Friday, September 05, 2014

The Fallen Stroh Family


HOW TO BLOW $9 MILLION

As with many of America's great fortunes, 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. And in the 1980s, Stroh’s surged, emerging as one of America’s fastest-growing companies and the country’s third-largest brewing empire, behind only public behemoths Anheuser-Busch and Miller.

The Stroh family owned it all, a fortune that FORBES then calculated was worth at least $700 million. Just by matching the S&P 500, the family would currently be worth about $9 billion.

READ MORE in Forbes

2 comments:

  1. Norma7:44 AM

    Is Stroh's out of business? We live in Florida, and my husband likes a beer once in a while. I keep telling him until he has a Stroh's, he hasn't had a beer.
    I don't drink, but I have tasted many, and nothing else adds up to Stroh's.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Norma7:47 AM

    Is Stroh's out of business? We live in Florida, and my husband likes a beer once in a while. I keep telling him until he has a Stroh's, he hasn't had a beer.
    I don't drink, but I have tasted many, and nothing else adds up to Stroh's.

    ReplyDelete