Part IThe Story
The streetcars stopped first. At the request of Mayor Henry W. Kiel, St. Louis observed five minutes of silence, and in the Jefferson and the Planter's House, two hotels where a good share of the city's business had been settled over glasses of the dead man's product, the lights went out. Twenty-five trucks were needed to carry the flowers. A 250-piece band led the procession. It stretched twenty miles, from No. 1 Busch Place, the mansion that sat beside the brewery like a gatehouse beside a castle, to Bellefontaine Cemetery on the city's north side. As many as 100,000 people lined the streets to watch it pass. Before that, almost thirty thousand had filed through the house where the body lay in state, among them the U.S. secretary of agriculture, the president of Harvard University, and the president of the University of California. Nobody in the line seems to have found it strange that a brewer should be mourned like a head of state.
He had died in Germany. On October 10, 1913, at the Villa Lilly in Lindschied, near Langenschwalbach in the hill country west of the Rhine, Adolphus Busch succumbed to the dropsy that had been swelling him since 1906. He was seventy-four. He had come to America at eighteen, built the largest brewery in the country, and then, at the end, gone back to the wine region he was born in to die in a house named for his wife. They shipped him home across the Atlantic and put him on a train to St. Louis. Home was a complicated word for Adolphus Busch, and the funeral did not settle it.
There was a further oddity that the mourners on the sidewalks might not have known about. The man who made Budweiser did not much like beer. Throughout his life he called his own product, in the thick German accent he never lost, "dot schlop." He drank wine.
By the Numbers
The Busch Ledger
21stBusch's place among his father's children (sources disagree on the total)
31,500 → 200,000+Barrels brewed, 1875 vs. 1881
850Refrigerator cars owned by his car company by 1888
1,000,000Barrels sold in 1901, a first for the company
$350,000Given to Harvard for a Germanic museum
Up to $60MEstimated value of his estate at death
100,000Mourners along the funeral route
The twenty-first son had no inheritance to wait for
Even the arithmetic of his birth is unsettled. Some accounts say Adolphus was the last of twenty-one brothers. Others make him the twenty-first child of twenty-two, the second-youngest. The State Historical Society of Missouri counts him as the twenty-first child of Ulrich Busch and the fourteenth by Ulrich's second wife, Barbara Pfeiffer. The precise number matters less than what all of them imply. A boy that far down the line in a large German merchant family was not going to inherit the family business. He would have to make one.
The family was not poor. That fact, too, would later become inconvenient. Ulrich Busch dealt in wine and brewing supplies in Kastel, across the Rhine from Mainz. He was an innkeeper and a landowner, and his own father, Matthias, had been a boatman on the river. The children were educated. Adolphus went to the gymnasium in Mainz and the academy at Darmstadt, then to the Collegiate Institute in Brussels, where he studied French at one of the better schools in Belgium. At seventeen he took a job as a shipping clerk in a mercantile house in Cologne and learned the river trade: what moved, what spoiled, what a cargo was worth by the time it reached the dock. Keep that last education in mind. Everything he later did in America was, at bottom, an answer to the question of what happens to a perishable good over distance.
In 1857, at eighteen, he left for St. Louis. He was not going into the unknown. Three of his brothers were already there or went with him. Johann would open a brewery in Washington, Missouri. Anton dealt in hops and eventually went back to Mainz. Ulrich Jr. was about to become his brother-in-law twice over. St. Louis was the chief Midwestern destination for German immigrants, a city that grew from 16,469 residents in 1840 to 451,770 fifty years later, with German newspapers, German churches, and around forty breweries by 1860. It also had two things a pre-refrigeration brewer needed: the Mississippi for water, and a honeycomb of limestone caves underneath the south side that stayed cool through the summer.
Andrew Wanko, a historian at the Missouri History Museum, has pointed out a detail from Busch's own account of his arrival that sits awkwardly beside the legend. Busch wrote that he had a substantial family allowance, and that he spent his first days in St. Louis "loafing, getting acquainted and having a good time."
"This certainly didn't make the commercial," Wanko said.
Commission Row, or how to marry into an asset
The loafing did not last. Busch went to work as a clerk in a commission house on the riverfront. He began, by most accounts, by sweeping floors and washing windows, and he was soon a familiar figure along Commission Row, the strip of merchant houses where cargo came off the boats to be inspected, priced, and sold. He was very good at judging hops, malt, and barley. The Cologne training paid off. He knew what a shipment was worth and could see what the man selling it was hoping you wouldn't notice.
With money from his father's estate (the sources disagree about when Ulrich Busch died and when the inheritance came, which is typical of this story) he went into partnership with a local merchant named Ernst Wattenberg. The name appears in some accounts as Battenberg and in others as part of "Wattenburg, Busch & Co.," founded in 1859. The firm sold brewing supplies to the city's three dozen or so breweries. One of its customers was a soap manufacturer who had come into a brewery more or less by accident.
