The two men who rescued Shiner Beer

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 […]

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Episode Transcript

(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.

(00:20):
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

(00:41):
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

(01:03):
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

(01:24):
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

(01:45):
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

(02:06):
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.

(02:28):
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.

(02:48):
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

(03:08):
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,

(03:30):
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

(03:50):
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.