It took the Stroh family over a century to build the largest private beer fortune in America. And it took just a few bad decisions to lose the entire thing.
the Stroh family's story starts with an immigrant: Bernhard Stroh, who arrived in Detroit from Germany in 1850 with $150 and a coveted family recipe for beer. He sold his brews door-to-door in a wheelbarrow. By 1890 his sons, Julius and Bernhard Jr., were shipping beer around the Great Lakes. Julius got the family through Prohibition by switching the brewery to ice cream and malt syrup production.
A glimpse into the lives of the richest, most prolific families in America, and how they built—and sustained—their empires.the Stroh beer business, based in Detroit, grew by following the basics: respect your customers; respect your employees. The former meant catering to Midwest working-class tastes at working-class prices . The latter by treating every employee like an honorary member of the clan.
In August 1989 the Stroh Brewery Co. was in retreat. The company that had treated employees like family laid off 300 people, one-fifth of its white-collar workforce."I had to let go four of the five people in the marketing research department. It was heartbreaking," remembers Ed Benfield, former director of market research at Stroh.
And yet it tried to do more. In 1996 Stroh repeated his mistake, borrowing yet more money for the $300 million acquisition of struggling brewer G. Heileman. The purchase fell flat. Heileman had breweries in cities like Seattle and Portland, where Stroh didn't, but it lacked a big stable of strong brands. One industry analyst remembers the deal described as"two sick chickens--they were both declining.
And why would it have been when the checks rolled in? In the 1980s the seven members of the fourth generation got $400,000 a year. That enabled a couple Stroh families to live in stately homes on gated Provencal Road in the tony Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Farms, with maids, cooks, country club memberships, boarding school tuition and no need for 9-to-5 jobs."A lot of people were living off the family business," says Greg Stroh, who's now 47.
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