Adolphus Busch, working with his father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser's brewery in St. Louis, introduced Budweiser as a pasteurized, bottled lager designed to survive shipping across the country. Named after the Bohemian town of Budweis, it used pasteurization technology borrowed from Louis Pasteur to give it a shelf life rival beers lacked.
Before refrigerated trucking and modern bottling, beer spoiled quickly and rarely traveled far from the brewery that made it. Adolphus Busch, a German immigrant with a sharp eye for both brewing chemistry and marketing, saw an opportunity: pasteurize the beer to kill spoilage bacteria, and it could be shipped by rail across a rapidly expanding American railroad network.
He modeled the recipe loosely on the pale lagers of Budweis in Bohemia (now Ceske Budejovice in the Czech Republic), a choice that would spark more than a century of trademark battles with the Czech brewer Budvar over who had the rightful claim to the name. Budweiser became the flagship product of what grew into Anheuser-Busch, eventually the largest brewing company in the world, and its introduction on April 23, 1876, marked one of the first times mass-produced, nationally distributed beer became possible in America.