soulard places were selling now for $300,000, and they were looking for other houses to buy, rehab, and sell. Paul did the finding; Brenda did the back office work. One dynamic in the Soulard market, Brenda told me, were persistent rumors that Bud was always on the prowl for certain kinds of properties and might be looking one day “to buy out this entire street.”