“It was a near-beer, so it was a product that tasted close to beer, but didn’t contain alcohol. It was so ever-present, it eventually became part of popular culture: Irving Berlin mentioned it in two songs, including “How Dry I Am.” The brewing building-the Bevo bottling facility-was named after the brand of “beer” that was available. By the time Prohibition rolled around in 1919, it ramped up production, and by the early 20s, A-B was selling 5 million cases of Bevo every year. A-B first brewed Bevo, its nonalcoholic near-beer, in 1916 after alcohol was banned in the military. It turns out the foxes have an interesting history that dates back to Anheuser-Busch’s survival strategy during Prohibition. Every time my mom tells me the story of the “poxes,” she wonders why foxes were chosen for the building instead of traditional gargoyles. In fact, they seem pretty easygoing, with their mutton shanks and beer steins in hand. The fox statues on the brewery are not considered scary to most of us. My grandparents soon learned it was best for everyone in the car to avoid the foxes, so they’d drive a couple blocks over in order to avoid the foxes my mom deemed so terrifying. She wasn’t talking about diseases she was so little she couldn’t pronounce the “F,” in “foxes”- she was spying the fox statues on the cornerstone of A-B’s brewing facility. Every time this happened, my mom would burst into tears and scream to my grandpa, “The poxes, Daddy, the poxes!” When my mother was young, maybe a toddler, she and her parents would drive home past the Anheuser-Busch brewery complex on Broadway. A stone fox on the facade of A-B's brewing facility.
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