In the late 1880s, with a wide spread industrial depression limiting investment opportunities in Great Britain, English investors began to eye the profitable American beer industry. An unprecedented growth in beer sales in the United States during this period, buoyed by record levels of German immigration and enthusiastic acceptance by native born Americans of lager beer, made the American breweries an attractive target, ripe for English acquisition. In 1889, the McAvoy Brewing Company and the Wacket & Birk Brewing and Malting Company were the first Chicago breweries to be acquired by an English owned syndicate, known as the Chicago Breweries Limited. Authorized capital was £600,000, of which £400,000 had been issued in shares of £10 each. The combined barrelage of this merger was 315,000 per year with total sales in 1890 at 206,000 barrels. This consolidation was seen by Chicago's brewers as the answer to a developing industry problem that would eventually have to be faced by brewers nation wide.

With all the new technological changes taking place in the industry, the established American brewery owners knew that the needed modernization of existing plants would be a tremendous capital undertaking. By selling out to the foreign investors, former owners had the choice of pocketing a huge profit and perhaps staying on as consultant or manager, or simply taking the cash and leaving the impending problems of modernization to the new owners. Michael Brand chose a humanitarian undertaking after selling his brewery to the United States Brewing Company. He used the profit from this sale to establish the German settlement, Brandsville, in Howell County, Missouri, in 1895, a source of refuge to immigrant Germans who were still flooding the shores of the United Stares.

In July of 1889, the City Contract Company of London took stock in the Peter Schoenhofen Brewing Company, Limited, with an authorized capital of £400,000. In June of 1890, the English owned City of Chicago Brewing and Malting Company, Limited captured about one third of the existing shares of the Conrad Seipp Brewery and it's subsidiary, the West Side Brewery, along with the F. J. Dewes Brewing Company (AKA City Brewery Company, Chicago), the L. C. Huck Malting Company and the George Bullen Malting Company. The reported price of the consolidation was $9,500,000 with $3,106,000 worth of bonds issued to mature in 1910.

In 1891, the Milwaukee and Chicago Breweries, Limited, another English conglomerate, merged with the previously formed American owned Syndicate, the United States Brewing Company. This merger included the Bartholomae & Leicht Brewing Company, the Ernst Brothers Brewing Company, the Bartholomae & Roesing Brewing and Malting Company, the K. G. Schmidt Brewing Company and the Val Blatz Brewing Company of Milwaukee. As noted in a prospectus in the Chicago Tribune on March 4, 1891, one belied advantage of combining these breweries was to increase the shipping and distribution efficiency of the Chicago breweries using the Val Blatz Brewing Company's established distribution network. K.G. Schmidt Brewing Company had already dabbled in exporting their "Budweiser" brand to the Western States and Territories with success, but their foresightedness was the exception. After years of neglecting the export market, it took an English syndicate, working through a Milwaukee brewery to develop a serious plan for the exportation of Chicago beer. Later results would prove that, for the most part, this plan was too little, too late.

Swept up by the wave of consolidations that were taking place around them, a group of American investors organized the American Malting and Elevator Company, buying a handful of local, independent malt houses that were providing malted barley and other cereal grains to nearby breweries.

The combined authorized capital of these mergers and consolidations was $11,716,000 and the combined capacity was 1,631,000 barrels annually, a little more than half of the barrelage of all the breweries in Chicago.

American capitalists, some with little or no experience in the brewing trade, took note of the generous outlay of cash and securities used by the English to acquire these breweries and began to construct an additional eighteen breweries in Chicago during the period of the Syndicates greatest acquisition frenzy, 1889 to 1900. Some of these risk takers hoped that their breweries might be acquired by the English soon after construction, leaving them with a quick and generous profit. Other American brewery owners to be, noted the high capitalization of the syndicated breweries and attempted to establish themselves with a minimal amount of leverage, if any at all. By 1894, Chicago had a total of fifty three breweries, ranked third in the nation in total number, Philadelphia and New York ranked number one and two respectively.

