Pearl Brewing Company - Pearl City, Texas

Pearl City, Texas

It's not uncommon to see beers named after the towns they were brewed in. For example, Texas' own Shiner is of course brewed in Shiner, Texas. Naming a beer after a local town or city accomplishes two things. First, it establishes name recognition. Second, it ensures that an increased number of people will at least try the beer, since it's local and they believe that either the beer will be fresher than a beer trucked in from somewhere else, or that the local beer might be more attuned to the area's general taste in beer.

So, seeing a local brewery name a beer after the town or city is pretty common. However, what is not common is a town named after a beer. That's exactly what happened though in Texas with Pearl. In a small community just west of Yoakum, Texas, a small store had the highest Pearl beer single point of sales for a number of years prior to Prohibition. Walter G. Hagens' general store was the focal point of the community, and it had sold Pearl’s beers by the truck load and still sold a rather large volume of the Prohibition-era non-alcoholic Pearl. The idea to name the town after Pearl was concocted by Hagens and the local Pearl distributor, R. J. Eslinger. In 1942 the motion passed and the German/Czech town became known as Pearl City.