Eberhard Anheuser was born on September 27, 1806, in Kreuznach on the Nahe, to a family that had made wine there since 1627. He came to America in 1842 with two of his brothers. His nephew Rudolf stayed behind and bought up vineyards along the Nahe, and Weingut Paul Anheuser was still producing German wine thirteen generations on. Eberhard made soap and candles in St. Louis and made them profitably. He also lent money to a struggling outfit called the Bavarian Brewery, founded in 1852 by a brewer and saloon keeper named George Schneider on Carondelet Avenue between Dorcas and Lynch streets. When the brewery failed, Anheuser bought out the smaller creditors and, in 1860, became the fourth owner in its eight-year history, alongside a pharmacist named William D'Oench who stayed a silent partner. Anheuser did not know how to brew. The beer showed it. William Knoedelseder, in Bitter Brew, reports that the product was so bad that customers would spit it back across the bar at the bartenders.
So a vintner's son owned a bad brewery, and a wine merchant's son sold him supplies. On March 7, 1861, the arrangement became a family. In a double wedding at a Lutheran church in St. Louis, Anheuser walked two daughters down the aisle. Anna married Ulrich Busch. Lilly, Anheuser's third daughter, sixteen or seventeen years old, married Adolphus, who was twenty-one and, according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Catholic. One supply salesman's account of the day compresses it neatly: the future malt mogul and his brother married their customer's daughters.
A little more than a month later the Civil War began, and Missouri, a slave state with a large and fiercely Unionist German population, broke open. Busch enlisted in May 1861 as a corporal in the 3rd Missouri U.S. Reserve Corps Infantry. He was present at the Camp Jackson Affair, the confrontation in which Union forces, many of them German volunteers, captured the state militia encamped on the edge of the city. He served through August, finished his three months, and was honorably discharged. The war happened to help his father-in-law's brewery: the Union Army banned hard liquor among its troops but not lager. It also helped Busch. While river trade collapsed and many St. Louis merchants were ruined, he made money.
By 1864 Anheuser was too busy with soap to look after the brewery and wanted someone younger running it. He hired his son-in-law to supervise the plant and its sales. Busch was twenty-five. In 1869 he bought D'Oench's half-interest and became company secretary, a title that understated the reality, since by then the brewery was largely his. The company was called E. Anheuser & Co., then from 1875 the E. Anheuser Company's Brewing Association. In 1879 it became the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. On May 2, 1880, Eberhard Anheuser died at his home in St. Louis and was buried at Bellefontaine. Busch became president and stayed president for thirty-three years.
For a later company that liked origin stories, the record is awkward in one respect. Nobody here founded anything in a garage. A trained middleman married a creditor's daughter and then bought out the silent partner. It was an acquisition, conducted partly at the altar.
Beer of Kings, King of Beers
In the 1870s Busch went back to Europe, as he would throughout his life, and studied what was changing in brewing there. The big development was pilsner: pale, clear, bottom-fermented lager in the Bohemian style, lighter than the dark, heavy beers most Americans drank. One of the well-known Bohemian beers came from the town of Budweis, now České Budějovice. It had been called "the Beer of Kings" since the sixteenth century.
Busch's partner in the experiment was Carl Conrad, a St. Louis importer of wines and champagnes and a liquor bottler. Conrad, a friend, owned the trademark on the name Budweiser and had Anheuser-Busch brew it for him. In 1876 they produced a lighter, crisper lager suited to a St. Louis summer and gave it the Bohemian town's name. The beer had nothing to do with Budweis. That didn't matter. The name signaled European quality to a German-American drinker, and it was easy enough for everyone else to say. When Conrad went bankrupt, Busch bought the rights to Budweiser from him in October 1882. Conrad's story fits the pattern of Busch's associates: an importer of wine whose real legacy was a beer, and who lost the thing he had named.
Busch then made one of the cleverer moves in the history of American advertising, though it was more of a pickpocket's move than an inventor's. He reversed the Bohemian slogan. "The Beer of Kings" became "the King of Beers." The old phrase said this beer was good enough for royalty. The new one said this beer was royalty. It was a small change of grammar and a large change of ambition, and the trademarks on both slogans in the United States ended up with Anheuser-Busch.
In 1896 he added a second brand, Michelob, which he described as a "draught beer for connoisseurs." The name came from the market town of Měcholupy in Bohemia. It was the company's "super-premium" beer, more expensive and more profitable, and it was positioned above Budweiser rather than beside it. The strategy, as the historian Timothy Holian puts it, was "a pioneering integrated marketing plan that focused on a single core brand, Budweiser," which became "the most successful nationally-distributed beer of the pre-Prohibition era." Michelob was the pricier option that made the flagship look like a bargain.
