Adolphus Busch

A detailed Summary of Adolphus Busch

The "King of Brewers", oddly enough, was not really a brewer at all: he was a super-salesman, and perhaps the greatest ever heard of in America. Granted that he knew good beer and ever sought after it, the fact remains that he did not know how to make it at all. In the same course of time he found men who did, but that was a mere detail. He sold the bad almost as efficiently as he sold the good. He could have sold anything. At one point in the early career of Anheuser-Busch its product was so inferior that St. Louis rowdies were known to project mouthfuls of it back over the bar. But Adolphus kept on selling it, and it became better, and eventually the best in America.

Adolphus Busch was born on July 10, 1839 to Ulrich and Barbara Pfeiffer Busch. Growing up in Kastel, near Mainz, Germany, Adolphus was the twenty-first of twenty-two children. At the age of eighteen, he moved to the United States, to join his three brothers in St. Louis, Missouri. He first started working on the riverfront as a clerk in a wholesale supply house, but was soon interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. There was nothing to interest him in the war, so he withdrew honorably after a brief service to enter the brewers' supply business.

In 1859, Adophus joined in a partnership with Ernst Wattenberg to form Wattenberg, Busch, and Company, a wholesale commission house. This particular wholesale house became the most prosperous in St. Louis at the time.

Adolphus did not have the best beer in town by far. It is said that the beer that he initially tried to sell was so bad that customers often spit it back over the bar. William Lemp had a brew that was vastly superior to Adolphus', and Adolphus knew this, so he worked vigorously to correct his own inadequacy. However, in his search for a brewer and a formula, he never let his production be interrupted. If bad beer were all that he could produce, then he would have to find a market for it. All breweries had spending agents, but Adolphus gathered one of the most accomplished crews there was. As a result of this, his beer was soon selling almost as well as Lemp's.

In 1876, Adolphus and his friend Carl Conrad, a liquor importer, developed a "Bohemian-style" lager, inspired after his trip to the region. They used very time-consuming, traditional methods and only the finest barley malt, hops, and rice. Brewers in Bohemia generally named a beer after their town with the suffix "er." Beers produced in the town of Plzen, for example, were called Plzners, or Pilsners. Busch and Conrad had visited another town also known for its breweries, about 65 miles south of Plzen, called Ceske Budejovice, later pronounced as Budweis. After their trip Europe, they introduced their beer as "Budweiser Lager Beer" in St. Louis, brewed by E. Anheuser Co.'s Brewing Association, and bottled and distributed by Carl Conrad. Adolphus considered this to be "The King of Beers." The Anheuser company was renamed Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association in 1

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Approximate Word count = 1184
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People