| Founded | 1909 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Shiner, Texas, USA |
| Owner(s) | The Gambrinus Company |
| Website | www.shiner.com |
Spoetzl Brewery is a brewery located in Shiner, Texas, USA. Also known as the "little brewery in Shiner",[1] the brewery produces Shiner Bock, a dark beer that is now distributed in 41 states. The brewery is owned by The Gambrinus Company.
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Spoetzl was founded in 1909, and claims to be the oldest independent brewery in Texas.[2] A group of businessmen incorporated Shiner Brewing Association and placed Herman Weiss in as the company's first brewmaster. In 1914 a German immigrant brewer named Kosmas (or Kosmos) Spoetzl co-leased with Oswald Petzold with an option to buy in 1915. Spoetzl had attended brewmaster's school and apprenticed for three years in Germany, worked for eight years at the Pyramids Brewery in Cairo, Egypt, and then worked in Canada. He moved to San Antonio in search of a better climate for his health, bringing with him a family recipe for a Bavarian beer made from malted barley and hops.
During Prohibition, Kosmas Spoetzl kept the brewery afloat by selling ice and making near beer. After Prohibition only five of the original 13 Texas breweries were still intact. When the Prohibition laws were repealed larger beer plants, such as Anheuser-Busch, moved to Texas making life harder on the smaller independent breweries, but Spoetzl kept things small and simple never going more than 70 miles for business.
In the 1970s and 1980s the brewery's Shiner Beer and Shiner Bock had less than 1 percent of the Texas market. In 1983 Spoetzl produced 60,000 barrels of beer; in 1990 only 36,000. Sales improved after Carlos Alvarez of San Antonio acquired the brewery in 1989: Production grew to 100,000 barrels in 1994, and over the next ten years, production nearly tripled.[3] The company has 66 employees.
As of 2010, it was the fourth-largest craft brewery and tenth-largest overall brewery in the United States.[4]
Spoetzl currently produces eight beers year round and four seasonal brews per year.[5]
In 2005, Spoetzl began producing a yearly brew in a progressive, anticipatory celebration of its 2009 centennial anniversary. The centennial program began developing and producing one special celebratory beer in small batches. The name of each such specialty beer corresponds to the age of the brewery: Shiner 96 was the specialty beer of 2005, Shiner 97 for 2006, and so forth. For the first two years, Spoetzl brewed Shiner 96 and Shiner 97 only from September through mid-December. Shiner 98 was released four months earlier in 2007 — in May — while Shiner 99 entered the market even two months earlier, in March 2008. Shiner 100 had the longest run of all the anniversary beers, seeing production all year long in 2009. After each beer's specified production run has ended, that year's beer is retired. However, Shiner 97 proved to be so popular that in 2008 Spoetzl brought the beer back as Shiner Bohemian Black Lager and made it a permanent part of the lineup. The Spoetzl Brewery originally intended to conclude its centennial beer production in 2009 with Shiner 100, but has since decided to continue the program on indefinitely.
Below is a listing of each beer and their respective style:
For 2009, Spoetzl also changed the neck label for all their beers. The labels proclaimed Spoetzl's 100th anniversary and include the tag line "Here's to a century of independent brewing. Prosit!" All the neck labels are similar, but each beer's label mimics the beer's signature colors.
Shine On is a coffee table book by Dallas author Mike Renfro, which document's the Little Brewery's history in photos as well as story. The book follows the brewery from 1909 to 2008. In addition to the history on the brewery, Shine On also includes the history of the town, as well as a look at some of the people responsible for making Shiner beer.
Shiner Bocktoberfest was an annual music festival held each October in Shiner, Texas. Bocktoberfest featured a concert line-up that blended Texas Country, Modern and Alternative Rock with Blues, Pop and Americana.
The Shiner Bocktoberfest Concert began in 1994 as the “Thanks a Million” concert, a tribute to the first million-case sales year achieved by the Spoetzl Brewery. Thousands of people attended the concert as the city of Shiner celebrated. The following year, the concert name was changed to the Shiner Bocktoberfest Concert. Bocktoberfest, originally on the brewery grounds, moved to Green Dickson Park, just one mile east of the brewery, to accommodate growing crowds.
The 2006 Bocktoberfest was the last. In early summer 2007, the Gambrinus Company announced that the annual concert would be discontinued.[8] According to Alvarez, the financial and administrative costs of the festival had become excessive, and the company needed to shift its energies toward its beers.[9]
Working with their Austin-based advertising agency McGarrah Jessee, Shiner’s guerilla marketing efforts at the Austin City Limits Music Festival have consistently achieved notoriety.[10] Most recently, in 2010, the company created the “Shiner Beer Local Stage,” which featured a two-day lineup of local bands performing on a custom stage constructed under two billboards near Zilker Park.[11]