Later in the company's history, executives sometimes told another version. In it, Busch stopped at a monastery in the 1870s, the monks gave him their recipe and a culture of their yeast, and that strain of yeast was kept for years in Adolphus's ice-cream freezer. The Encyclopedia of Business treats the story as fiction, and it is. It has survived anyway. As recently as 2012 a management blogger reviewing the family's history repeated, as fact, that Busch bought a beer recipe "from monks in a Bohemian village." The ice-cream freezer is the giveaway. It is too domestic and too cute to be anything but a salesman's invention.
The myth-making extends to the institutions. The National Register listing for the brewery records that it was "opened in 1852 by German immigrant Adolphus Busch." In 1852 Adolphus Busch was thirteen and living in Kastel.
The cold chain
The real secret was neither a recipe nor a monk. It was temperature.
Beer was a local product in nineteenth-century America for the same reason milk was. It spoiled. A brewery sold within the distance a wagon could cover before the product went bad, which meant every city had its own breweries, every brewery had its own neighborhood, and nobody had a national brand because a national brand was physically impossible. Busch, the former shipping clerk, saw this as a logistics problem. He did not think of it as a fact about beer.
He attacked it from several directions at once. He was the first American brewer to pasteurize beer, applying Louis Pasteur's heat treatment to the bottle so the beer kept much longer. He was among the first to use mechanical refrigeration in brewing. In 1876, the year Budweiser launched, he introduced refrigerated railroad cars. By 1877 the company owned forty of them. In 1878 he set up a separate firm, the St. Louis Refrigerator Car Company, to build, sell, and lease them. By 1883 it owned 200 cars, and by 1888 it owned 850. Along the rail lines he built a network of ice houses where the cars could be re-iced on long runs. The beer went out in bottles, an early and heavy commitment at a time when most beer was still sold from the keg, and the bottles came from his own Busch Glass Company.
The results showed up in the production figures. The brewery made 31,500 barrels in 1875 and more than 200,000 in 1881. The plant on the south side expanded through the 1870s and kept expanding. In 1887 the company founded the Manufacturers Railway Company, a short line to switch refrigerator cars in and out of the brewery and serve other industries nearby. It ran until 2011, outlasting the founder by ninety-eight years and his family's ownership of the company by three. By 1901 Anheuser-Busch had passed one million barrels in annual sales, and by 1907 it brewed nearly 1.6 million.
Busch did not stop at the cars. He bought bottling plants, ice-manufacturing plants, stave makers for barrels, timberland for the staves, and coal mines to fire the boilers. He bought railways. The family bought hop farms near Cooperstown, New York. If a component of the business could be owned, he tried to own it.
— William Knoedelseder, author of Bitter Brew, on NPR, 2012He was vertically integrated before there was a name for it.
This is where "dot schlop" stops being a quaint anecdote. A brewer who loved beer might have built his company around the beer. Busch built his around everything surrounding it: the glass, the ice, the car, the rail spur, the coal. He studied the pilsner process carefully and cared what Budweiser tasted like. But his emotional distance from the product seems to have let him see the company as a system. The liquid was the cargo, and the cargo was not the business. His competitors in Milwaukee were brewers who sold beer. Busch was a shipping clerk who happened to own a brewery.
He built the brewery to look like something much grander. The Brew House, completed in 1891–1892, is still one of the strangest industrial interiors in the country, with "multi-storied hop chandeliers, intricate iron-work, and utilization of natural light," according to its National Register nomination. Around it, red-brick Romanesque buildings went up with square crenelated towers. By the time the site became a National Historic Landmark District in 1966 it covered 142 acres and 189 structures. A man who called his product slop housed it in a castle.
Custer in every saloon
In 1896, the year Michelob came out, Anheuser-Busch began sending a picture to America's bars.
The painting was Custer's Last Fight by Cassilly Adams, a St. Louis artist: the Little Bighorn as melodrama, Custer with saber raised, the Seventh Cavalry going down around him. Busch's company had it reproduced as a lithograph and distributed thousands of copies to saloons. More than a million copies were eventually printed, and the National Museum of American History calls it one of the most popular artworks in American history. It is not a beer advertisement in any obvious sense. It is a scene of American catastrophe, framed and hung over the bar, with the brewery's name attached. Whoever drank under it absorbed the association without being told what it was.
It was the best known of many giveaways. Through the 1880s and 1890s the company handed out bottle openers, calendars, corkscrews, pocketknives, postcards, and prints, all useful or decorative things people would keep. Busch himself, according to an often-repeated account, gave a gold-plated pocketknife instead of a business card. In its handle was a tiny peephole, and if you held it to your eye you saw a portrait of Adolphus Busch.
That knife says a lot about him. It is generous, a little absurd, and a calculated piece of self-promotion: a gift that carried the giver's face. He traveled the country in a private railroad car named Adolphus, and a spur line was laid so the car could pull up almost to the back door of One Busch Place. The same account that describes the pocketknife has him watching his workers bow as he passed and saying, "See, just like der king!" Whether he said exactly that is impossible to confirm. That the story attached itself to him and stayed is not.
