A local development group is considering options for the Pearl plant site. Express-News file photo

Mix in German immigrants during the mid-1800s, and a brewing industry was sparked, becoming an important industry in San Antonio for 150 years.

Texas brewing began as a cottage industry with brewer Julius Rennert in New Braunfels and Charles Degen in San Antonio.

It later became a backbone of the region's economy, with big breweries employing thousands. But that industry since has returned to its simpler roots.

Between 1996 and 2000, nearly 1,000 people lost their jobs as the Lone Star Brewery and then the Pearl Brewery closed.

But brewpubs and a historic brewery east of the city are keeping a remnant of Texas' brewing tradition alive.

It's been a remarkable evolution. Fred Mosebach, a reporter for the San Antonio Express, recounted in a 1930s article that "beer brewing is a time-honored industry of San Antonio that has maintained a payroll to supply the sinews for trade and commerce as a contributing share to the prosperity this city has always known.

"There is no institution in San Antonio which has provided more employment than the breweries," Mosebach wrote.

San Antonio's economy once revolved around pecans, garment factories and brewing beer.

By some accounts, the making of beer was the first industry established in San Antonio when William A. Menger and Charles Degen opened a brewery next to the Alamo in 1855.

Bier here

The early Mexican settlers of the region likely drank a corn-based brew, letting wild yeasts convert the sugars in the grain to alcohol. It usually was made for special occasions and drunk quickly because it spoiled in the heat.

The next wave of settlers, the Texians, were largely from Tennessee and probably preferred a crock of whiskey that could be made in home distilleries.

In the eastern states, English settlers and their descendants were making ales in the early 1800s. But a rash of German immigration in the mid-1800s scattered German brewing methods — and the tradition of lagers, which ferment slower and at colder temperatures than ales — to Texas and the nation.

When the Germans arrived in Texas, they found no beer to their liking and began making their own, said Jeff Holt, a home brewer in Fredericksburg who has researched the history of Texas beer for his Web site Texasbreweries.com.

"You can sort of follow the German population through the breweries," Holt said.

Census records of German settlers in Texas show that few were listed as brewers when they first arrived. But 10 years later, stonemasons, shoemakers and farmers began to show up on the books as brewers.

There is some evidence that Julius Rennert, a shoemaker who was among New Braunfels' first settlers, built his brewery on the banks of the Comal River about the same time as Menger — perhaps as early as 1847. Carol Stein, who owns a house on the site, said a few crocks and bottles remained on the basement's flagstone floor.

As Rennert's trade grew, other breweries popped up in New Braunfels in the 1850s and 1860s operated by John Schneider, Richard and August Weinert, Charles Dambmann, Karl Geunther and Mathias Esser.

Little is known about any of these breweries, said John Rightmire, a collector of bottles and brewing memorabilia in New Braunfels. Thanks to violence in saloons, more is known about drinking establishments from the newspapers than about the breweries.

"People get murdered in saloons," Rightmire said. "There's been trouble associated with alcohol since an hour after it was invented, but not many stories about breweries survived."

In Castroville, Louis Huth may have operated a brewery in the general store of George Haass as long ago as the late 1840s, according to Holt's research. Huth moved to San Antonio in 1863.

In Fredericksburg, Frederick Probst began brewing around 1857 and another brewery started in the basement of the Nimitz Hotel about 1860.

Many breweries disappeared during the Civil War, when ingredients such as hops were harder to come by because of Union blockades. Rightmire said Dambmann's brewing equipment was confiscated in 1863 to make saltpeter in Landa Park for gunpowder used in the Civil War.

But Menger's Western Brewery, with Charles Degen as brewer, thrived until Menger's death in 1878. The beer, fermented and stored in cold tunnels below what is now the much-expanded Menger Hotel, sold for 50 cents a gallon.

Degen, whose fame had grown throughout the Southwest as thirsty travelers sampled his wares at the Menger Hotel, started his own brewery on Blum Street in 1879. Shortly after it opened it was Texas' largest brewery and operated until 1915.

By the mid-1870s, there were more than a dozen breweries operating in San Antonio and surrounding Hill Country towns. But few survived beyond the death of the founding brewer, and more breweries were destined to fall as the area was linked to the goods of the nation by more than the slow freight wagons.

Beer by rail

In 1881, the International Great Northern Railroad, which later became the Missouri Pacific, linked San Antonio and Austin. The railroad helped create large brewing companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Pabst, Stroh and Schlitz.

Julius Rennert, like many brewers of the time, felt the pressure of the railroad. By the time the rail link was complete, he became one of Texas' first distributors of beer shipped from the Anheuser-Busch breweries in St. Louis. Rennert eventually stopped selling his local beer altogether.

Adolphus Busch already had made inroads with the brewers of the area, and his company was probably the first beer on the trains to South Texas, said Char Miller, chairman of Trinity University's history department.

With the train came other goods, and an economic boom followed. More people meant more beer was needed.

