Liquor Dealer Carl Conrad —“This Bud’s for You!”

Now it can be told.   Budweiser, perhaps the most famous name in beer, was not first coined by the Anheuser-Busch Company of St. Louis, but by a liquor dealer in the same city.  His name was Carl Conrad.  Beginning in 1876, Conrad’s Budweiser story is one of rapid rise as he opened branch offices in a number of cities and towns, and just as rapid a fall as he became overextended financially. In the end Conrad, shown here, was forced to assign the brand to his good friend Adolphus Busch.  And the rest is beer history.

Born in 1843 in Hesse-Daemstadt, Germany,  Conrad emigrated to the United States as a youth and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, a city with a strong German presence.   After what appears to have been employment in one of the many St. Louis liquor houses, Conrad at about the age of 23, opened his own establishment in 1866 at 20 N. Fifth Street. He called it C. Conrad & Company.  Before long he found it necessary to expand and opened stores at 7 North Second and 205 Market Streets, and later, a building at 407-417 N. Sixth Street shown here on a trade card.

His proprietary brands were “Moss Rose Bourbon” and “Governor’s Choice Rye, both of which he trademarked in 1882.  His source for those whiskeys was the Silver Creek Distillery, a modest-sized facility (RD#531, 8th District) in Madison County, Kentucky. [See my post of July 27, 2022 on the distillery.]  Both whiskeys had a sizable customer base, as indicated by the jug shown left, from a Buffalo, New York liquor dealer.  Conrad advertised these labels through shot glasses, below, given to wholesale customers.  Note the CCC monograms — Carl C. Conrad.

But whiskey was not what made Conrad memorable but his role in the creation and early marketing of Budweiser beer.  One version of the story is that on a trip to Europe about ten years after opening his liquor house, he dined in a small brewery in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) where he was served a beer that he decided immediately was the best he had ever tasted.  This brew used a different mashing method from the usual pilseners.  The result was in a lighter color and more effervescence.  Some said it “sparkled.”

Fired with the idea that such a beer would have a ready market in the United States, Conrad hurried back to Saint Louis to convince his good buddy Adolphus Busch about its potential.  Conrad was not a brewer but Busch was.  Conrad asked him to make a rice-based beer that would replicate the taste of the Bohemian brew.  Agreeing to a contract with the liquor dealer, Busch set out to create a “very pale, fine beer” like nothing else on the American market.  Conrad would bottle the brew and see to its marketing.  Recalling the Bohemian town of Budweis, known for beer quality, he decided to call his brainchild “Budweiser Lager Beer,” and designed the label shown above.  (Look familiar?)  Budweiser bottles were embossed with the Conrad company name.  

Believing that his beer would have wide appeal, he concentrated his energies on creating a national customer base. Beginning in 1876 Conrad continued the pattern of rapid expansion he had followed in growing his St. Louis liquor business.  His enthusiasm for Budweiser led him to open outlets in a host of distant towns.   As shown below, advertised on trade cards, Conrad boasted of “branch offices “ in Denver, Leadville, and Gunnison City, Colorado, and Dallas and Buena Vista, Texas. He claimed two more in Germany.  On a sales visit to California, he invested $3,000 (equivalent today to $85,000) outfitting a “fine place where people could find [his] beer.”  Later Conrad added Chicago, New York and New Orleans to outlet locations.

Conrad initially was successful in rapidly expanding his customer base to the point that Budweiser soon was available nationwide. He sold a quarter of a million bottles in twelve months, and by late 1878 had sold six thousand barrels of the beer.   By the early 1880s, however, this business plan had run into trouble.  Railroads had raised freight costs from eastern parts of the United States to the West by so much that it was cheaper to send barrels by sea “around the Horn” to California than across country by train.  Certain thirsty western mining towns were getting their beer delivered by mule train, as depicted in this Budweiser ad. 

Interruptions in supply lines were compounded by what a New York Times report suggested in January 1883:  Noting that Conrad’s beer empire had grown very fast:  “Their branch offices were so scattered they found it impossible to get in collections as rapidly as needed.”  The Times likely was referring to the lack of beer to sell and the paucity of revenues to justify the heavy advertising and cost of operating so many outlets.

 

Compounding Conrad’s problems may have been the bottle shortage in the West.  Beer and other bottled products were shipped long distances by wagon under difficult conditions. Because of this, empty glass bottles became an important commodity.  

One historian has observed:  “Teamsters could purchase a dozen bottles of liquor in Missouri for four dollars each, drink the contents along the way, and trade the empty bottles each for six dollars worth of produce in New Mexico.”  From a financial standpoint it was important that most bottles be returned to the originator for refilling. Unfortunately for Conrad,  Budweiser bottles were often not returned but continued to be refilled elsewhere, even by competitors, or put to other uses like this house constructed in Rhyolite, Nevada, by a local saloonkeeper.  It largely was made of Budweiser bottles.

Conrad did his best to prop up the merchandising structure he so lovingly had constructed for his beloved brew by subsidizing branch offices from profits of his St. Louis liquor stores.  Adolphus Busch informed the New York Times that Conrad’s assets were expected to be sufficient to cover his debts. A meeting of the creditors on January 22, 1883, however, revealed that Conrad’s assets would actually be about $140,000 short of paying his outstanding bills.

Acknowledging that he had run out of resources, Conrad declared bankruptcy.  The Lindell Glass Co. of St. Louis, above, a firm that made beer bottles, was one of the largest creditors, owed between $32,000 and $33,000.  Although the loss hit Lindell hard and it teetered close to closing, the company, shown here, ultimately survived.  Conrad’s largest creditor was Anheuser-Busch, owed $94,000.  With his good friend Adolphus assisting, Conrad was able to cancel that debt by turning over the Budweiser trademark and the rights to Anheuser-Busch “to bottle and sell” the beer.  He also was forced to shutter his liquor stores in St. Louis.

The process was made as painless as possible. Conrad did not formally assign the Budweiser trademark to Anheuser-Busch until 1891 and his CCC insignia and name remained on Budweiser paper labels until almost 1920.  Provided a lifetime position at the brewery, Conrad was present to see the imposition of National Prohibition require the shutting of the facility and the end (temporary as it turned out) of Budweiser sales.  Carl Conrad died in 1922 and was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, the monument shown here.  His wife of many years. Franciska, joined him there a year later.

Note:  It was seeing the Moss Rose whiskey jug above that led me to the story of Carl C.Conrad, one that turned out to be primarily about beer, not liquor. The amount of information about the origins of Budweiser proved sufficient to compose a post.  A key resource was an article by Jay Brooks on April 1, 2022, written to commemorate the anniversary of Conrad’s 1843 birth.