In South St. Louis, near the bleak and dreary Mississippi riverfront, there stands a gingerbread jumble of 100 buildings which form a city in themselves. They cover an area larger (72 city blocks) than Chicago's Loop, contain a spic & span power plant big enough to serve a city the size of Dallas, and are surrounded with as much rail trackage as Indianapolis. Each year, the buildings consume 3,522,980,000 gallons of water, 4,500,000 bushels of malted barley and the entire output (192,000 tons) of a nearby coal mine. Over them all hangs the sick-sweet smell of malt and hops. The name of the city-within-a-city: Anheuser-Busch, Inc., largest U.S. brewery (by area) and maker of famed Budweiser and Michelob beers.
Despite its size, Anheuser-Buschmen think that their empire is not yet big enough. This week the company will break ground for a new $20 million plant in Newark, its first eastern brewery. When it is completed in 1951, the new plant will turn out 1,000,000 barrels of beer a year, and put Newark close to the nation's biggest brewing centers—Milwaukee, St. Louis and New York. With its new plant, Anheuser-Busch will save on shipping costs to the East Coast. It also hopes to regain its place, lost a few years ago to Milwaukee's Schlitz, as the nation's biggest beer producer.*
Enter Adolphus. The Anheusers and the Busches got together in St. Louis before the Civil War, when Adolphus and Ulrich Busch, young sons of a vast family (21 children) of German immigrants, married two daughters of Erberhard Anheuser, a small and not very successful brewer. Son-in-law Adolphus, who combined a Teutonic genius for organization with the salesmanship of a pitchman, soon built up annual production to 25,000 barrels. In 1876, he got a new and better beer formula from a local restaurateur and called the new brew Budweiser.
He was one of the first to use the new discovery of pasteurization to keep bottled beer from spoiling, and thus was a jump ahead of most U.S. brewers, in national distribution. By 1901, Anheuser-Busch, Inc. was turning out more than 1,000,000 barrels a year. Adolphus also took some sidelines: he built the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, and brought the first diesel engine patents from Switzerland to the U.S.
Just outside St. Louis, he also built himself a turreted, U-shaped mansion with an armor-filled hunting room and a kitchen that could serve a 40-place dinner at the drop of a bottle cap. One story has it that once, when driving in his open coach near the brewery, Adolphus waved graciously back to admiring friends and retainers on the sidewalk and said to a friend: "You see, choost like a king!"
In his later years, old Adolphus began to spend more time abroad, kept in touch with St. Louis by cable from his luxurious "castle on the Rhine" (cable tolls often ran to more than $100 a day). In 1913, his son August Sr. took over the old family company.