Free Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer by Maureen Ogle Page A

Frederick Pabst had little if any formal education. He more than compensated for that, however, with an astonishing intellect and what one Milwaukee businessman and longtime friend described as a “remarkable genius for organization.”
    Where and when Frederick Pabst met Phillip Best is not known. Their German heritage would have brought them together socially, but Best may have encountered the Captain during one of the brewer’s trips to Chicago. In any case, three days before his twenty-sixth birthday, in March 1862, Frederick Pabst married Best’s oldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Maria.
    The union benefited both men. Just three of Best’s seven children had survived infancy, and his only son, Henry, was but ten years old. Presumably Phillip and Frederick discussed the possibility of Pabst leaving the water for beer. Bad luck forced the issue. On December 16, 1863, a ferocious storm pounded Lake Michigan. Pabst was on a regular run, his beloved Sea Bird filled with passengers and crew. Faced with the possibility that vessel and passengers might not survive the onslaught of waves and wind, Pabst beached the steamer, a maneuver that damaged it but saved everyone’s life. It would cost $20,000 to repair the Sea Bird’s broken hull. A few weeks later, Frederick Pabst reported for work at the brewery on Chestnut Street.
    Another of Phillip’s sons-in-law, Emil Schandein, soon joined Pabst at the helm. Schandein had trained as an engineer before he emigrated to Philadelphia in 1856, at age sixteen. There he tended bar, a position that surely disappointed him intellectually and financially. A year or two later, he headed west to Illinois for the life of a traveling salesman. That work carried him to Watertown, Wisconsin, where he met the Best family. He married Phillip’s daughter Lisette in the spring of 1866 and went to work for his father-in-law soon after. As vice-president of Best Brewing, he complemented Pabst’s lack of education with his own scientific and technical expertise. But Schandein suffered from frail health—induced, perhaps, by the heavy drinking that provided an escape from an unhappy marriage (Lisette conducted a long affair with their son-in-law). He spent much of his time in restorative travel, during which he visited the company’s branch offices and spied on the competition.
     
    I N THE MID -1860s, Pabst and Schandein, Busch, and the Uihleins were just a few brewers among many, their brewhouses barely distinguishable from thousands of others. Each boasted a dozen or so employees, a steam engine, some wagons, and a few teams. Each served up about four thousand barrels of beer, or one-third of the output of what were then the country’s biggest brewhouses. Forty years later, these men helmed the three largest breweries in the world, sprawling factories whose output topped or neared the million-barrel mark.
    Historians today generally scorn the idea of the “great man,” but these émigrés who became the giants of the American brewing industry were made of rare and precious materials; were, in their own way, great men who ranged through their days oblivious to indecision or failure, dismissive of doubt and human frailty. Where some men edged their way toward change, Frederick Pabst dived headfirst. What some condemned as recklessness, Adolphus Busch embraced as lifeblood. August Uihlein seized the chance from which other men shrank. Their personalities differed, but circumstances and a passion for competition linked their futures.
    So did another fact, one so obvious that it’s easy to overlook: Each fell into the industry by accident rather than design. True, Adolphus Busch worked briefly—less than a year—at an uncle’s brewery, but his real training in the business, and that of the other great brewers, only began after he had sealed a partnership with a relative. Like the nation they adopted as home, these men were wedded to the future, not the past, and so entered their careers