Earlier in my career, I worked with a guy, a native St. Louisan, who claimed a weakness for the smell of processed hops.

They smelled like home.

Where he grew up, prevailing breezes brought past the windows emissions of the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Plenty of other industries occupied that portion of St. Louis south of downtown, but this particular aroma hit home.

Factory exhaust rarely makes for pleasant nostalgia, but I get this. When I first moved to St. Joseph, certain atmospherics and releases from the Quaker Oats plant gave the city a cozy feel on a cold morning.

In the brewery's case, a wave of Pestalozzi Street pride comes with the smell. A lot of folks in that part of St. Louis worked at the sprawling beer factory or had kinfolk who did. Certainly, they knew the product, given liberally to employees as a job perquisite and displayed in neon in the window of every tavern on the south side.

Like driving a VW in Detroit during an earlier day of Big Three auto dominance, locals who openly carried a six-pack of Miller High Life into their homes created neighborhood suspicion.

It was not just an uncivil act, it was a slap at the social order.

A sign looked down on those people, the slogan for the flagship product Budweiser. It read "King of Beers."

And you don't mess with the king. A person runs the same risk going to Disney World and giving Mickey a groin kick.

When the brewery used to own the baseball team, the patriarch of both, Gussie Busch, would ride into the stadium that bore his family name atop a wagon pulled by Clydesdales. Always on opening day. The wagon did a wide loop around the outfield, and the organist played Budweiser's signature song, which might have an actual name but which I call "Here Comes the King."

People in the stands, I swear, had tears in their eyes. It seemed akin to a Churchill Downs crowd getting misty when a band plays, "My Old Kentucky Home."

Given this hometown allegiance, the proposal by a European-based company to acquire Anheuser-Busch seems as likely to start a trans-Atlantic war as an assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

InBev, headquartered in Belgium, has put forth a $46 billion offer to buy the Missouri-born company. Last week, the Busch board of directors rejected the deal, but InBev wants to incite a shareholders' riot that would lead to a takeover from abroad.

Back in the days when St. Louis had two major-league teams, the Cardinals and the Browns, the city had a phrase that expressed its position in manufacturing and baseball: "First in booze, first in shoes and last in the American League."

A St. Louis beer competitor, the William J. Lemp Brewing Co., closed as Prohibition took hold. Its massive manufacturing home sold to the International Shoe Co. in 1922. International Shoes eventually closed because most shoe-making operations moved overseas.

No St. Louisans went barefoot in that aftermath, but they grate at being asked to watch the "King of Beers" move to a continent where they still have kings.

Germans came to America's midsection and made a lager. Now Belgians want to take it back. Our dollar went soft even as our hops smell sweet.

Ken Newton's column runs on Sunday and Tuesday.