St. Louis has never been a wine town. It’s never been a cocktail town. Since the dawn of time, St. Louis has been a beer town. Well, at least since Anheuser-Busch started brewing there in 1852. Budweiser, Busch, Bud Light: Those are some of their beers. Maybe you’ve heard of them.
Bud Light is still the country’s best-selling beer, but America is starting to broaden its horizons. 2.3 American breweries opened every day in 2016, and even though craft beer accounts for only 13% of the American beer market, its presence in the nation’s largest cities and smallest towns is expanding.
People take pride in their local craft breweries, and St. Louis is no exception, which begs the question: How can craft beer survive on Anheuser-Busch’s home turf? These four inventive St. Louis craft breweries hold the answer.
When Tom Schlafly opened Schlafly Brewery in 1991 there were only two other brewers in the state of Missouri, one of which was AB. “The thought of another brewery existing in the same town as AB was inconceivable,” explained Stephen Hale, ambassador brewer at Schlafly. “The consensus at AB was that a smaller guy couldn’t possibly make it in the shadow of the eagle.”
Craft beer in St. Louis was uncharted territory in the ‘90s. “We grew by trial and error. We didn’t know what people wanted to drink. We didn’t really know much of anything,” said Tom Schlafly. “If you tell someone who lives in St. Louis, that doesn’t own or operate a brewery of their own, to meet you at ‘The Brewery’, that means AB. It was hard fighting a brand that was so institutionalized.”
Despite AB’s control of distribution and zoning legislation (which made it hellish for a small operation like Schlafly to distribute beer and erect a taproom) and a general skepticism from the people of St. Louis, Schlafly had one major advantage. “We got way more media attention than a small brewery or business would have warranted,” said Schlafly. “It was the David and Goliath story that everyone wanted to see.” The opening was covered on all local news outlets, giving Schlafly press he never could have afforded.
“Part of the message we tried to get out there was variety. At the time, anything not on this narrow sliver of the beer spectrum, lagers and light lagers, was considered exotic or revolutionary,” explained Schlafly, who started introducing oatmeal stouts, pale ales, and wheat ales to the city. “I knew micro-brewing was a trend that wouldn’t evade St. Louis forever. I had to try it. If I failed, I failed.”
Twenty-six years later, Schlafly distributes in 13 states (and Washinton D.C.). If you head to any bar in St. Louis with more than three tap handles, you’ll probably find a Schlafly Pale Ale or White Lager on the list. All it took to prove craft beer had a home in St. Louis was one brewery to take the plunge.
Even after the success of Schlafly, craft beer in St. Louis was still lacking a widespread fanbase, until 2008 brought one of the most disruptive beer buyouts in the history of the industry. Anheuser-Busch was acquired by Belgian beverage giant InBev, and thus, AB InBev was born. From a business perspective, it was huge for AB’s international markets.
But the fallout in St. Louis was different. The St. Louis Business Journal reported that Anheuser-Busch employed approximately 6,000 people in the St. Louis area in 2008. By 2011, three years after the buyout, it was down to approximately 4,000 workers. Because so many family members, neighbors, and friends worked at the brewery, the effects of the buyout and the layoffs were felt by a large portion of the St. Louis population.
“Some people were very, very sour about all that. You had folks who drank Bud for their entire life, suddenly wanting to drink something else,” said Cory King, former head brewer at St. Louis’ Perennial Artisan Ales and current owner of Side Project Brewing. “They were thinking, ‘It’s a foreign company now,’ or ‘I know someone who got fired.’ People started looking for beer elsewhere.”
By 2011, the demand for new beer options was high. That year, four craft breweries opened taprooms in St. Louis: Urban Chestnut, 4 Hands, Civil Life, and Perennial Artisan Ales. Suddenly, there was new energy in the St. Louis beer scene.
Perennial, owned by Phil and Emily Wymore, is still the smallest of the four breweries that opened that year, but their beers draw formidable crowds. The 20-person operation brews everything from funky apricot wheat ales to Belgian-style pales, served to thirsty patrons sitting in the tap room’s teal leather stools.