The private life was regal and very expensive. There was the St. Louis mansion; two homes in Pasadena, where the gardens were filled with figures from the Brothers Grimm; a country estate and hop farm near Cooperstown; two villas in Germany; and the railcar. Holian notes that the Busches lived "a lavish lifestyle rivaling that of Old World royalty," and that Adolphus gave "small but not inexpensive gifts" to people he met, partly to impress them with how well he had done in the New World. He was also, Holian adds, "never a member of St. Louis high society." The old Anglo families who ran the city's clubs did not have him to dinner. He built his own court. The city's old money stayed apart from it.
The family histories that have accumulated since, among them The House of Anheuser-Busch and the German-language Adolphus Busch: Das Leben des Bier-Königs, keep coming back to one word, the one already in his slogan. Bier-König. The beer king. He had taken the title from a Bohemian town and, by force of salesmanship, attached it to himself.
The greatest industrial company in the world
Brewing was never going to be enough. The historian Todd Barnett, in a 2019 dissertation at the University of Missouri titled More Than Beer, argues that Busch "is mostly remembered as a brewer" but that his career was "always about more than beer," and that he planned to build "the greatest industrial company in the world" through a coordinated set of investments in oil, natural gas, coal, engines, machinery, utilities, and transportation.
The most striking of these was the engine. Busch bought from Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer whose compression-ignition engine was the most important power plant in the world, the rights to build diesel engines in America. Diesel was another German who had been educated partly abroad, and whose name eventually belonged more to his machine than to him. Busch founded the Diesel Motor Company, which became the American Diesel Engine Company and then the Busch-Sulzer Bros. Diesel Engine Company. For a time, Barnett writes, Busch held a monopoly on diesel manufacture in North America. A brewer from Kastel had brought the diesel to the United States.
He kept going. He was president of the South Side Bank and of the Manufacturers Railway, and a director of the Louisiana Purchase Company. He was a director of the 1904 World's Fair. In 1909 he was the leading investor in a consortium of St. Louis capitalists that bought Laclede Gas from the North American Company, the utility conglomerate that also owned Union Electric and the city's consolidated streetcar system. He invested heavily in Dallas, then growing quickly as an industrial city. In 1912 he opened the Adolphus Hotel there, the tallest building in Texas and named, naturally, for himself. Down Main Street, at 1509, was the Busch Building. Earlier he had bought breweries in Texas that opened the way to California and Mexico.
That kind of wealth meant access, and the letters show it. On November 10, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to thank Busch for a telegram and told him he had contributed more than anyone else to the result in Missouri. In July 1907 Roosevelt asked him to visit Washington when he returned from Europe. On November 18, 1907, in the middle of that year's panic, with money draining out of the interior to cover the run in New York, Roosevelt wrote to reassure him that Treasury Secretary George Cortelyou was "straining every nerve" to relieve the crisis. A president was explaining federal monetary policy to a brewer. In December 1909 Busch was writing to Hugo Münsterberg, the German-born Harvard psychologist, which fits his other main concern in those years: German culture at Harvard.
That concern produced a building. Busch gave Harvard a total of $350,000 to endow a Germanic museum, which became Adolphus Busch Hall at 29 Kirkland Street in Cambridge. In 1895 he joined the board of Washington University in St. Louis and stayed on it until he died, after which his son August took his seat. In October 1900 the cornerstone was laid for Busch Hall, the first building on what became the university's Danforth Campus. It was designed for chemistry, leased out during the World's Fair, and opened for classes in 1905. When the Rhine flooded Mainz-Kastel in 1882 he paid for repairs. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 he sent $100,000, half from his own pocket and half from the company.
The giving went to both sides of the Atlantic, as everything he did did. He gave Cambridge a German museum and gave Kastel flood relief. He was naturalized as an American. He bought German castles. He was usually somewhere between the two countries, by train or by ship, carrying gifts.
Budweiser spells temperance
The empire had one weak point, and it was the product itself.
By the 1890s the temperance movement had turned into a prohibition movement with real political force: the Anti-Saloon League, Frances Willard's women, Carry Nation with her hatchet in Kansas in 1900. Busch led the brewers' resistance. The PBS series Prohibition describes him as the head of the Brewers Association, who "threw himself in front of the Prohibition movement and held it off for as long as they could." His company ran advertisements arguing that beer was the moderate drink, the opposite of whiskey. One slogan read: "Budweiser Spells Temperance." Knoedelseder reports that when Busch met a president at a political function he lectured him for thirty minutes on the dangers of prohibition.
He also hedged. In 1908, as the drys gained ground, Anheuser-Busch introduced Bevo, a near-beer malt beverage with little or no alcohol. It became the most successful of the company's non-alcoholic products. The man who made the King of Beers was developing its replacement, in case beer was outlawed. A decade later, when it was, Bevo, malt extract, brewer's yeast, and ice cream kept the company alive and most of its workers employed.
