History
Spoetzl was founded in 1909, and is the oldest independent brewery in Texas. 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, Kosmos 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 When the Prohibition laws were repealed, larger beer plants, such as Anheuser-Busch, moved to Texas making life harder on the smaller independent breweries, but Spoetzl kept things small and simple,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. The company now has 85 employees.
As of 2013, it was the fourth-largest craft brewery and tenth-largest overall brewery in the United States.
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