Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer by Ogle Maureen

Author:Ogle, Maureen [Ogle, Maureen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2007-10-07T21:00:00+00:00

OVER THE NEXT few decades, these new realities would reshape the brewing industry. The dearth of breweries created an opportunity for those smart enough—and wealthy enough—to grab it. Brewers who would thrive in the middle and late twentieth century were those who used highways and wholesalers as well as modern advertising methods to move their beer into lager vacuums. The shift from saloons to the home market, and from local sales to long distance shipping, also turned the old preProhibition ratio of bottled beer to tap—about 90 percent tap—upside down. By 1935, about one-third of beer sold was already in a package. By 1940 it was half, and by 1960, 80 percent of beer would leave its brewery in a bottle or can. Successful brewers would learn how to capitalize on this shift.

In those first few years after repeal, none of this was yet obvious. But if we turn to the company whose owners visualized the new dynamic faster and more clearly than any other brewers, we understand the scope of the Busch family’s achievement. If any one factor explains the dramatic growth of Anheuser-Busch after repeal, it is that August A. Busch and his two sons accepted the challenge that Prohibition and repeal forced upon them: to learn how to do business—how to make business—beyond the insular world of nineteenth-century brewing.

For eighty-odd years, the Busch men had sold just one product—beer—and sold almost all of it in one place—saloons. They had long ago mastered the art of selling beer to bartenders, and of manipulating mortgages and leases in order to build a network of tied houses; they knew how to hand out beer trays and penknives stamped with the company name. But after January 1920, none of those skills mattered. “We had to forget that we were brewers, bred in the bone and trained that way for years,” August A. Busch told a reporter, a painful process that he likened to “tearing trees up by the roots.” The keys to not just survival but success, Busch understood, lay in diversification, distribution, and marketing.

Through trial-and-error, and more than a few failures, he and his employees gained an understanding of how to create a diverse line of products and introduce them into new territories. To sell ice cream, for example, Busch organized a marketing department—itself an innovation of the 1920s—and targeted four markets in four different regions of the country. Into each, his employees dispatched the new ice cream; $10,000 per week for advertising, which went “a long way in one place;” and a product-specific sales crew. If “demand persist[ed] after the nine-days’- wonder of the first promotion,” and the staff had amassed the necessary “experience on which to proceed, and the certainty” that it would “get [its] money back, and something more,” only then was it time for Anheuser-Busch to “undertake a national campaign.”

Looking back, the Busch strategy sounds absurdly basic, almost stupidly obvious, because it’s become the basis of the twentieth-century way of doing business. But to a brewer in the 1920s, it was all new, and after April 7, 1933, it became the key to the company’s success.

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