Busch did not live to see that. He did see the hostility directed at him. In March 1911 Adolphus and Lilly celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. He gave her a diamond tiara. Gifts came from President William Howard Taft, from former President Roosevelt, and from the German Kaiser. Editorialists in the dry press were furious.
— Editorial on the Busch golden wedding, March 9, 1911Self-respecting American citizens, whether they are presidents, ex-presidents, or privates, should contribute nothing to his orgies.
"Privates" is a pointed word to use about a man who had been a Union corporal. The editorial was attacking more than a party. It was attacking the claim he had spent fifty years building: that a German brewer with a palace in the Rhineland and an accent he never lost could be a respectable American, honored by presidents. Within a few years, after he was dead and the country was at war with Germany, that claim would be much harder to defend. The beer would be outlawed, and German brewers, Busch's family included, would be treated with open suspicion.
A man of responsible position must have another ready
"For every man of responsible position," Adolphus Busch once said, "there must be ready another to succeed him." He had cause to think about it.
He and Lilly had thirteen children, and the list reads like a casualty report. Alexis was born and died in 1869. Emilee was born and died in 1870. Martha was born and died in 1873. Edward, the eldest son, died in 1879 at fifteen. Adolphus Jr. died in 1898 at about thirty. Peter died in 1905 at about thirty-three. When the father died in 1913 he left five daughters and two sons, August and Carl, and Carl died two years later. The heir was the one who outlived the others: August Anheuser Busch Sr., born in 1865 and named for both of the families the double wedding had joined.
August ran the company from 1913 to 1934, which meant he ran it through Prohibition. He built three upscale restaurants in St. Louis to make drinking look respectable, including the Bevo Mill, and when the brewery could no longer legally make beer he sold yeast, malt extract, ice cream, and Bevo. On April 7, 1933, when low-alcohol beer became legal again, his sons Adolphus III and August Jr., known as "Gussie," gave him a team of Clydesdales to celebrate. The horses that now stand for the brand never met the founder. They arrived twenty years after he died, as a gift from his grandsons to his son.
August Sr. died in 1934. Adolphus III ran the company through the war, built the baker's yeast business into the country's leader, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Barnes Hospital in 1946. Then came Gussie, who in 1953 bought the St. Louis Cardinals and gave the brewery thirty thousand captive customers per home game. When baseball would not let him name the ballpark after a beer, he named it Busch Stadium after himself and two years later introduced a beer called Busch. In 1957 Anheuser-Busch became the largest brewer in the United States. Gussie's son, August III, removed his father in a boardroom coup and ran the company from 1974 to 2002 with a cold efficiency his great-grandfather would probably have admired. His son, August IV, took over in 2006.
The family's rites of succession had something feudal about them. Knoedelseder reports that the firstborn sons were given a few drops of Budweiser on the tongue before they tasted their mother's milk. That is a coronation in miniature: the product given before the mother.
The reign ended in 2008. On June 11 of that year InBev, a Belgian-Brazilian brewer headquartered in Leuven, made an unsolicited offer of $65 a share, or $46.4 billion. By then the Busch family held roughly 4 percent of the company, not nearly enough to block a deal. The family split. On June 20, in a letter to the board, Adolphus A. Busch IV, the founder's great-grandson and a half-brother of August III, urged the directors to remember their fiduciary duty.
— Adolphus A. Busch IV, letter to the Anheuser-Busch board, June 2008Decisions could no longer be made simply because they benefited our family.
He went further. Under InBev, he wrote, "Budweiser would once again be truly the 'King of Beers.'" His brother Andrew issued a public statement the next day supporting the board and "a strong company headquartered in St. Louis, where it was born." On July 13 the board accepted $70 a share, about $52 billion in total equity and, as Knoedelseder noted, the largest cash transaction in the history of American business. The deal closed on November 18, 2008. The company that resulted was based in Belgium, where a young Adolphus Busch had once studied French.
The new owners moved fast. They laid off 1,400 employees and 415 contractors. They sold the theme parks and the corporate aircraft. They collected 1,200 BlackBerries from employees. They stopped giving out free beer. They extended supplier payment terms from 30 days to 120. When the restructuring was finished, three senior Anheuser-Busch managers were left. The brewery whose founder had given gold pocketknives to strangers now paid its suppliers four months late.
Born the hard way
In February 2017 Anheuser-Busch ran a Super Bowl commercial about its founder. It was called "Born the Hard Way," and Budweiser's internal marketing team had been through twelve revisions of the script by the time it was final. In it a young Adolphus Busch, ragged and determined, crosses the Atlantic in a storm, is told by an American, "You're not wanted here, go back home," jumps from a burning riverboat, and stumbles into St. Louis covered in mud. In a tavern he meets Eberhard Anheuser and tells him that next time they will drink the beer he has sketched in his notebook: Budweiser.
