The difference a century made at Anheuser-Busch's Bevo Bottling Facility

From cork to bottlecaps and Budweiser to Soulard Strawberry Wheat, those bottles tell a story of more than a beverage.

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I jumped the gun a bit last fall when I wrote about the building of Anheuser-Busch’s famous Bevo Bottling Facility, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. As part of that commemoration, Anheuser-Busch is paying tribute to its roots in the Soulard neighborhood. So the brewers took a walk up Ninth Street to the iconic market, bought a huge bounty of strawberries from a delighted farmer, and produced a limited run of eight kegs of Soulard Strawberry Wheat in the Research Pilot Brewery.

Longtime readers will remember that the pilot brewery resides in the oldest continuously operating brew house in the City of St. Louis, dating to 1879. (If you’ve developed a sudden thirst, the beer is available only at the Biergarten on the brewery grounds.) Jim Bicklein, the St. Louis plant manager whom I interviewed back in 2016, also gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the Bevo Bottling Facility, which further revealed just what an amazing and historic structure it is.

But first, a little backstory about bottling beer at Anheuser Busch and in St. Louis in general. Bottling today is heavily associated with automation, but for much of its early history, it was extremely labor-intensive—and didn’t even involve bottle caps. Each bottle required the insertion of a cork, which comes from a tree native only to the western Mediterranean. Workers sat at a special bench and squeezed the cork into the bottle, which required great strength and time.

Early archival photographs of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery reveal that while the bottling department was important in the 19th century, it was nowhere near as large as the future Bevo facility.

Anheuser-Busch is famous for pioneering vertical integration, the practice of owning all the aspects of its business model, from the hops fields in Germany to the railroad engines that moved its refrigerated railcars around St. Louis. So the invention of the bottle cap in 1892 must have been a relief; the brewery no longer had to rely on the vagaries of the cork-tree bark supply.

As for glass, it was in steady supply: A-B purchased the Belgian Pavilion from the World’s Fair for its Adolphus Busch Glass Works, set up on brewery property east of Broadway. Nonetheless, by the dawn of the 20th century, bottling was still very much a 19th-century affair.

This brings us to my behind-the-scenes tour of the Bevo Bottling Facility, where Bicklein showed me things I hadn’t even registered the first time around. In 1918, when this building was new, everything about it rejected the past and projected a bold new future. A brewery publicity article from the time described the original furnishings in the lobby. World War I was winding down at the time, so I was intrigued by the prominent placement of a bronze statue of the Baron von Steuben, a famous general who had trained George Washington’s Continental Army at the behest of the Prussian King Frederick the Great during our Revolutionary War. Historians generally agree that the von Steuben’s training made the Continental Army far more effective against the British. But by 1918, Prussia had become the German Empire, and the German Empire was the enemy of America. The bronze statue in the lobby seemed to say, “Yes, German Americans are patriots, too!”

We climbed to the top floor of the Bevo Bottling Facility, which is now largely automated and has no need of the 2,500 workers it employed in 1918. But there are still quite a few employees up here, carefully watching the machines, and on this day, they were bottling Bud Light.

There is something sublime about the sight of thousands of blue-capped bottles moving down a river of conveyor belts. The theme repeats itself throughout the building: scientific efficiency and cleanliness. Even the roof, which features some of the best views in the city, is clean, and like all “flat” roofs, has a slight pitch to it. The giant letters of the Budweiser sign tower over the mortals behind them. The “sawtooth” skylights, which I would refer to as clerestory windows, have a very important configuration: They face north, which seems counterintuitive. But as any artist will tell you, and the early promotional material explained, northern light provides steady, even light, and at no time of the day or the year will it glare and temporarily blind a worker.

Efficiency continues downstairs. The canning lines come next, in former storage rooms, and then we reach the basement, which is a sight to behold. A brewery brochure of the time provided a vivid ekphrasis of this critical portion of the building. The brewery grounds were on a gently sloping hill heading down to the river, and the basement opened to an excavated railyard that terminated underneath the Bevo Bottling Facility itself. There were 13 tracks and platforms (the Busches confronted triskaidekaphobia head-on, unlike other famous St. Louis brewing families). The anonymous author described the basement as harkening to the halls of Thebes, most likely referencing the Hypostyle Hall of the Temple of Amun at Karnak. I can see what he is talking about: The massive, round, reinforced concrete columns in the basement stabilize a monumental space, as crates of beer are whisked here and there to waiting pallets. With classic German efficiency, designers used the round structural piers to anchor circular conveyor belts that gently brought crates of beer from the top floor to the basement, where moveable loaders could be adjusted to the doors of each railcar.

Nowadays, most of the train platforms have been removed, and the basement shipping facility has been extended out past Broadway. That brings us to what was perhaps the most fascinating and amazing part of the tour. When the Bevo Bottling Facility went up, Anheuser-Busch built a viaduct that took Broadway over the railroad tracks and platforms east of the new building. When you’re heading south on Broadway, there’s nary a clue that you are driving over a giant shipping facility. Down below, the only evidence that you’re under Broadway, a major traffic artery, is the presence of some massive concrete arches, which are described in the advertising literature as inspired by the “Baths of Caracalla.” Having visited those famous Roman ruins on several occasions, I will admit there’s a bit of a resemblance, but what’s amazing is that the space under which trucks and cars pass is an immaculately clean warehouse, and we stood there without hearing so much as a rumble from the cars and trucks above us.

As we went back upstairs, we reflected on the Bevo Bottling Facility’s critical role in the image Anheuser-Busch has presented over the last century. What I always find fascinating about studying the brewery is the hunt for historical references, whether the carefully placed Baron von Steuben statue or the sterile cleanliness of the white glazed tile on the walls. Even the light reflected off those tiles has significant meaning in Western civilization, and the building makes great use of sunlight to create a feeling of openness and welcome. I also find it significant that for major landmarks in the brewery’s history, such as the end of Prohibition or the production of the 20 millionth barrel of beer, the Bevo Bottling Facility is inevitably chosen as the commemorative photographs’ backdrop. August Busch Sr. took a huge gamble, and it’s easy to see why he and his sons, Adolphus Busch III and Gussie Busch, have such big grins on their faces in that iconic photo.

Research assistance provided by Kathy Sattler, senior director of marketing; Jim Bicklein, St. Louis Brewery general manager; Tracy Lauer, director of the A-B archives; and Kim Hennen at Weber Shandwick. Also, for fans of all aspects of Anheuser-Busch history, I have recently found an image in the collections of the Missouri History Museum Archives that will be of interest. The story of Anheuser-Busch began, of course, when Eberhard Anheuser acquired the Bavarian Brewery. Read the backstory here.

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