Georgius (George) Henricus Busch was born in Kastel, Hessen, Germany to Udalrico Busch and Barbara Pfeiffer. Their family was very large. By 1830 he was one of 13 siblings under the age of 23. Georgius escaped the crowded family home, lured by the wide open plains of America.

He first settled in Belleville, Illinois where he in 1834 established what would become the Belleville brewery. After selling out in 1848 he crossed the Mississippi River to became a hop merchant/brewer in St. Louis, Missouri, operating as the Buena Vista Brewery. By 1854 the hop business had taken a back seat and Busch was once again concentrating on brewing.

He built a huge underground aging cellar and a state-of-the-art brewery on top of it. His brewery was now the sixth largest in St. Louis. In 1856 he took on Charles Fritz as a partner. Busch was now approaching fifty years of age, and this situation must have appeared like a tremendous opportunity to Samuel Wainwright, the ambitious 35 year old owner of the third largest brewery in town. Wainwright bought Busch's stake in the Buena Vista, then one year later he bought out Fritz too. Busch continued run his Hop business and kept his home across the street from the brewery.  The old-timer surely stopped in from time to time to see how things were going at his old place.

George Henricus Busch died in 1895 in Warren Michigan at age 87. His brewery thrived until prohibition, succeeding even in the shadow of his younger brother Adolphus's firm, the Anheuser Busch Brewing Association.

Samuel Wainwright was born in Pennsylvania, the son of Prominent brewer Joseph Wainwright. From a young age he and his brother Ellis apprenticed in his father's Pittsburgh Brewery where they learned the art of brewing of ale and beer in the English method.

In 1831, at age 22, Ellis ventured westward with the intention of establishing one of the first breweries in St. Louis Missouri. Samuel joined him around 1840 and eventually the two ran the Fulton Street Brewery until Ellis's death in 1849.

At age 27, Samuel Wainwright became controlling partner the firm and he ran it heroically. The brewery thrived despite being in the same town already crowded with big brewing firms and dozens of smaller ones.

Wainwright's vision was aggressive and expansive. In 1857 Samuel abandoned the Fulton Brewery and purchased the more modern brewery built in 1854 by George Busch (older brother of Adolphus). The new brewery also indicated a change in direction for Wainwright. He started focusing more on Lager Beer, which was considered the new thing in the 1850s. The change paid off. By 1857 the Wainwright brewery led the city in sales and continued to grow from there. Samuel Wainwright died at the top of his game on October 19th, 1874. He was just 52 years of age.