The English taste for American breweries began to waiver as disappointed investors began to realize that the breweries were overvalued. Blatz's dilapidated brewery in Milwaukee had been purchased for the kingly sum of $2,500,000. Within a year it was necessary to pour an additional $400,000 into the plant for needed repairs. Coupled with the burden of overcapitalization, the Syndicates stock quotes fell. Subsequent dividends were less rewarding than anticipated. English investment brokers offered one excuse after another... bad weather, poor barley harvest, weak economic conditions... but stiff competition from the numerous independent breweries and the drain of stock and bond dividends were the real reasons for the Syndicates' dismal performance. Robbing Peter to pay Paul they worked with little operating capital. To make matters worse, Irish American saloonkeepers threatened to boycott any English controlled breweries and turned to the independent lrish owned breweries for product. Disturbed by the onslaught of foreign capital buying up local breweries, the Independent Brewing Association composed of several wealthy and influential Chicago citizens, established a brewery in 1891. The organization's objectives were to operate a local brewery "maintained .... by home capital and conducted on free principles, independent of any and all Syndicates and pools."

In spite of vigorous attempts by the Syndicates and independents alike to boost sales, beer consumption in Chicago inexplicably started to taper off. Belated efforts by the local Syndicates to increase the export trade offered no real chance in which to increase sales. Schlitz and Pabst in Milwaukee and Busch Brewing in St. Louis, well on their ways to a national market, had already secured a dominant position not only in the surrounding Midwest and South, but also in the developing Western states. Ironically, they used the vast railway shipping yards of Chicago as the hub of their expansion.

With hopes of securing a larger market share and, if need be, squeezing the remaining independents out, the English controlled breweries started to bring down the wholesale price of their beer Having anticipated such a move, the Chicago & Milwaukee Brewers Association joined together in 1890 to stabilize the sinking barrel price at $6, a two dollar decrease. Up until this move by the English Syndicates, any rivalry between brewers taking over one another's retail accounts had been quite civilized. If a brewer took a saloonkeeper from a rival brewery, he was obliged to pay the rival brewery $3 per barrel for each barrel purchased by the retailer in a given period of time. This informal agreement, along with a number of more detailed pacts, soon fell apart as the Syndicates brought the barrel price down to an unprecedented $4, with a 50 cent rebate, if necessary to effect a sale. There was talk in the Chicago brewing community that prices would eventually fall to the inconceivable price of $2 a barrel. In an attempt to maintain some sort of profit on their beer, a number of brewers began to introduce the cheaper cereal grains of rice and corn to the brewing mash. This cost cutting move ran contrary to the old German "Rheinheitsgebot" which stated that beer was to only be made with water, hops, malted barley and yeast. The adulteration of the centuries old purity standard was the beginning of the a new beer, the American-styled lager, lighter in taste and character than it's all malt predecessor. The addition of cereal grains also helped to hinder the formation of "chill haze" in bottled beer, a coagulation of protein that formed when the beer was cooled. Normally drawn into thick drinking steins, the customer was usually unaware of this phenomena. With the growing acceptance of bottled beer in clear glass, the customer would have no reason to question the turbidity and drinkability of an otherwise fine product.

The Milwaukee brewers, who had shipped 325,000 barrels of beer to Chicago in 1890, were forced to participate in this "beer war," selling their products at $4 per barrel, $4 less than the going rate in Milwaukee. Unwilling participants as they were, the Milwaukee brewers could not afford to pull out of this one time profitable market while the price war continued. Their biggest fear, whispered throughout the Milwaukee brewing community, was a possible assault on their home grounds by the English controlled Chicago breweries, possibly importing beer priced as low as $3.50 a barrel and bringing havoc to a previously unchallenged market. " ....they do not feel like taking part in the war at Chicago if it can be avoided" Milwaukee Daily News reported. Their fears were unfounded as the Chicago brewers inexplicably failed to take this initiative.

