S2 Ep4: ICE COLD EMPIRE The Adolphus Busch Story
About this episode
This episode explores the life of Adolphus Busch, a German immigrant who revolutionized the brewing industry in America.
Ice Cold Empire: The Adolphus Busch Story is the fourth episode of MR. HANSoN Podcast, Season 2 — Empire Builders. It tells the true story of how a German immigrant boy, the twenty-first of twenty-two children, crossed an ocean with almost nothing and built the largest brewery on earth — not by making a better beer, but by building the system that carried beer across a continent for the first time in history. Born in 1839 in the town of Kastel near Mainz, Adolphus Busch grew up inside his father's wholesale trade in wine, lumber, and brewing supplies, where he learned a lesson that would define his life: goods sitting still are worth almost nothing, and it is the system around a product that makes the product matter. This episode follows Busch from the banks of the Rhine to the docks of New Orleans, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, through a season in the Union Army during the Civil War, and into the struggling little brewery owned by his future father-in-law, Eberhard Anheuser. It traces how Busch, a supply salesman who had seen the inside of every brewery in the city, recognized the one enemy that trapped all of them — spoilage, temperature, and distance — and set out to defeat…
Topics covered
- immigration
- brewing history
- entrepreneurship
- industrial innovation
- American history
More episodes of The MR HANSoN Podcast
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- The Boy Who Sold Matches: The Relentless Rise of Ingvar Kamprad Season 2 "Empire Builders"
- The Pepperidge Farm Story: Margaret Rudkin and the Loaf That Failed
- The Candy Bar That Melted the World: The Rise of Percy Spencer
- The Man Who Left: The Untold Rise of John Deere
- Across the Street: The Relentless Rise of Glen Bell
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