The ad went out a week after a presidential executive order barred entry to travelers from seven countries, and it set off a political fight. Conservatives called for a boycott. Historians had a different objection. "It is one giant Hollywood leap away from the real Adolphus Busch," Andrew Wanko told St. Louis Public Radio, "but his real life is no less fascinating." Busch had come from money, with an inheritance and a family allowance, into a city that was about a quarter German, where his brothers were waiting. He spent his first days loafing. There was no burning boat. There was no sketch of Budweiser in 1857. Budweiser came along nineteen years later, when he was almost forty, made with a friend who sold champagne.
The ad was untrue, and it was also faithful to the company's tradition. The monastery recipe was invented. The yeast in the ice-cream freezer was invented. The landmark plaque has him opening a brewery when he was thirteen. Budweiser was named for a town he had no connection to, and King of Beers was a Bohemian slogan turned around. The man who started all of it sold an idea of a beer and drank wine at home. His successors, now taking orders from Leuven, did the same thing he had done: they sold America a European's version of America.
The real story is still there, in the brickyard and in the cemetery.
When Lilly Busch saw the mausoleum her parents had built at Bellefontaine, she decided it was not good enough for her husband. She had it torn down. The family members buried inside were moved out and reinterred in the ground. In their place she hired Thomas Barnett to design a new tomb in the Bavarian Gothic style, built from stone quarried in Missouri, completed in 1921 at a cost of $250,000. She died in Pasadena on February 17, 1928, and was brought back to lie beside him.
The stone is carved with grapevines. They stand for the wine country around Kastel where Adolphus was born and for the wine he actually liked. Over the door, on the lintel, are Caesar's words: Veni, Vidi, Vici. I came, I saw, I conquered.
Part IIThe Playbook
Busch is easy to caricature as a Gilded Age showman with a railcar named after himself. That reading misses most of what he did. Underneath the tiaras and pocketknives was one of the most disciplined operating strategies of the nineteenth century: a logistics-first reading of a perishable market, a brand built by borrowing prestige and then inverting it, and an integration program that reached from the coal mine to the bar. Below are twelve principles drawn from the record. Some of them describe his blind spots as well as his strengths.
The principles
- 1.Sell the system, not the liquid.
- 2.Own the constraint that keeps your market local.
- 3.Borrow prestige, then invert it.
- 4.Concentrate on one flagship and price around it.
- 5.Build infrastructure that outlives your product edge.
- 6.Treat kinship and ethnicity as a distribution network.
- 7.Make the advertisement an object people keep.
- 8.Become the brand, and know what that costs.
- 9.Let the core business finance the adjacencies.
- 10.Hedge existential risk inside the product line.
- 11.Buy legitimacy where the establishment can't refuse it.
- 12.Succession is the last product you ship.
Principle 1
Sell the system, not the liquid
The most important fact about Adolphus Busch may be the one that sounds like trivia: he called his beer "dot schlop" and preferred wine. A founder in love with his product tends to optimize the product. Busch, trained as a clerk who priced cargo on the Rhine and on Commission Row, optimized the path between the product and the customer. Pasteurization, refrigerator cars, ice houses, bottles, and a rail spur were all solutions to one problem, which was how to get a perishable good to a distant buyer without it spoiling.
None of this means he ignored quality. He studied pilsner methods in Europe and cared about the flavor of Budweiser. But emotional distance from the liquid let him see that the brewery was one node in a network, and that the network was where the profits were. His Milwaukee rivals were brewers. He ran a logistics company that also brewed.
Tactic: Write down every step between your product and your customer's hand, and ask which step, if you owned it, would make the product itself matter less.
Principle 2
Own the constraint that keeps your market local
Before Busch, beer was local because it spoiled, the same way milk was. Every competitor accepted that as a fixed condition of the industry. Busch saw it as an engineering problem with a known solution, since Pasteur's work and mechanical refrigeration already existed. The constraint that protected every small brewery in America was the one he attacked.
He did not just solve it once. He took ownership of the solution. In 1876 he introduced refrigerator cars. By 1877 he had forty. In 1878 he spun off the St. Louis Refrigerator Car Company, and by 1888 it had 850 cars. Production went from 31,500 barrels in 1875 to more than 200,000 in 1881. Breaking a market's physical limit is valuable. Owning the means of breaking it compounds that value, because competitors then need your infrastructure to follow you.
Tactic: Identify the physical or regulatory limit that defines the size of your market, and invest in owning the solution rather than licensing it.
Principle 3
Borrow prestige, then invert it
Budweiser had no connection to Budweis. Michelob had none to Měcholupy. Busch took Bohemian place names because they told German-American drinkers this was the real thing from Europe. Then he made the move that turned imitation into ownership: "the Beer of Kings" became "the King of Beers."
The two phrases do different jobs. The original makes the beer a servant of royalty. Busch's version makes it the sovereign of its category. In a market crowded with local brewers selling similar lagers, he did not claim to be as good as the European original. He claimed to rule the whole class. Borrowed authority gets you a hearing. Inverted authority gets you the throne.
