Who owns shiner bock brewery

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Are you sure you want to delete your account? Your information will be erased and your published posts will be reassigned to the site's admin account. This action cannot be undone. Skip to content. About the Author: Jess Baker Jess Baker walked into a beer fest in and realized beer had come a long way from what her dad had been drinking since the 70s.

Stories and opinions shared on CraftBeer. Search for:. Is your brewery expanding? Are you releasing a new beer or hosting an festival? Log in to add your news or event to CraftBeer. Local legend maintained that Spoetzl would occasionally forget to boil off the alcohol in select batches. When regular beer production resumed in , Spoetzl became prosperous enough to replace the original wood and tin building with a stone structure.

With her father's death in , Spoetzl's daughter Cecelie ran the brewery until when the business passed out of family hands and a succession of owners then struggled to keep the operation profitable. Although Alvarez had no intention of tampering with the brewing process, he made other changes as soon as Gambrinus took over the Spoetzl Brewery. He canceled all of the contracts to brew other companies' brands, even though the work amounted to one-quarter of the brewery's annual revenues.

Alvarez anticipated that he would need all of his production capacity to support the projected demand in Shiner beers. He also canceled all out-of-state agreements for Shiner beers, which had been sold to anyone willing to buy a shipment, even as far away as Arizona and Ohio. Alvarez wanted to make sure that the product was handled properly, and so for the sake of quality control and long-term growth he contracted the sales territory.

Finally, and to some observers the most surprising move, he immediately raised the price of Shiner beer, which under the previous owners had cost less than Budweiser and now cost 75 percent more.

Alvarez wanted to position the product in the premium category, and although Shiner beer had a loyal following that might be disenfranchised, it was small, and Gambrinus stood to gain considerably by establishing the higher price with customers unfamiliar with the brand.

Gambrinus also invested millions to upgrade the facilities. It added new fermentation tanks, created the brewery's first testing laboratory for quality control, and built a new warehouse. The changes made by new ownership soon began to show results. The brewery produced 35, barrels in , but by the number had increased to ,, as Shiner Bock became America's best-selling bock beer. Spoetzl was now the largest specialty brewery in the Southwest and the seventh largest in the country.

With the rising popularity of specialty beers, the three major industry giants--Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors--looked to create their own internal specialty product lines or to simply buy up the microbreweries. Gambrinus, with its Spoetzl operation in sound shape, became involved in this consolidation of the craft brewer segment by purchasing the BridgePort Brewing Company in BridgePort was the oldest operating microbrewery in Oregon, an area which had become a hotbed for craft brewing.

His recipe for BridgePort Ale proved popular and fueled the brewery's growth. It introduced a number of craft beers, which it began to bottle in and distribute to retail stores in Oregon and Washington. Other area microbreweries, however, expanded more rapidly through public offerings of their stock. They surpassed privately funded BridgePort, which never devoted money to promotions or marketing. The Ponzis knew they either had to curtail expansion plans, step up their commitment, or sell out to a company with deeper pockets and better sales and marketing capabilities.

In the end, they chose to sell the business to Gambrinus. Gambrinus, as it had done with Spoetzl, instituted a number of immediate changes. In Gambrinus gained its first national distribution deal for an imported beer when it acquired the distribution and marketing rights for Canada's Moosehead beer from the Guinness Import Corporation.

Despite industry insiders who discounted the possibility of reversing the trend of declining sales with Moosehead, Gambrinus looked to apply some of the lessons it had learned with Corona beer. In the meantime, Corona sales were so strong that Modelo decided to renew import rights with Barton and Gambrinus for an additional ten years, despite the fact that Anheuser-Busch now owned a major stake in the Mexican brewer and was itself interested in acquiring the distribution rights to Corona.

Modelo had good reason to be pleased with its American partners. In Corona passed Heineken to become the largest-selling imported beer in the United States. Building on its U. Although a strong second to microbrewer Boston Beer, makers of the Sam Adams line of beers, Pete's struggled in an environment in which the craft segment of the beer industry suffered a sharp drop in growth. Sales declined in late and early , forcing Pete's to look for a buyer. They are talking about Karbach Brewing Co.

Spoetzl Brewery. A-B is a public multinational company with its global headquarters in Belgium. A-B acquired Karbach Brewing Co. A-B does not want you to know that Karbach is produced at the formerly craft Karbach brewery and at its large, low-cost A-B plant in Houston.

This is a huge company with deep pockets seeking to force its way into our town. We are proud of our beer, proud of our independence, proud of our heritage, proud of our authenticity, and proud to be in Shiner, Texas. Your friends at the Spoetzl Brewery. Support Local Journalism. Information is power. And we believe everyone deserves access to accurate independent coverage of their community and state. Our readers helped us continue this coverage in , and we are so grateful for the support.

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