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A good salesman, with training in chemistry and physics, Adolphus Busch increased the brewery's annual production from a trickle to 25,000 bbls. within eight years. He also began brewing Budweiser after a tour of Europe. According to the apocryphal story, Adolphus got the secret formula of the famed brew of a monastery. Actually, he developed the formula with Carl Conrad, a St. Louis restaurateur, tried to match the light beer he found in the Bohemian town of Budweis. He felt that it would become more popular in the U.S. than the heavy beer then being made. He was the first big brewer to perfect refrigerated railroad cars, thus opening vast new markets in the South, installed the first pasteurization process for beer. In 1879 the name Busch first appeared in the company title, and Adolphus was well on his way to pushing beer sales past the 1,000,000-bbl. mark.
By the time his grandson (Anheuser-Busch's current president) was born in 1899, Adolphus Busch was a legendary figure in St. Louis. At his 20-room brick mansion he lavishly entertained such guests as Sarah Bernhardt and Teddy Roosevelt; he bought homes in Pasadena, Calif. and Cooperstown, N.Y., bought himself a manor on Germany's Rhine, had himself painted by Sweden's Anders Zorn. Traveling to New York in his private car, he passed out gold coins on all sides. Adolphus Busch could afford it. When he died in 1913, he left his family an estate valued at $50 million and a brewery turning out beer at the rate of 1,600,000 bbls. a year.
The Dark Days. His son, August Busch Sr., took over the presidency, steadily boosted sales even through World War I, when anti-German feeling ran high in the U.S. He built the chateau on his estate to move his children out to the country, where, as Gussie Jr. says, "a kid just couldn't have had more." Friends remember young Gussie as difficult for other children to get along with, recall that he was hot-tempered and impatient with dogs and horses. Says Gussie himself: "Let's just say I was the original Peck's Bad Boy." He went to Fremont Public School in St. Louis, then tried Smith Academy, a private school. "Without doubt," says Busch, "I was the world's lousiest student. I never graduated from anything." Instead, Gussie Busch learned his lessons at the brewery, where he first went to work in 1922, just two years after Prohibition had staggered the industry.
While Gussie scrubbed vats, his father tried to hold the company together and fought for survival and repeal. Anheuser-Busch turned from beer to a variety of other products: yeast, refrigeration cabinets, bus and truck bodies, corn and malt syrup, and a variety of soft drinks, including a chocolate soft drink named Carcho. The losses were staggering. Nevertheless, the company stayed in business. Young Gussie used the time to climb through the ranks. By 1924 he was brewery superintendent; in 1926 he was named general manager and sixth vice president; eight years later, when Prohibition was finally repealed, he was ready to fill the jobs of first vice president and boss of the entire brewery division.