Budweiser

The most popular beer in the world, Budweiser is the flagship brand for the Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. A lager beer of very mild flavor, Budweiser helped set industry standards for American brewing, became one of the most identifiable brands among all consumer products, and dominated beer marketing for over a century.

Budweiser is part of a long brewing tradition. In 1860, the German immigrant Eberhard Anheuser bought a struggling St. Louis brewery and, with his son-in-law Adolphus Busch, made it a thriving company. Under primarily Busch’s leadership, the Bavarian brewery strove to serve a national market, an unusual idea in an era of local and even neighborhood breweries. In 1863, for example, there were 2,004 breweries operating in the United States, collectively making 2 million barrels of beer. To facilitate creating such a national brand and shipping it great distances, Busch devised a network of roadside icehouses to cool railcars filled with his beer. Years later he would pasteurize his product and invest in a fleet of refrigerated freight cars.