Region & History

St. Louis sits on the Mississippi, just below where the Missouri flows in. In the 19th century so many Germans settled here that breweries became part of the cityscape. The original Anheuser-Busch plant still stands today in the Soulard neighborhood, tracing back to the Bavarian Brewery of 1852.

Johann Adam Lemp arrived in 1838 from Eschwege in Hesse and is considered one of the pioneers of lager beer in the city. In the early 1840s he founded a small brewery, and his son William built a much larger one on Cherokee Street in the 1860s. By the 1870s, Lemp at times outpaced Anheuser-Busch in both volume and reach.

Eberhard Anheuser took over the Bavarian Brewery, and his son-in-law Adolphus Busch joined after the Civil War. Busch had married Anheuser's daughter Lilly in 1861. In 1879 the company took the name Anheuser-Busch, and after Eberhard Anheuser's death in 1880, Busch led it as president.

Budweiser came onto the market in 1876, a pale lager modeled on the Bohemian style. The brand initially belonged to Carl Conrad, a wine and champagne merchant who had Anheuser-Busch brew the beer for him. When Conrad went bankrupt, Busch bought the rights in 1882.

Prohibition, the nationwide alcohol ban in the US from 1920 to 1933, didn't survive at Lemp; the brewery grounds now serve as storage and studio space. Anheuser-Busch stayed afloat with other products, including the non-alcoholic Bevo. When the ban ended, Clydesdale horses pulled the first wagon of legal beer out of the brewery in 1933.

In 2008 the Belgian-Brazilian company InBev bought the group, which has been known as AB InBev ever since. There's no protected designation of origin for beer from St. Louis as there is in the European register: Budweiser is a brand, not a protected name. Alongside the giant, craft brewers like Schlafly brew their own beers.