Among the ongoing dramas created by the sale of Anheuser-Busch Cos. to InBev is the future of Grant’s Farm, the ancestral family home of the Busch Family, which has been operated both as a 22-acre private family estate and as a 198-acre wildlife preserve open to the public and promoting Anheuser-Busch.
The saga is of interest to beverage alcohol executives because Grant’s Farm was one of a number of things used by the Busch Family to make friends with both customers and noncustomers. Others included Sea World, the St. Louis Cardinals, Busch Stadium and, of course, the Budweiser Clydesdales.
The future of Grant’s Farm has been an ongoing legal battle that included an offer by William K. Busch, who has started a brewery in St. Louis, to acquire Grant’s Farm, build a brewery on the premises and operate the property as a year-round attraction. He has the backing of one other sibling. But four siblings don’t think he and his company have the resources to maintain the property and would eventually sell parts of it to developers.
We don’t know, of course, what internal family dynamics are involved. What is clear to us from reading a just-rendered decision is the August A. Busch Jr. wanted Grant’s Farm to stay in the family. To do this, he created a trust to own the property, and gave its trustees broad authority to manage, and to sell, the property.
When internal family discussions broke down, all the major players ran to the courts, asking the courts to resolve their disputes. In a just-rendered decision, Bryan L. Hettenbach, a probate judge in St. Louis County, Mo., ruled Wells Fargo Bank, as the sole disinterested trustee, has absolute, unfettered discretion “to accept an offer for the purchase of any or part of the Family property from any buyer (whether or not a member of the Busch Family), or to choose not to sell any part of the Family Property at all.”