Read Online Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer by Maureen Ogle - Free Book Online
Authors: Maureen Ogle
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Winkelmeyer and Uhrig, is an unanswerable question. And a moot one, because in November of that year, “normal” fell by the wayside. Americans elected Abraham Lincoln president. A few weeks later, a convention of South Carolinians voted to secede from the Union.
Tension rattled St. Louis, a city divided against itself in a state wracked with conflict. Missouri had entered the Union as a slave state, and many residents owned slaves and identified with the Confederate cause. The core of Union support centered on the Germans living in and around St. Louis; they abhorred slavery as a threat to individual rights. President Lincoln understood that if Missouri fell to the Confederacy, he and his army would lose control of the Mississippi River, the main highway running deep into Confederate territory. He and his generals had to hold Missouri, and that meant keeping a grip on St. Louis with its wharves, warehouses, and vital rail links to the eastern United States.
Over the next few months, Union officials struggled to maintain order in a city riven by loathing and hatred. “I see nothing but ruin and starvation,” lamented one Confederate sympathizer, “and when it will end God only knows, our City is encompass’d with armed Goths and Vandels [sic], for they are Dutch [ Deutsch, or Germans] or Poles that cannot speak our language and they are searching every carriage as it passes, and every house in the environs of the City for arms and ammunition . . . ” Eberhard Anheuser surely sighed with relief when federal troops seized control of the arsenal, a hulking structure filled with gunpowder and weapons that sat just two blocks from his brewery.
Amidst the turmoil, Adolphus Busch played the kind of hand that Joseph Schlitz and Valentin Blatz would have recognized: In March, he married Anheuser’s daughter Lilly (Adolphus’s older brother Ulrich, who also lived in St. Louis, married another Anheuser daughter on the same day). With that union, Busch committed himself to his adopted home.
He made a good choice at a good time. The war proved a godsend to the city’s beermakers: St. Louis swarmed with troops headed into or out of enemy territory, and with an endless stream of prisoners, wounded soldiers, refugees, escaped and freed slaves, and other bits of human flotsam and jetsam. Military clerks trudged from warehouse to wharf, from butcher shop to bakery, in search of supplies. Bricklayers, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and carpenters arrived. Soldiers guarded wharves, warehouses, and the arsenal, as well as the ring of fortifications that dotted the city’s western fringes. Everyone needed beer. “I never saw a city where there is as much drinking of liquor as here,” marveled a physician stationed with the Union army. “Everybody —almost—drinks. Beer shops and gardens are numerous.” No fan of drink, drinkers, or Catholics, the good doctor blamed the city’s sorry state on the Germans, who, he reported, clung “to their meerschaums & beer, and their miserable faith . . . ”
His disdain was lost on the multitudes. This was a war fought with beer. Military commanders banned intoxicants from camp and field, leaving lager—officially nonintoxicating—as the troops’ choice of drink. Military supply clerks contracted with hundreds of brewers to supply men with lager, which traveled better and lasted longer than ale. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers forged friendships and built camaraderie over tin cups of lager, an experience they carried home when the war ended.
Lager even received a stamp of approval from the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization that monitored the troops’ health. A USSC physician who studied camp diets reported that lager drinkers suffered less from diarrhea than did non—beer drinkers. Lager, he noted, “regulates the bowels, prevents constipation, and becomes in this way a valuable substitute for vegetables” (a food in short supply). “I encourage all
Tension rattled St. Louis, a city divided against itself in a state wracked with conflict. Missouri had entered the Union as a slave state, and many residents owned slaves and identified with the Confederate cause. The core of Union support centered on the Germans living in and around St. Louis; they abhorred slavery as a threat to individual rights. President Lincoln understood that if Missouri fell to the Confederacy, he and his army would lose control of the Mississippi River, the main highway running deep into Confederate territory. He and his generals had to hold Missouri, and that meant keeping a grip on St. Louis with its wharves, warehouses, and vital rail links to the eastern United States.
Over the next few months, Union officials struggled to maintain order in a city riven by loathing and hatred. “I see nothing but ruin and starvation,” lamented one Confederate sympathizer, “and when it will end God only knows, our City is encompass’d with armed Goths and Vandels [sic], for they are Dutch [ Deutsch, or Germans] or Poles that cannot speak our language and they are searching every carriage as it passes, and every house in the environs of the City for arms and ammunition . . . ” Eberhard Anheuser surely sighed with relief when federal troops seized control of the arsenal, a hulking structure filled with gunpowder and weapons that sat just two blocks from his brewery.
Amidst the turmoil, Adolphus Busch played the kind of hand that Joseph Schlitz and Valentin Blatz would have recognized: In March, he married Anheuser’s daughter Lilly (Adolphus’s older brother Ulrich, who also lived in St. Louis, married another Anheuser daughter on the same day). With that union, Busch committed himself to his adopted home.
He made a good choice at a good time. The war proved a godsend to the city’s beermakers: St. Louis swarmed with troops headed into or out of enemy territory, and with an endless stream of prisoners, wounded soldiers, refugees, escaped and freed slaves, and other bits of human flotsam and jetsam. Military clerks trudged from warehouse to wharf, from butcher shop to bakery, in search of supplies. Bricklayers, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and carpenters arrived. Soldiers guarded wharves, warehouses, and the arsenal, as well as the ring of fortifications that dotted the city’s western fringes. Everyone needed beer. “I never saw a city where there is as much drinking of liquor as here,” marveled a physician stationed with the Union army. “Everybody —almost—drinks. Beer shops and gardens are numerous.” No fan of drink, drinkers, or Catholics, the good doctor blamed the city’s sorry state on the Germans, who, he reported, clung “to their meerschaums & beer, and their miserable faith . . . ”
His disdain was lost on the multitudes. This was a war fought with beer. Military commanders banned intoxicants from camp and field, leaving lager—officially nonintoxicating—as the troops’ choice of drink. Military supply clerks contracted with hundreds of brewers to supply men with lager, which traveled better and lasted longer than ale. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers forged friendships and built camaraderie over tin cups of lager, an experience they carried home when the war ended.
Lager even received a stamp of approval from the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization that monitored the troops’ health. A USSC physician who studied camp diets reported that lager drinkers suffered less from diarrhea than did non—beer drinkers. Lager, he noted, “regulates the bowels, prevents constipation, and becomes in this way a valuable substitute for vegetables” (a food in short supply). “I encourage all
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