Tactic: Find the established marker of quality in your category, attach yourself to it, and then rewrite it so it describes your leadership of the category rather than your resemblance to an incumbent.
Principle 4
Concentrate on one flagship and price around it
Holian calls Busch's approach "a pioneering integrated marketing plan that focused on a single core brand." At a time when breweries sold whatever the local trade wanted, Busch put everything behind Budweiser: the railcars, the bottles, the lithographs. A national brand required one name repeated in every market, not a different lineup in each city.
When he expanded, he expanded upward. Michelob, introduced in 1896 as a "draught beer for connoisseurs," was a super-premium beer that made Budweiser look like a reasonable everyday choice. Gussie's Busch beer, sixty years later, extended the range downward. The flagship was never diluted. Other brands were placed around it to protect it.
Tactic: Pick one flagship, give it every distribution and marketing advantage, and position every new offering explicitly above or below it, never beside it.
Principle 5
Build infrastructure that outlives your product edge
Pasteurization did not stay a secret. Other brewers learned to bottle and to refrigerate. Busch's technical lead was always going to shrink. What lasted was the physical infrastructure: cars, ice houses, and the Manufacturers Railway, founded in 1887 and operated until 2011.
B
The Cold Chain, Assembled
How Busch turned a perishable local good into a national product, link by link.
1864
Busch takes over supervision of the brewery and its sales.
1869
Buys William D'Oench's half-interest; becomes company secretary.
1876
Budweiser launched with Carl Conrad; refrigerated rail cars introduced.
1877
Fleet reaches 40 refrigerator cars.
1878
St. Louis Refrigerator Car Company founded; pasteurization in use.
1882
Busch buys the Budweiser rights from the bankrupt Conrad.
1887
Manufacturers Railway founded to switch cars at the brewery.
1888
Refrigerator car fleet reaches 850.
1901
Annual sales pass one million barrels.
Product advantages are perishable in the same way beer was. Infrastructure behaves more like the Mississippi: slow to build, but once built, it shapes everything downstream. Busch spent the profits from his temporary technical lead on assets that would keep earning after the lead was gone.
Tactic: Assume your product advantage has a shelf life, and put the margin it earns into durable physical or network assets competitors would need years to copy.
Principle 6
Treat kinship and ethnicity as a distribution network
Barnett's dissertation emphasizes that "at every step, Busch depended on a network of friends and family to provide leadership and synergy between his companies." He came to St. Louis as part of a chain of Busch brothers. His first big customer became his father-in-law. His brother married his wife's sister on the same day. His partner on Budweiser was a German importer. His market was a city that went from 16,469 people to 451,770 in fifty years, swelled largely by German immigrants who already wanted lager.
This was not sentiment. It was a cheap source of trust in a market with weak contract enforcement and slow information. The German-American network gave Busch credit, customers, partners, and a home market to test in before he went national. The double wedding of 1861 was, among other things, a merger.
Tactic: Map the communities that already trust you, by origin, profession, or shared history, and use them as your first market and your first source of partners before you go after strangers.
Principle 7
Make the advertisement an object people keep
The Custer's Last Fight lithograph was not shaped like an advertisement. It was shaped like art. Thousands of copies went to saloons in 1896, more than a million were eventually printed, and it hung over bars for decades. The bottle openers, calendars, corkscrews, and pocketknives worked the same way. Each was useful or decorative enough to be kept, and each carried the brewery's name into the places where people drank.
Busch understood that the most efficient advertising is the kind the recipient chooses to keep in front of himself. A newspaper notice is thrown away the next day. A calendar stays up all year. A Custer print stays up for a generation.
Tactic: Design at least one piece of marketing that your customer would want to display or use daily even if your name weren't on it.
Principle 8
Become the brand, and know what that costs
The private railcar was named Adolphus. The Dallas hotel was the Adolphus. The pocketknife had his face in it. The tiara, the villas, and the Grimm figures in the Pasadena gardens were a deliberate royal performance that matched the King of Beers branding. Busch made himself the human version of the product's claim, and the press, presidents, and the public responded.
The cost appeared in 1911. When Taft and Roosevelt sent golden-anniversary gifts, the dry press attacked Busch personally, writing about "his orgies." A founder who becomes the brand gets free publicity and also gives every opponent a single target. The personal fusion also passed down to heirs who had the name without the judgment.
K
The Founder as Brand: Ledger
What Busch's personal mythology bought, and what it put at risk.
| Move | Benefit | Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Private railcar Adolphus | Scale Mobile headquarters for national selling | Conspicuous wealth for critics to point to |
| Gold pocketknife with his likeness | Scale Unforgettable calling card | Risk Founder and product become one target |
| Presidential correspondence | Scan Access during the 1907 panic | Gifts became ammunition for prohibitionists |
| Royal family culture | Try Loyalty and continuity for five generations | Risk Succession by birth order, not ability |
Tactic: If you make yourself the face of the company, also build institutional assets that would keep their value if your reputation became a liability tomorrow.
