Adolphus Busch

• Born: July 10, 1839
• Birthplace: near Mainz, Hesse (now in Germany)
• Died: October 10, 1913
• Place of death: near Langenschwalbach, Germany

American brewer and industrialist

Busch built a beer-brewing empire that eventually became Anheuser-Busch Companies and later was acquired by Belgian brewer InBev.

Sources of wealth: Manufacturing; sale of products

Bequeathal of wealth: Children

Early Life

Adolphus Busch (ay-DOHL-fus buhsh) was born near Mainz, Hesse, on July 10, 1839, the youngest of twenty-one children. As a boy, he began working with his father, a wine merchant and brewing supplies dealer. He was educated in Mainz and Darmstadt and attended high school in Brussels. When he was seventeen, he went to work as a shipping clerk in a mercantile house in Cologne. Here he learned valuable business skills that would allow him to amass his great fortune.

First Ventures

When he became eighteen, Busch left Germany for the United States and set up his own supply store with his brother Ulrich. Two other Busch brothers had already left for America and had settled in St. Louis, Missouri, which was quickly becoming a virtual German colony. He married Lilly Anheuser, and his brother Ulrich married her sister Anna, in a double ceremony in 1861.

Busch went in to the brewing business in 1865 with his wife’s father, Eberhard Anheuser, who already owned the struggling Bavarian Brewery Company. Together they created Budweiser, a lighter and sweeter variety of beer than others at the time. Busch worked hard to have his beer sold in taverns, even paying some owners to keep it on tap, although it tasted horrible. When the brewers finally created a good-tasting batch, the beer became a sought-after beverage. As Budweiser became popular, Busch gradually reduced the number of beers manufactured by the company in order to focus on the most profitable brands.

When Anheuser died in 1879, Busch took over as president of the company. Busch increased production and turned a small brewing company into a city-sized corporation housed in St. Louis. In the laboratories at Anheuser-Busch, scientists developed a new pasteurization technique that allowed beer to be shipped without refrigeration, which meant that beer could be transported from coast to coast without turning sour. Busch was also famous for his ingenious marketing and sales techniques. He focused on building a brand, and because of this, Budweiser beer remains one of the most recognizable products in the world.

Mature Wealth

Busch was able to amass his wealth by keeping ownership of the company within the family When he first went to work for Anheuser, there were 480 shares of stock in the company—238 belonging to him, 2 shares to the brewmaster, and the remaining 240 shares split between Anheuser and his daughter Lilly. After Anheuser’s death in 1879, Busch began buying up shares of the company from Anheuser’s relatives, increasing his total shares from 238 to 267. He also created a vertically integrated corporation by owning companies that supplied the materials necessary to make his beer. He owned glass bottle plants, ice-making businesses, refrigerated railroad cars, and eventually the railroads themselves. Production increased by more than 200 percent by 1880, with a record production of more than 130,000 barrels of beer. He added workers and buildings at the brewery in St. Louis and employed guides to give tours of the facility to visitors. In the fifteen years since Busch went into business with Anheuser, he had taken a small local brewery and turned it into a national empire that was generating more than $2 million a year.

Busch’s heirs continued his marketing legacy, with the most notable and longest-running campaign being the world-famousBudweiser Clydesdales, an iconic eight-horse hitch (team) that travels to more than one thousand events annually. The company also mass-markets its products through major sports sponsorships and partnerships, and since 1980 it has allied with Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League (NHL), National Basketball Association (NBA), twenty-eight National Football League (NFL) teams, Major League Lacrosse, the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA), the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), the U.S. Olympic team, the Olympic Games, and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup.

Legacy

While he lived lavishly and never thought twice about spending money to close business deals and expand his enterprises, Busch still managed to amass more than $50 million by his death in 1913, at the age of seventy-four. His estate was the largest ever probated in the state of Missouri. Over the years, he had given generously to education and other charities, but his prime focus was creating an empire out of his small brewing city in St. Louis. In July, 2008, Anheuser-Busch made the decision to sell to Belgian brewer InBev for $75 a share. The acquisition of Anheuser-Busch by InBev, which had more than 120,000 employees in more than thirty countries around the world, created the world’s largest brewing company. InBev agreed to reserve a spot on the board for the chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch, August A. Busch IV, and kept the North American headquarters in St. Louis in order to retain the history of the iconic American brand. In 2009, the company was led by Busch IV, and the Busch family had a total fortune of more than $1.3 billion.

Bibliography

Hernon, Peter, and Terry Ganey. Under the Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Krebs, Roland, and Percy J. Orthwein. Making Friends Is Our Business: One Hundred Years of Anheuser-Busch. Chicago: Cuneo Press, 1953.

Ogle, Maureen. Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. Boston: Harvest Books, 2007.