Courtesy of Anheuser-Busch
Jim Bicklein.
More than 150 years after Eberhard Anheuser and his son-in-law Adolphus Busch took over a failing brewery on the southern outskirts of St. Louis, the business of brewing beer on Pestalozzi has only become more complex and demanding. But luckily for Anheuser-Busch, the brewery is in the able hands of current general manager, Jim Bicklein. He sat down with St. Louis Magazine earlier this week to discuss the challenges and rewards of managing the oldest continuously operating brewing in St. Louis, and how the historic buildings, many now over 100 years old, still function in the modern, technology-driven beer industry in 2016.
A graduate in electrical engineering at the University of Missouri, Rolla, Bicklein joined Anheuser-Busch when the brewery was expanding due to the success of Bud Light. Continuing on a tradition of promoting all brewmasters from in-house, Bicklein was trained in the art of brewing by earlier company experts; he in fact held that position until he was just recently promoted to general manager at the brewery. It requires decades of hard work at Anheuser-Busch to rise to such a position; currently, not a single brewmaster was hired from outside of the company. Did he start out scrubbing the fermentation tanks, as legend states all future presidents of Busch once did? No, but Bicklein has climbed into the small, claustrophobic tanks on occasion to scrub out the nooks and crannies where the water jets can’t reach.
Besides the universal requirement of keeping a brewery of any era spotlessly clean to avoid the contamination of fermenting beer, Bicklein faces other challenges unique to a historic physical plant such as the St. Louis brewery. For example, there are approximately 260 different roofs of various age and sizes that must be maintained across the 100 acres of the brewery. Typically, in modern breweries, such as the next oldest Anheuser-Busch brewery from 1951 in Newark, New Jersey, brewing operations are contiguous under one roof. Consequently, at Newark and newer breweries, fermentation can occur right next to bottling, with little need for transportation between different departments.
In St. Louis, ever since the 19th century when a bridge soared over Pestalozzi Street from stock houses over to the brew house, the brewery has faced the challenge of maintaining efficiency even while transporting the beer and its ingredients between different buildings. Bicklein estimates that the beer and its ingredients travel several miles during production. The giant pipes, high overhead and snaking throughout the complex, require their own maintenance to preserve the beer as it moves through production. For example, during the winter the brewery must keep the pipes from freezing; “heat tracing” electrical wiring wrapped around the pipes keeps the conduits at just the right temperature. High-efficiency pumps push the beer through the network at a rapid speed. In order to further increase efficiency, the water used to flush the pipes is reused when vats and tanks are washed out in the brewery. Computer automation allows for the careful regulation of kettle temperatures without the need for manual adjustment by workers.
Maintaining and outfitting the brew house with the highest quality machinery is also paramount to the operation of a brewery in historic surroundings. For example, the mash tubs and brew kettles are now made out of stainless steel, as opposed to the traditional copper. Simply put, any metal subjected to high temperature variations over several decades will warp. While the brewery still maintains a few kettles with copper tops, they actually conceal stainless steel interiors. If properly maintained, the steel kettles should last 50 to 60 years. Bicklein is highly motivated to keep the kettles in good condition; when the brewery last replaced a kettle, the staff had to remove the brew house’s skylight and slowly lower the kettle down several stories, and the crane operator was unable look directly at where the huge metal vessel was going. One can imagine the logistical challenges of such a feat.
Another interesting facet of the brewery is its preservation of utilities such as the power plant that sits just to the east of the brew house. The three, 225-foot-tall smokestacks still function, having been built one at a time around the turn of the 20th century. Just a year and a half ago, the plant converted from coal to natural gas, which is more efficient, less expensive, and cleaner than coal. Amazingly, up until the conversion, the boilers, which date to the 1950s, were still burning coal, trucked in to the brewery grounds. The brewery does not exist in its own electrical grid, however. The plant, as massive as it might seem, is relatively small compared to municipal power plants, so it co-generates electricity with AmerenUE. The Anheuser-Busch power plant is perhaps one of the oldest continuously operating generating stations in St. Louis; once dozens of coal-fired power plants and their smokestacks dotted the landscape, and now it is one of the last. There is also an old water treatment plant on the brewery grounds, but Anheuser-Busch maintains a close relationship with the City of St. Louis Water Division, carefully monitoring water quality. In fact, local legend has always claimed that the city’s water supply is so robust and high quality because of the demands of local breweries.
In these cynical times, with a majority of Americans now unhappy with their workplace, and the average time at a job at 4.4 years, it was refreshing and inspiring to talk to Bicklein, someone who clearly lives and breathes his position as general manager. One of his favorite places to go, when not working in his office in the Bevo Bottling Plant, is to climb up onto the roof of the brewery and look out over stunning vistas of the city and the Mississippi River. Also, it was fascinating to learn that the 1879 brew house, built when Eberhard Anheuser was alive, still functions as a small test brewery, the Michelob Brewing Company. Bicklein sums it up best:
“It’s humbling, because brewmasters for over a hundred years have walked in the same footsteps as I walk, looked into brew kettles in the same spot as me, and were making the same beer that has stood the test of time since 1876. It’s humbling to be a part of that.”
This is the final installment of a month-long look at how architecture and technology have figured into the legacy of Anheuser-Busch; you can read the earlier installments here, here, and here.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at naffziger@gmail.com.
