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"Ah, This Is It." But with all the new techniques, everything still depends on the brewmaster. Each afternoon at 4 p.m., Anheuser-Busch's Brewmaster Frank H. Schwaiger, 46, a big, granite-faced Bavarian, walks to a special room at the brewery where a table is lined with unmarked glasses. Some hold the day's Budweiser, some Michelob, some specially air-expressed samples from Budweiser breweries in Newark and Los Angeles, some competitors' beer. Schwaiger sniffs each glass, holds it to the light to check the color, drinks deeply in great, man-sized gulps, never sipping or swirling the beer in his mouth the way whisky or wine tasters do. "Ah," he will say quietly, "this is it," or, "No, no, the malt, the malt." Then he will order any one of a thousand slight changes to keep the various Anheuser-Busch brews uniform. After two hours of tasting. Brewmaster Schwaiger heads for home in a rosy glow of beer and good cigars. Says he: "And I think then that perhaps I have the very best job in all the world."
Beyond the brewing, Anheuser-Busch faces complicated pricing and distribution problems. The company charges its wholesalers $2.46 per 24-bottle case, yet it makes only 14¢ profit. The rest of the average $5-per-case retail cost of Budweiser goes for retailers' and wholesalers' markups, steep state and local taxes. To conform with varying local liquor laws, Anheuser-Busch has to use some 600 different labels, packages and bottle caps.
The Family. In his zest, his super-salesmanship, his devotion to beer, Gussie Busch follows in the well-marked footsteps of his beer-baron ancestors. The brewery is still controlled by the founding families. Together with St. Louis' Anheuser family, the Busch clan owns 65% of Anheuser-Busch's 4,816,218 outstanding shares; Gussie himself owns 22%, worth some $20 million, and is paid a salary of $150,000 a year. Eberhard Anheuser, the 74-year-old grandson of one of the founders, is chairman of the board, but Gussie, grandson of the other founder, is the man in command. Says he: "The thing I want to do more than anything else in the world is run this business in a way that would make my grandfather and my father and my brother proud of me."
More than anyone in the family, Gussie Busch is like Adolphus Busch, the son of a prosperous Mainz, Germany wine merchant, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1857. Settling in St. Louis, Adolphus Busch got into the brewing business by marriage. In 1861 he married the 17-year-old daughter of Eberhard Anheuser, a prosperous St. Louis soap manufacturer who had taken over a small South Side brewery after its owners went broke. When young Adolphus got back from the Union Army, Eberhard Anheuser asked him to run the beer company. He could hardly have found a better man.