In 2013, head brewer Cory King was given space at Perennial to start brewing and bottling his own beers in the brewery, experimenting with ales that didn’t necessarily fit in the Perennial lineup. Today, he makes some of the best barrel-aged beers in the world at his own brewery, Side Project.
King and his wife Karen King, who also owns and operates the James-Beard-nominated Belgian beer bar the Side Project Cellar, specialize in beers aged in wood barrels, puncheons, and giant wooden vessels called foeders. Side Project’s beers, poured from bottles adorned with elegant scripted type, are funky, tart, and complex in flavor. They sometimes pick up flavor from added raspberries, blueberries, or peaches and the wine or whiskey barrels they age in. These are the kind of beers where second, third, and fourth sips impress more than the first.
And these are some of the most sought-after beers in the country. Beer traders have what they call a “Side Project Guy,” someone who lives in St. Louis and makes it to Side Project releases regularly. The “Side Project Guy” will then ship (with questionable legality) bottles of barrel-aged Saisons to fans across the country, in return for other rare brews.
The Kings also run Side Project like an incubator in the way it originated at Perennial. Beers that don’t fit into the Side Project family, like boozy English barley wines or dry-hopped IPAs, are produced under the newly-formed, in-house Shared brewing label, by employees who want to explore their own recipes and ideas. Shared beers are packaged and sold exclusively on premises, acting something like a pop-up restaurant in the digs of an already established chef.
Side Project pushes the St. Louis beer scene as a whole towards a funkier, more artful destination, but King is quick to credit new growth in the St. Louis beer scene to one source: AB. “Your dad, uncle, grandma, aunt, mom, whoever, they all drank Bud. That truly paved the way for all of these breweries to open up, more so than the buyout,” explained King. “AB established generations of people drinking beer, accepting it as their drink. AB made St. Louis a beer town. We owe them for that.”
Throughout this growth, no brewery in the Midwest was making New England IPAs, the hazy, juicy, not-so-bitter style currently loved by craft drinkers across the country, until Narrow Gauge Brewing opened in 2016. Head brewer and co-founder Jeff Hardesty brews in the basement of an Italian restaurant called Cugino’s, next to a Sherwin-Williams paint store and across the street from the local police station in the St. Louis suburb Florissant.
Beneath a floor that appears to stretch to fit the room’s contents, in the glow of not-so-natural light, Narrow Gauge brews in a three-barrel brew house with six fermenters, large stainless steel tanks where boiled grain turns to beer. It started even smaller though, with only two fermenters. St. Louis beer obsessives clamored for his beers, and Hardesty had to triple his brewing operation within four months of opening.
Hardesty’s introduction of the New England-style IPA isn’t unlike Anheuser-Busch’s introduction of German-style lagers to a city of ale drinkers, back in the 1800’s. It took a second to get used to the style, but people loved them. And in the past decade, AB’s parent company InBev has been quietly been purchasing smaller American breweries, like Goose Island and Wicked Weed, supplying funding to develop craft beers and distribute them to a wider audience. The beer list at AB’s tap room now looks more like a craft brewery’s than you’d expect. “We’re making all kinds of beers, from session sours to stouts to double IPAs to fruit-aged beers,” said Rob Naylor, brewmaster of AB’s research pilot brewery.
And brewers are noticing the change in strategy. “The tables have kind of turned a bit now,” said Schlafly’s Stephen Hale. “AB wants to emulate the way that craft breweries are operating. That’s big.”
Over a century after AB turned St. Louis into a beer town, the influence of smaller breweries like Schlafly and Perennial inspires young, gung-ho productions like Shared Brewing, as well as Anheuser-Busch itself. The city’s scene is vibrant and ambitious, and if you find yourself waiting for a release at Side Project or Narrow Gauge, the beer at the end of that line is probably worth it.
