Those who know be know that I love Shiner beer. In particular Shiner Bock. I've been drinking it since the 80's and always have a 12 pack cold.
Many moons ago I went with some friends on a trip to the old Spoetzl brewery, the home of Shiner beer. I still remember taking the tour of the brewery, ending with some samples in the old visitor's center, a log building.
At the time, Shiner was a local beer, found mainly in the area around Austin and College Station. But there were a few spots in Dallas that carried it, like the Son's of Hermann hall, where I had my first one while attending a Robert Earl Keen concert there. That started a lifelong love of the brew from that little brewery in (your guessed it) Shiner, Texas.
So it shouldn't be surprising that my Texas adventure had to include a trip back to Shiner and another tour. So, I booked a site at Green Dickson park in Shiner (cool park, but I'll save that for later,) and spent the day at the home of Shiner.
Now, in the 30 plus years, a lot had changed. When I was there the first time, it was not doing really well. I found out later it almost closed (gasp!)
But I get ahead of myself. Let's do the history thing, shall we?
After the Civil War, a stream of German and Czech immigrants started to come to Texas. And a lot of them settled in the rich farmland between San Antonio and Houston. They brought a lot of their traditions with them, including cuisine. Like chicken fried steak? They called in schnitzel.
Here's the side note. I know you guys are going to get on me about the Germans and Czechs coming to Texas. Yeah, I know, they were here before the war. But this area was settled in the late 19th century.
But what the settlers in Lavaca county didn't bring with them was good beer. Sure, they tried to make it, even founded the Shiner Brewing Association and built a brewery. The trouble was, they didn't know how and the first attempts didn't turn out so great.
The good folks at the SBA figured out they weren't going to get good beer unless the do the obvious: hire a German trained brewmaster. And they found one in Kosmos Spoetzl, who had trained in Germany, then went on to run breweries in Egypt and San Francisco.
Old Kosmos was quite the character. His whole life once taking over was beer. It's said you never saw him without a cup of Shiner in his hands.
And he was a natural salesman also. He would go out to the fields and stop to watch the field hands at work, then leave cold bottles of Shiner on the fence posts for the hands to enjoy. Kosmos was always looking for ways to get the brand out.
Today, Shiner beers are still made the same way Kosmos first brewed them, using barley, hops, yeast and Texas well water. Shiner is the oldest independent brewery in Texas and one of the oldest in the U.S.
But it almost wasn't. Remember I said when I went back in the 80's it wasn't doing well? The brewery had fallen on hard times. The original plan to keep it local wasn't working out in the land of Bud, Coors and the like, and to top it off, the family wasn't running things anymore. Kosmos' daughter took over the brewery when he died in the 50's and ran it until her death. But her children weren't interested in making beer, so the brewery languished through a series of owners until 1989 when Carlos Alvarez, an entrepreneur from San Antonio and owner of Gambrinus brewing, bought Shiner, expanded the brewery's capacity and started an aggressive campaign that culminated in Shiner being in every State in the U.S. and every military base in the world.
And I can attest that fame hasn't changed my favorite beer. Even though Spoetzl has branched out to specialty and seasonal beers (some are pretty good,) the original Bock is still just as good as that first one I had over 30 years ago.
When you go to Spoetzl, make sure you stop by the visitors center. Every visitor gets 4 wooden nickles, each good for a sample. And they have 6 or 8 beers on tap.
Oh, and that secret? During prohibition it was illegal of course to brew beer. Many breweries stayed afloat by making soap, or malted milk, or even near beer. Shiner chose the latter, but what the feds never figured out was that they never really stopped making beer.
You see, old Kosmos was good friends with the folks at the local railroad depot. Whenever the "G-Men" would show up in town to check out the brewery, they'd let him know and he would dump the entire batch through a secret pipe into a nearby creek. That way when the inspectors cam to the brewery, all they'd find was near beer.
Of course dumping that much beer had a bit of an extreme effect on the creek. Ever seen the head on a beer? Well, when the locals saw that foam, they'd rush to the creek to get those drunken fish and have a great big old fashioned fish fry.
So I guess you could say that the Spoetzl brewery is the oldest continually operating brewery in the U.S. Of course they can't "officially" claim that though.