In this age of startups, creative destruction, public companies and activist investors, it's hard to imagine the idea of creating a huge industrial empire, run by successive generations of family

Few empires exemplify this better than the history of Anheuser-Busch.  From its Germanic roots in St. Louis, it’s a story of all that is American culture, good and bad.  Ambition, philandering divorce, substance abuse, violence, family feuds, all washed down with a beer.

It’s a saga of an American family and an American beer, told by longtime LA Times reporter William Knoedelseder in Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer.

My conversation with William Knoedelseder: