Beer Factoids from Ambitious Brew

• Philip Best, who created the brewery that would become Pabst, was too poor to pay for his first boiler in Milwaukee, so instead he promised (and delivered) a lifetime supply of free beer to the ironmonger who built it for him.
• Like many German brewers, the Best family left its brewing business in Germany in the early 1840s in part because the falling price of tea and coffee meant that more and more customers were abandoning beer in favor of “the intoxicating novelty of caffeine.”
• In the early nineteenth century, Americans didn’t drink beer, they drank whiskey—more than 7 gallons per adult a year. There were 14,000 commercial distilleries in the United States but only about 200 small breweries.
• American brewing peaked in 1873, when there were 4,131 breweries. By 1978, beer’s low point, 41 brewers operated 89 plants. Today breweries number a healthy 1,400.
• In 1840, Americans drank 2.5 gallons of spirits per capita, but only about a gallon of beer. But in 1896, they downed 15 gallons of beer (and a mere gallon of liquor). Pre-Prohibition beer consumption reached its high point in 1914 at 21 gallons. Beer came back in 1933, but it was 1975 before Americans would drink that much beer again. The post-Prohibition high came in 1981 with 23.8 gallons. Since then, consumption has drifted steadily downward. Spirits, in contrast, have held steady at about a gallon per capita per year.
• The Republican party was formed, in part, thanks to beer—it was created to appeal to immigrants and urban dwellers who were equally repelled by the Democrats’ support of slavery and the Whigs’ support of anti-drink temperance activists.
• Through the last half of the nineteenth century, doctors often prescribed lager beer to pregnant and nursing women, on the grounds that its barley content provided them with necessary nutrients.
• The first beer labeled “Budweiser” was sold in the United States in 1876. A hugely popular brew from the very beginning, it was modeled on a fine lager from the ancient Bohemian city of Budweis, and its success helped transform all American beers into paler and more elegant brews than they had been. It was also expensive: In 1878, a form bottle cost the equivalent of $17 in today’s money.
• The Michelob you drink today is based on a recipe first brewed in 1896 by Adolphus Busch of Anheuser-Busch. In the 1960s his grandson Gus put the beer in a bottle with a fancy label and charged the astronomical price of $7 a case for it ($43 in today’s money).
• The second largest brewer in New York, Jacob Ruppert, also owned the Yankees from late 1914 until he died in 1939. He stole Babe Ruth away from the Red Sox.
• The nation’s oldest brewery is D.G. Yuengling and Son, which was founded in 1829 by David Gottlieb Yuengling. It’s the second-oldest family-owned business in the United States. The family may have to change the name: Current president Dick Yuengling’s daughters have joined the company.
• The famous Budweiser Clydesdales have their roots in Adolphus Busch’s fondness for Percheron horses: He stabled them in buildings that featured Tiffany stained-glass windows.
• In order to one-up Anheuser-Busch at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Frederick Pabst spent the equivalent of $1.9 million in today’s money on a 13 square foot model of his brewery plated in 24-carat gold. The “America’s Best” slogan of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon beer dates from this mammoth event, where the fact that no grand prize was awarded didn’t stop both Pabst and Busch from claiming it.
• The first tax on beer was levied in 1862 by the cash-strapped Union Congress. By the early 1900s, taxes on beer (along with wine and spirits) brought in fully 40 percent of the nation’s revenues.
• When the United States entered World War I in 1917, food had to be rationed, and the brewers’ use of grain was seen as unpatriotic: “Every bushel of grain that is destroyed” in the Pabst or Busch brewhouse, wrote one journalist, “serves the Kaiser just as well as a bushel sunk by a submarine at sea.”
• Prohibition was repealed in 1933 thanks in large part to the Depression, since the government wanted tax revenues from alcohol. And beer delivered: Forty-eight hours after beer was legalized, the nation’s brewers had deposited 10 million dollars in taxes (the equivalent of $145 million today).
• In the 1920s, women’s clothing became lighter and clingier, women became obsessed with their weight, and they turned up their noses at beer on the grounds that it was fattening. To persuade them otherwise, brewers sponsored women’s days in department stores, featuring recipes made with beer and marketing beer as a beauty product (one suggestion was to use beer as a hair rinse before you rolled your coif in curlers). Brewers also sponsored soap operas on the radio.
• Miller High Life was the first beer to be marketed primarily to women. Touted as the “Champagne of Bottle Beer,” it was light, dry, and pale.
• In the 1950s, Americans favored colas and martinis over beer. Weber Waukesha Brewing in Wisconsin fought back with “Sassy,” which contained the same alcohol content as regular lager, but came in flavors like cherry punch and cola. The company’s ads promised the beverage left no tell-tale “after-breath.”
• The first “Lite” beer came out in 1967, but it took off when Miller Brewing executive John Murphy bought it and relaunched it as Miller Lite. In Lite’s first few years, Murphy spent more than $20 million on promotion and advertising that included the classic “Tastes Great/Less Filling” campaigning.
• Coors, a small Colorado brewery once known only in the western United States, became immensely popular in the early 1970s when it was discovered by hippies, college students, and Paul Newman. Gerald Ford had it flown to the White House for Mexican food night. It was embraced for its purity and counterculture credibility despite the Coors family’s disdain for “pleasure-loving parasites,” as they labeled hippies.
• Jim Koch, the founder of Samuel Adams, descends from five generations of brewers; the original Sam Adams lager recipe is one his father discovered among his grandfather’s papers in the family attic.
• Starbucks founder Gordon Bowker also co-founded Redhook Ale Brewery of Seattle.
• Anheuser-Busch pulled its popular Spuds Mackenzie ads in the late 1980s when the company was accused of marketing to children. (Spuds was female, by the way.)
• Portland, Oregon boasts the nation’s highest consumption rate of craft beer, and the metropolitan area has more breweries than any city in the world.