The "King of Brewers", oddly enough, was not really a brewer at all: he was a super-salesman, and perhaps the greatest ever heard of in America. Granted that he knew good beer and ever sought after it, the fact remains that he did not know how to make it at all. In the same course of time he found men who did, but that was a mere detail. He sold the bad almost as efficiently as he sold the good. He could have sold anything. At one point in the early career of Anheuser-Busch its product was so inferior that St. Louis rowdies were known to project mouthfuls of it back over the bar. But Adolphus kept on selling it, and it became better, and eventually the best in America.
             Adolphus Busch was born on July 10, 1839 to Ulrich and Barbara Pfeiffer Busch. Growing up in Kastel, near Mainz, Germany, Adolphus was the twenty- first of twenty-two children. At the age of eighteen, he moved to the United States, to join his three brothers in St. Louis, Missouri. He first started working on the riverfront as a clerk in a wholesale supply house, but was soon interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. There was nothing to interest him in the war, so he withdrew honorably after a brief service to enter the brewers' supply business. In 1859, Adophus joined in a partnership with Ernst Wattenberg to form Wattenberg, Busch, and Company, a wholesale commission house. This particular wholesale house became the most prosperous in St. Louis at the time.
             Among his customers was Eberhard Anheuser. In 1859, Eberhard, a successful St. Louis businessman, first financed a loan to a struggling neighborhood brewery called The Bavarian. After purchasing the brewery, he renamed it as E. Anheuser and Company. Eberhard, being a brewer and not a salesman, found it hard to dispose of the beer that his small equipment produced. Before long he found himself owing Adolphus a seemingly large sum of money. The bill kept growing larger, and...