Crocker - Houston beer: a heady history of brewing in the Bayou City

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2012 by Ronnie Crocker

All rights reserved

First published 2012

e-book edition 2012

ISBN 978.1.61423.500.2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crocker, Ronnie.

Houston beer : a heady history of brewing in the Bayou City / Ronnie Crocker.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

print edition ISBN 978-1-60949-537-4

1. Beer industry--Texas--Houston--History. 2. Brewing industry--Texas--Houston--History. 3. Breweries--Texas--Houston--History. 4. Beer--Texas--Houston--History. 5. Brewers--Texas--Houston--Biography. 6. Houston (Tex.)--History. 7. Houston (Tex.)--Economic conditions. 8. Houston (Tex.)--Biography. I. Title.

HD9397.U53H683 2012

338.4766342097641411--dc23

2012006560

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Long hours alone at the computer notwithstanding, writing a book is a joyfully collaborative effort, and I am grateful to every person you see quoted, cited in a photo caption or named as an interview subject in the bibliography of this book. Each contributed, either by taking the time to talk with me, sharing important documents and memorabilia orlike those nineteenth-century newspaper writersleaving something behind that remains worth reading. Thank you, all.

Special thanks to Philip Brogniez, Susan Lieberman Seekatz and Ralph Stenzel, who answered the call of a stranger who said he was writing a book and wanted their help. I hope you enjoyed sharing your stories with me as much as I have enjoyed setting them down here.

Much appreciation to the following:

To Kyrie OConnor of Wait, WaitDont Tell Me! fame. For three years, Kyrie was my editor at the Houston Chronicle, and she was an immediate and enthusiastic supporter of the Beer, TX blog I write for chron.com. She graciously read early chapters of this book and encouraged me to keep going.

To Burke Watson, my great friend and tenacious former Chronicle colleague, for putting his excellent editing skills to work on the draft.

To Joyce Lee, the indefatigable Chronicle librarian, for tracking down any number of old stories, books and photographs.

To the excellent Chronicle photographers whose work enlivens these pages, to Howard Decker for giving me permission to use their pictures and to Susan Barber and Ken Ellis for designing the Beer, TX logo.

To the Houston Public Library, the Metropolitan Research Center and librarians and archivists everywhere for curating such an immense volume of material for anyone who wants to see it, whenever the need arises. Please squawk loudly whenever your elected officials talk about cutting funding for this valuable work.

To Mountain Brew author Ed Sealover and The History Press commissioning editor Becky LeJeune for getting me into this project. I never cursed their names once.

To Patricia Shepherd, my partner in life, another thoughtful reader of drafts and a boon companion on many beer adventures past and future.

And to the countless readers, brewers and home-brewers, bartenders and bar owners, sales reps, distributors, beer geeks and otherwise enthusiastic participants in this great citys beer-loving community. They have made writing Beer, TX and this book a rewarding journalistic endeavor.

Cheers!

Ronnie Crocker

February 1, 2012

Chapter 1

An Industrial Revolution in Beer

In the muggy late summer of 1913, Houston Ice and Brewing Company was hardly alone in promoting its beer as the best in the city, even if it was the only one bold enough to boast that its flagship, a lager called Southern Select, constituted a potent muscle-building liquid nutrient.

Frequent advertisements in the Houston Chronicle declared Blatz the finest beer ever brewed and Pabst the finest for forty years. Old Fashioned Lager, alluding to the wilting Gulf Coast heat, offered to cut your suffering in half with this best of summer beverages, while Budweiser crowed that it had sold 175 million bottles the year before. These national brands also were given to touting their exclusive local distributors, while the American Brewing Association, independently run at Railroad and 2nd Streets in Houston for twenty years by a certain Adolphus Busch of St. Louis, described its Pilsener as pure as the suns rays and asked, May we deliver you a case? Just phone Preston 73.

But then on Wednesday, September 3, Houston Ice and Brewing dropped a marketing bombshell on its competitors. A rare full-page ad, illustrated with woodcut drawings of genteel women and men riding horses across what could be the English countryside, urged Houstonians to Follow the Call of Triumph! Southern Select could now credibly be called the worlds finest bottled beer after earning the Grand Prix of the Exposition medal at an international competition in Ghent, Belgium. The beer, brewed and bottled on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou at the four-block-wide Magnolia Brewery in Houstons industrial heart, had outranked 4,067 other beers by a jury of the greatest European scientists, chemists and brewery experts. The hometown brewers bought another full-page ad on Sunday, September 7, and two slightly smaller ones the following two Sundays to elaborate.

Houston Ice and Brewing ran a series of full-page ads in the Houston Chronicle to commemorate the international accolades for its Southern Select. Collection of Philip Brogniez.

The beer that achieved this signal distinction was made in Houston last December; it was four months old when it was bottled and exported and had been four months in the bottles when the award was made. It was made, aged, handled and packed exactly as every bottle of Southern Select is made, aged and handled for consumption in the home, club and cafe.

The beer that has made Houston triumphant, the first ads declared, a poke at the already famous slogan for Schlitz. According to a later report, the jab was sharpened for a downtown celebration outside the Rice Hotel, when a banner was raised declaring Southern Select The Beer that Made Milwaukee Jealous. The local press jumped on the bandwagon, proclaiming in a news story that Texas jumps into the limelight with a locally brewed beer that put Milwaukee out of the running and leaves St. Louis nowhere. The writer quoted company vice-president Robert Autrey as crediting the soil of Texas, the local water and the brewerys own standard operating procedures with contributing to a beer the brewers already considered first rank.

Houston Ice and Brewing Company operated the Magnolia Brewery on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou from the 1890s until Prohibition.