Blue Ribbon Brouhaha?: Beer Battles at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
BY PAUL DURICA
On June 2, 1893 the Adams Express Company delivered safely to Chicago a model of a Milwaukee brewery, built to scale and made of pure gold. The model soon turned up as the centerpiece, held aloft by a quartet of carved gnomes, within an ornately-designed pavilion in the central gallery of the Agricultural Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the Chicago World’s Fair.
Brewer Frederick Pabst reputedly spent $100,000 on the gold model of his brewery and thousands more on the pavil-ion, itself clad in terracotta renderings of hops and barley. He regarded both as a wise investment. Historians have es-timated that some 27 million people paid admission to the World’s Fair, which ran from May 1 until October 30, 1893 on some 633 acres in Jackson Park in Chicago. The Fair in-troduced Americans to the wonder of alternating current, the thrill of the Ferris Wheel, the taste of Cracker Jack and Juicy Fruit. It capped the nineteenth century and ushered in the twentieth. A good showing at the Fair, Pabst reasoned, would ensure the success of his brewery for decades to come.
Of course, his brewery wasn’t the only one to have set up a display in the Agricultural Building. Rival Milwaukee brew-er Joseph Schlitz had created an even more elaborate pavil-ion which, according to the Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition, consisted of two “immense beer tuns,” which had been split open to create an interior space and were flanked by “figures of heroic size” who held aloft the company’s signature globe, ringed in jeweled glass and lit by electricity from within. Then there was the pavilion of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, which the Rand-McNally guide to the Fair didn’t rate as very impressive, as well as displays by several other American brewers, such as W. J. Lemp, also of St. Louis, and Christian Moerlein of Cincinnati. Nations from around the world also promoted their beers. A visitor to the Agricultural Building could sample beer from such unlikely locations as Italy, Australia, Japan, and Brazil.
Within the Agricultural Building, the brewers had to compete with exhibits on farming, livestock, and textiles. The building itself was but one of fourteen immense neo-classical structures that made up the heart of the World’s Fair called the Court of Honor. And the fourteen main buildings were but a small portion of the 200-hundred some structures dot-ting the fairgrounds and housing, in total, some 65,000 exhibits. Forty-six nations participated, as well as all of the 44 states. Within the Agricultural Building, the gold model of the Pabst Brewery had to contend with the confectioner Schall & Co.’s rendering of the “Landing of Columbus” made entirely in gum-paste (the World’s Fair marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas) and Stollwerck Brothers ten-foot-tall, 2,2000 pound chocolate statue of “Germania.” More in line with the scale of the brewery model was the Brinkner’s display, which consisted of miniature cotton bales handcrafted by slaves thirty years prior. “A special feature of this exhibit,” the Rand, McNally guide informed readers, “is the old slave who assisted in the growing of this crop of cotton.” The Agricultural Building had a classical façade but its steel-frame interior swelled with the contents of a county fair and was about as tasteful.
Fortunately for Pabst and his associates, Americans were beginning to favor beer over whisky. In a special report written for the Fair’s Committee on Awards, Eugene F. Weigel proclaimed beer “one of the necessities of life” and argued that the “beneficent influence and civilizing effects of beer are everywhere apparent.” Beer’s lower alcohol con-tent as compared to whisky made it, Weigel argued, an ally of the temperance movement. With a considerable amount of statistical support, Weigel announced that America had become the third-biggest beer producer in the world, right behind Germany and Austria, having actually overtaken those nations in the making of lager and pilsner-style beers.
By 1893, the United States did have a considerable ethnic-German population, with sizable communities in cities such as St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Germans, in fact, made up the largest ethnic bloc in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair, far outnumbering the Irish. Improved refrigeration techniques made the production of lagers and pilsners significantly easier (no more keeping the barrels in caves, as the Lemp brewery was famous for doing), and American tastes shifted away not only from whisky but also from English-style ales and porters.
Concessionaires at the World’s Fair responded to this change in taste. Multiple German-style beer gardens could be found within the fairgrounds proper and on the Midway Plaisance, home to the very first Ferris Wheel and other popular attractions. The Wellington Catering Company, a sort of Victorian era Aramark, prepared for Chicago Day, which commemorated the anniversary of the 1871 fire in October, by purchasing 4000 half-barrels and 1800 cases of bottled beer, almost all of which would end up being consumed by the over 750,000 people who attended. The Pabst brewery took part in the Chicago Day festivities, having purchased 250 tickets in advance for its employees and various dignitaries.
Frederick Pabst played a very public role throughout the Fair’s duration. When a replica Viking ship from Norway temporarily anchored in Milwaukee before heading south to Chicago, he was there with the other city fathers to greet it. When the Commissioners from Foreign Nations toured North Dakota and Wisconsin by train to see firsthand America’s vast agricultural resources, Pabst welcomed them back to civilization with a luncheon at his brewery. When it came time to award medals for the most distinguished exhibits, Pabst and his brewery model made of gold were ready.
Pick up a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon today and you’ll that it was “Selected as America’s Best in 1893.” Most people, understandably, think that the distinctive Blue Ribbon relates to this award, but it predates the World’s Columbian Exposition. Bottled beer was something of a novelty in the late nineteenth-century, and the Pabst Brewing Company began tying blue ribbons around the necks of its Best Select brand in order to make the product appear classier. And the claim about being chosen as “America’s Best” isn’t quite what it seems either.
The six judges chosen by the Committee on Awards be-stowed numerous gold medals for taste, purity, style, exhibition, and so forth with breweries from across the world taking home prizes, but the battle for best beer, when all was said and done, came down to two cities, Milwaukee and St. Louis, and two breweries, Pabst and Anheuser-Busch. When the results were first announced on October 30, 1893, the date of the World’s Fair’s closing, Anheuser-Busch led with six gold medals to Pabst’s five. The awards process had not been easy with the judges divided over whether the taste tests and chemical analyses of the beer should be blind or not. All of the breweries but Pabst favored blind judging. The judges ultimately decided that they wanted to know what they were drinking as they were drinking it. And when the final results favored Anheuser-Busch, certain members of the jury detected a “clerical error” in the United States Government Chemist’s report and gave Pabst some extra points, bringing it into a tie in some categories and ahead in others. Pabst moved to make public this amended decision with an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune on November 17, 1893, which proclaimed a “victory complete and absolutely unparalleled in the history of expositions,” the result of the “first and only report of the judges,” which was “made officially for the first and only time on Wednes-day, Nov. 15, at 5:30 PM by J. Boyd Thatcher, Chairman on Awards.” Adolphus Busch and his lawyers came up from St. Louis and charged fraud. Chairman Thatcher took the matter out of the hands of the six judges and convened at the Palmer House hotel a special Court of Appeals who took down testimonies from witnesses and heard statements form the two breweries’ lawyers before reaching a final decision in late December. In the end, Anheuser-Busch got its six medals, with their Budweiser selected as the best beer.
While the Fair’s “beer war,” as the press called it, was being waged, Frederick Pabst made plans to have his pavilion in the Agricultural Building dismantled and shipped to his mansion in Milwaukee. It was eventually annexed to the house and became the Pabst family’s conservatory. Today it is the gift shop, the last stop on the tour of the mansion. The Pabst pavilion is also one of a handful of structures to have survived the 120 years between the World’s Fair and today. Anheuser-Busch may have won back in 1893, but today when consumers think of the World’s Columbian Exposition and beer, one brand always comes to mind, whether the blue ribbon was deserved or not.
