More from Anheuser Busch

It was freezing cold in here!

These are the beechwood lagering tanks are the last stop a beer makes before it is bottled up and shipped out for distribution.  Here, it spends several weeks over a bed of beechwood chips to enhance its flavor.   This step is unique to Budweiser.

These tanks are absolutely enormous.  In order to drink an entire tank, a person would have to have a 12oz serving of beer every hour for 137 years.  The Beechwood Aging Cellar houses 375 tanks with a capacity of 3600 barrels.  Each of the tanks holds enough beer to fill approximately 200,000 six-packs.  That's a lot of beer.

A few of the things that we learned during this part of the tour:

1.  Yeast is a very important part of beer making.  The yeast used by Budwesier is a direct descendant of the yeast culture first used by Adolphus Busch in 1876.  It was even frozen during Prohibition to ensure that it wouldn't be lost.  Only five people in the history of the company have had a key to where it is kept.

2.  Budweiser added rice to ensure that it was a premium quality.  Today, the company is responsible for purchasing 12% of U.S. rice production.  I was told by someone that this is actually a lie.  Rice is used to make it cheaper to produce.  Since I know nothing about beer, I have no idea which is correct.

3.  Before milk was even being pasteurized, Anheuser Busch started pasteurizing beer for distribution.  Clearly their priorities were in order.

4.  The Brewmasters meet daily at 3 p.m. to sample beer from all of the breweries here in the United States.  Samples from the international breweries are flown in once a week.

I was surprised by how ornate everything is in the production buildings.  Even the railings.  Definitely not the look of your typical factory.

The Eagle sits atop one of the gates where the Clydesdales exited with the first batch of post-Prohibition beer and were greeted by a

crowd of 25,000.

This was once a schoolhouse.  The city finally decided that it probably wasn't the best idea to have a school in the middle of a brewery and sold it to the company.  For a while, it acted as the administration building.

Entrance to the school building.