Principle 9
Let the core business finance the adjacencies
Busch used brewing profits to buy the American rights to Rudolf Diesel's engine and for a time held a monopoly on diesel manufacturing in North America. He was the lead investor in buying Laclede Gas in 1909. He built the tallest building in Texas. Barnett describes the overall aim as "the greatest industrial company in the world."
What lasted is the instructive part. The brewery and its infrastructure lasted a century and a half. The diesel company, the utility stakes, and the conglomerate as a whole did not hold together under his heirs. The adjacencies depended on his personal network and judgment, and they were not rooted in the operating system that made the brewery durable. Funding new ventures from a strong core is sound. Expecting them to survive without their founder is not.
Tactic: When cash from your core business funds a new venture, give that venture its own management and logic so it doesn't depend on your personal attention to survive.
Principle 10
Hedge existential risk inside the product line
Busch fought Prohibition head-on, with "Budweiser Spells Temperance," lobbying, and a thirty-minute lecture to a president. He also prepared for losing. In 1908, twelve years before national Prohibition, the company introduced Bevo, a near beer. When Prohibition arrived, Bevo, yeast, malt extract, and ice cream kept the plant running and most of the workers employed.
Founders usually do one or the other. They fight the threat and assume they'll win, or they accept it and pivot in a panic. Busch did both at once: he argued as though beer was safe and built as though it wasn't. The product that saved the company was developed by the man who most loudly insisted it would never be needed.
Tactic: For each existential threat to your business, fund one product or revenue line that would still work in the scenario where you lose the fight.
Principle 11
Buy legitimacy where the establishment can't refuse it
Holian notes that Busch was "never a member of St. Louis high society." The old families did not let him in. So he gave to institutions whose acceptance carried more weight than any club's: Washington University, where he joined the board in 1895 and paid for its first building; Harvard, where $350,000 built a Germanic museum with his name on it; San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; Kastel after the 1882 flood. The president of Harvard came to his funeral.
This was not pure cynicism. His attachment to German culture was real. But it worked strategically. A brewer at risk of being labeled a corrupter of American morals had become a benefactor of American education, with his name on buildings that would last longer than the political arguments of the day.
Tactic: If a gatekeeper won't accept you, identify the institutions that gatekeeper respects and build lasting, named relationships with them.
Principle 12
Succession is the last product you ship
"For every man of responsible position," Busch said, "there must be ready another to succeed him." He lived it painfully. Six of his thirteen children died before him, three of them adult sons. The company went to August Sr., then to August's sons in order, then by primogeniture and boardroom coup down to August IV. Drops of Budweiser on a firstborn's tongue were the family's version of a coronation.
The weakness of birth-order succession is that it does not select for ability. By 2008 the family held about 4 percent of the company, was split over InBev's bid, and the founder's great-grandson was telling the board that "decisions could no longer be made simply because they benefited our family." Busch built a system that could move beer across a continent. He did not build one that could choose the best leader to run it.
Tactic: Write down, now, the criteria your successor must meet, and make sure the process for choosing that person can override bloodline, seniority, and your own sentiment.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Adolphus BuschMy principle is that a man must love his business in order to make a success of it, and if he does not do this, he is not worthy of it and is bound to go under.
— Adolphus BuschThe best advice I can give a young man just starting in business life is to work faithfully and loyally and with untiring energy for his employer—to give his employer double what he is paid for.
— Adolphus BuschFor every man of responsible position there must be ready another to succeed him…
— Andrew Wanko, public historian, Missouri History Museum, 2017It is one giant Hollywood leap away from the real Adolphus Busch, but his real life is no less fascinating.
The first quotation sits uneasily beside "dot schlop." Busch loved his business, the ice houses, the cars, the empire, not necessarily the thing in the bottle. That distinction may explain a good deal of his success.
Maxims
- Love the business, not necessarily the product. Distance from the product can let you see the system it moves through.
- Spoilage defines markets. Whatever keeps your product local is the thing to own.
- Steal the crown, then reverse it. "Beer of Kings" became "King of Beers," and imitation became sovereignty.
- One flagship, many satellites. Every new brand should sit clearly above or below the flagship.
- Spend the temporary edge on permanent assets. Pasteurization spread to competitors; the railway ran until 2011.
- Marry the network before you build one. Kin, customers, and countrymen were Busch's first distribution system.
- Advertising people keep beats advertising people read. Custer stayed over the bar for a generation.
- If you become the brand, you also become the target. Tiaras win admirers, and they also give critics something to attack.
- Fight the threat and hedge it at the same time. Bevo was launched twelve years before it was needed.
- Succession by birth order is a hope, not a plan. The system Busch built could move beer across a continent but could not pick his best successor.