But the rail also meant that local breweries willing to make the investment also could send their beer off to other cities. The precursors to the Lone Star and Pearl breweries were born.

Busch started the Lone Star Brewing Co. in 1884. Anheuser-Busch bought the Alamo Brewing Co. in 1895 and merged it with Lone Star. The Lone Star building Busch had built for the brewery on Jones Avenue in 1904 still stands as the San Antonio Museum of Art.

As Lone Star and Alamo Brewing grew, a group of citizens formed the San Antonio Brewing Association and purchased the plant on the site of what later became the Pearl Brewery. Otto Koehler became its first manager, introducing Pearl beer in 1886. The brewery expanded and was among the largest breweries in Texas by 1916.

The dry years

Degen brewed on Blum Street almost until his death in 1912, missing the beginning of Prohibition — and never getting a chance to carry out his plan for such an eventuality.

"If Prohibition comes, Germans in this state will have to form a trust and drink up all the water," Degen was reported to have said.

Prohibition came to Texas in 1918 and became national policy in 1920. It meant the death of many breweries, but some managed to stay in business by other means until the ban was lifted in 1933.

Koehler's wife, Emma, took over as CEO of the San Antonio Brewing Association after her husband died in 1914. She is credited with rescuing the company during Prohibition, taking advantage of the plant's capabilities to make ice, run a creamery and bottle soft drinks.

One minute past midnight on Sept. 15, 1933, the company was ready for the revelry that marked the end of the Prohibition era. Twenty-five boxcars and more than 100 trucks left the brewery grounds "down a street lined with cheering supporters," the company history recounts.

The New Braunfels Brewing Co., now the site of the New Braunfels Smokehouse meat processing plant, had tried to hold on to life during Prohibition making Busto beer. Signs proclaimed to consumers: "There is no beer near here, but there is near beer here."

But federal agents shut down the brewery in 1925 when they discovered the "near beer" had too much alcohol in it. The brewery didn't live to see Prohibition's repeal.

Modern industry

The success of Pearl beer continued and the company name officially was changed to Pearl Brewing Co. in 1952. In 1961, the firm bought the then-well-known Goetz Brewing Co. of St. Joseph, Mo., and began making Country Club Malt Liquor and the low-alcohol Goetz Pale Near Beer.

Further industry consolidation boosted San Antonio operations with more beers, the opening of an aluminum can recycling center and a can manufacturing plant.

Pabst Brewing acquired Pearl in 1985. Pabst eventually shut down its famous Milwaukee plant and moved its corporate headquarters to San Antonio.

The Lone Star Brewery reopened after Prohibition as Champion Brewing Co. at a new plant making Sabinas beer, which later became Champion beer.

It wasn't until 1940 that brewer Peter Kreil from Munich created the formula for the first beer to actually be called Lone Star beer. In 1949, under the leadership of Harry Jersig, Lone Star went public. By 1960, the brewery had 651 employees and by 1965, annual sales exceeded 1 million barrels.

Olympia Brewing Co. of Washington bought Lone Star in 1976, and it changed hands again in 1983 when Wisconsin's G. Heileman bought Olympia.

Detroit-based Stroh then bought Heileman and closed the San Antonio brewery in 1996, signaling the end of San Antonio as a major brewing town. Pabst bought most of the Stroh brands, including Lone Star, in 1999 and began brewing Lone Star at the Pearl plant to great fanfare.

A year later, Pabst's holding company, S&P Co. of California, decided to shut down the Pearl plant, laying off more than 300 workers.

The new generation

San Antonio is still the headquarters of Pabst, the fourth largest brewing company in the country, but the manufacturing jobs are gone. Only administrative offices remain. All the breweries have been sold and the giant Miller Brewing Co. makes the dozens of Pabst-owned beer brands under contract.

San Antonio also is home to the Gambrinus Co., importer of Mexican beers such as Corona and Negra Modelo as well as Canadian Moosehead lager. Gambrinus owns the now-famous Spoetzel Brewery in Shiner and Pete's Brewing Co. Pete's beers are contract-brewed by Miller.

Microbreweries such as Frio Brewing Co. and the Yellow Rose Brewing Co. have come and gone in the last decade. Regionally, only Real Ale Brewing Co. in Blanco remains. It's building a larger plant to keep up with demand from Austin and San Antonio.

But brewpubs with beer brewed and served on site are keeping a 150-year-old South Texas tradition alive at places like Blue Star Brewing Co. in San Antonio, Faust Brewing Co. in New Braunfels, Fredericksburg Brewing Co. in its namesake town and the new Dodging Duck Brewhaus in Boerne.

The Pearl Brewery still stands as a tribute to the once great brewing industry, though the brewing equipment will be sold off in January by new owners Silver Ventures.

San Antonio-based Silver Ventures will transform the Pearl plant on the banks of the San Antonio River, but exact plans for the property have not been revealed.

Preserving the history of Pearl will be a key to the development, Silver Ventures Managing Director Ken Halliday said, because "so much of the brewery is the story of San Antonio."

tpoling@express-news.net