Price cutting was only part of the Syndicates' plan to increase sales. In 1892, both the Chicago Brewing & Malting Company, Limited and the Milwaukee & Chicago Breweries, Limited, through their representatives, the City of Chicago Investment Company, pooled over $6,000,000 for the purchase of saloons through which to exclusively funnel their products. By adopting this English practice of "tied houses," it was hoped that profits would rise as the Syndicates seized control not only of the beer market but of the retailers themselves. Even Milwaukee tried this approach in Chicago. Concrete reliefs of the Schlitz logo can still be found on the former tied houses built by Schlitz at ninety fourth and Ewing and thirty fifth and Western on the South Side and Damen and Belmont on the North Side.

One attempt to end the beer wars took place during the Fall of 1895. There was talk of forming a loose confederation of Chicago breweries to end the under cutting of the price of a barrel of beer. It was proposed that the brewers would form a pool of over $1,000,000 by turning in two dollars per barrel for a determined period of time. This money would be supplemented by an additional stipend of ten cents on the barrel. With a combined barrelage of over 4,000,000 per year, the ever incteasiisg fund would be deposited in the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank and managed by a board of directors, elected by the brewers. From this fund, dividends would be issued to, those breweries that cooperated in regulating the price of beer to a non-competitive level. Any brewery that broke ranks would lose access to the previously invested money and any future dividends. Like previous attempts at cooperation, this compromise never took effect as the brewers maintained a maverick attitude on pricing.

In 1898, one more attempt at consolidation took place with the formation of the United Breweries Company, Chicago. With the support of the Chicago brewers association, this group of local liquor interests hoped to stabilize and even raise the price of a barrel of beer to pre-Syndicate days. Involved in this merger were thirteen breweries, twelve in Chicago including the Chicago Brewing Company, Citizens Brewing Company, Carl Corper Brewing & Malting Company, Fecker Brewing Company, Henn & Gabler Brewing Company, Monarch Brewing Company, North-Western Brewing Company, Phoenix Brewing Company, William Ruehl Brewing Company, M. Sieben, South Chicago Brewing Company, Star Brewing Company Of Chicago and the Blue Island Brewing Company in neighboring Blue Island, Illinois. Contrary to the local syndicate's original business plan, which called for the quick consolidation and closing of some of the breweries, administrators of plants targeted for closing managed to delay the inevitable causing fiscal and legal nightmares for the Syndicate's investors.

The troubles of the Syndicates seemed to go on and on, dissent even coming from within their own ranks. In 1892, during the early days of the Syndication craze, William C. Seipp and Louis C. Huck, sons of pioneer brewers Conrad Seipp and John A. Huck, along with T. J. Lefens resigned their positions as managers of the Chicago Brewing and Malting Company. The official reason given for the mass resignation was that they had agreed to stay on only for a short time to aid in the smooth transfer of the newly formed Syndicate to English control. Rumors abounded in the Chicago brewing community though, that they had been forced out because of dissatisfaction in London with their management of the Syndicate. The discharged brewers offered no explanation. In 1894, Leo Ernst, Vice President and General Manager of the Chicago & Milwaukee Breweries announced that he was leaving the Syndicate and starting up his own independent brewery, which was perceived as an affront to the English owners he had served.

With beer prices already lowered during the local "beer wars" to unprecedented levels, the U.S Governnsent slapped a $2 a barrel tax on all beer to help finance the Spanish-American War, cutting deeply into what was left of brewing profits. Finally, in 1899, English courts ruled that English firms operating in foreign lands were to be taxed at the same rate as those operating on English soil, erasing a tax advantage the Syndicates had enjoyed for years. No further attempts were made by English investors to purchase breweries in Chicago, but the damage was done. The beer wars, the cost of modernization and the Spanish-American war tax had crippled the Chicago brewing industry. A new breed of brewery owners would rise from the devastation of the 1890s. This leaner, more determined, tougher group of individuals would soon face their greatest challenge. .