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In 1909, in the little town of Shiner, a group of German and Czech farmers decided they missed the beer of the old country. They pooled their money, built a ramshackle brewery, and called it the Shiner Brewing Association.
But they weren’t brewers. They were farmers. The beer was, well, bad. Locals apparently joked it tasted more like medicine than malt.
But Texas Standard commentator W.F. Strong tells us things started looking up for Shiner beer in 1914.
The full transcript of this episode of Stories from Texas is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
W.F. Strong [00:00:00] In 1909 in the little town of Shiner, Texas, a group of German and Czech farmers decided they missed the beer from the old country. They pulled their money, built a ramshackle brewery, and called it the Shiner Brewing Association. But they weren’t brewers, they were farmers. The beer was bad. So bad locals joke that it tasted more like medicine than molt. By nineteen fourteen, the brewery was on its last legs or last barrels. That’s when a Bavarian brewmaster named Cosmo Spoetzel appeared. He’d been trained in Germany, worked in Egypt, and landed in San Antonio. He leased the struggling brewery with an option to buy, and buy it he did, with his own savings and no small measure of faith. Spoetzel brought with him an old world recipe for dark lager. He brewed it carefully, stubbornly, and soon the townsfolk said Shiner Beer finally tasted like beer. Through prohibition he kept the brewery alive by making so called near beer and ice, and even construction materials. By the time he died in 1950, Shiner beer had become the pride of the little Texas town. But it never got bigger than that. For decades, Shiner was still a tiny brewery in a town of two thousand souls, barely scraping by. Undercapitalized for sure, but ably managed by Spoetzel’s daughter, Miss Celie. She held on. She kept it going against all odds. Hers was the only female owned brewery in America. She even lived in a house on the brewery site to devote all her time to it. She kept it alive, but she couldn’t get it healthy. Locals were loyal to the brand, still Shiner’s market was mighty small. Even after Miss Celie stepped down in 1966, and Shiner went through a succession of different owners that never during the seventies and eighties managed to garner more than one percent of the Texas beer market. Then along came Carlos. In nineteen eighty nine, Carlos Alvarez stepped in. He wasn’t German, he wasn’t Czech. He was born in Mexico City. His father ran a little beer distributorship in Acapulco named Corona. You’ve probably heard of that. Carlos had studied biochemical engineering, worked with Grupo Modelo, and learned the beer business inside and out. He came north, founded his own company, Gambrinus, in San Antonio, and made a fortune importing Corona and Modelo to the United States. With that success he turned his eyes toward Texas. Alvarez saw Shiner as a brand with deep roots, good recipes, loyal fans, but no reach. No expanding markets. He bought the Spetzel brewery. Modernized its equipment, expanded production, and started marketing Shiner statewide. Before long, Shiner Bock wasn’t just the pride of Lavaca County. It was on shelves from El Paso to Amarillo to San Antonio and Houston, and soon after on shelves from California to New York. So today when you raise a cold Shiner Bock, remember this, Texas’s most famous little beer survived not one brush with extinction, but two. In fact, in 2024, it was the number one selling craft beer in Texas, selling four hundred and fifty four thousand barrels of beer. One hell of a keg party. The first time Shiner was saved by a wandering German brewmaster who carried an old recipe in his pocket. The second time it was rescued by a Mexican born importer who believed a small town Texas beer could stand tall in the world. Two men, two rescues, one legend. I’m W.F. Strong, these are stories from Texas. Some of them are true.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
