At the end of the day, this Texas historian just wants a cold, affordable beer and the truth. Lone Star Brewing Company has long been making the first part easy. The second part? Not so much. For the better part of a decade, it has been stamping its products with “Since 1884.” But this year the company got aggressive about it, presumably for a nice, round-numbered anniversary, by putting a giant “140” on billboards, cans, hats, koozies, stickers, T-shirts, and tap handles.
It’s true that a Lone Star Brewing Co. was established in 1884. The San Antonio–based company brewed, among other brands, Alamo Beer. But it never sold a beer named Lone Star. It went out of business in 1919. A second and separate Lone Star Brewing Co. was founded in 1940—also in San Antonio. That year it introduced the Lone Star Beer we know and love today. It’s now one of 29 active brands owned by juggernaut Pabst.
I got interested in the history of Texas breweries about twenty years ago, thanks to a birthday gift from my wife, Shannon. I looked at the vintage Pearl beer calendar she gave me and realized I didn’t know much about Texas beers beyond a handful of brand names. So I decided to research the topic, developing skills that would help me write my first history book, Picnic: Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition, published last April. When Lone Star started using its “Since 1884” branding, in 2017, I understood what it was referring to and why it wasn’t right.
I reached out by email to Brandon Kieffer, the interim brand director for Lone Star, to ask why the company was using “Since 1884,” given that the company founded in that year was distinct from the one launched in 1940. His initial response was “We appreciate your interest in covering Lone Star’s 140th anniversary!” But after I followed up with additional questions, he acknowledged that “there is a distinct difference in the establishment of the Lone Star Brewing Company in 1884 and the launch of the product Lone Star Lager Beer in 1940.”
I pulled out a Lone Star tallboy from my cooler and looked at the “140” emblazoned on it. I opened Lone Star’s website and saw all the merch that’s labelled “Lone Star Beer 140 years.” It seems there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation.
Kieffer says the current company “reestablished (the copyright and trademark) after it had been dormant through Prohibition.” This explanation irks Charles Staats, president of the Lone Star chapter of the Brewery Collectibles Club of America and board member for the National Association of Breweriana Advertising. The two companies “have no connection, financially, heritage-wise, nothing, zero,” Staats says. “It’s two totally different addresses, two different parts of San Antonio, two different companies that came up with the name ‘Lone Star.’ ”
The 1884 Lone Star Brewing Co. opened on September 13 of that year with a lavish public banquet and free beer. The San Antonio Light enthused that it was a “good beer, amber colored and pure, a boon to thirsty souls.”
The beer was popular, but the brewery would encounter legal problems on the road to Prohibition, which commenced in 1919. Unlike its neighbor Pearl and the little brewery ninety miles to the east in Shiner, Lone Star didn’t survive the dry years. It shipped its brewing equipment to Mexico and the brewery became a cotton mill in 1921. (Sixty years later it became the San Antonio Museum of Art.)
When beer became legal again in Texas, on September 15, 1933, Sabinas Brewing Company of Mexico was building a brewery in San Antonio. Once open, it started strong, but after a few years it struggled to turn a profit. Staats says Sabinas’s demise was fueled by its introduction of canned beer, in 1937, which didn’t catch on in Texas until years later. Sabinas reformed as Champion Brewing Company in early 1939, but by that fall it was in talks with Muehlebach Brewing Company for the Kansas City operation to purchase the brand.
Muehlebach bought Champion, intending to keep it a regional brewery. Muehlebach president Robert Drum wanted to rename it “Lone Star Brewing Company,” but there was doubt as to whether that name was legally available.
The Jerry Retzloff papers at the Wittliff Collections in San Marcos tell us that, yes, there was some legal difficulty securing the name, but it didn’t come from the original owners of the 1884 company. Instead, investor Frank Northrup had grabbed the trademark in 1936. Northrup had envisioned running a “Lone Star Brewing Association” in San Antonio, but it never got off the ground. Drum really wanted “Lone Star” and Muehlebach’s lawyer was tasked with sorting it out.
Drum prevailed and Muehlebach acquired the Lone Star trademark in 1940. Lone Star Beer premiered in April of that year and was an immediate hit. Lone Star emerged as its own company in 1949 when Muehlebach bowed out.
Longtime Lone Star drinkers can probably pick it up from there. With slogans such as “Going Great in the Lone Star State,” “From the Big Country,” “Long Live Long Necks,” and “the National Beer of Texas,” Lone Star became part of Texas culture.
But even that didn’t protect it from consolidation. Olympia Brewing Company of Washington State bought Lone Star in 1976, and it would be owned by Wisconsin’s G. Heileman and Michigan’s Stroh’s before becoming part of Pabst in 1999. Lone Star was brewed in San Antonio until 1996, when Stroh’s production moved to Longview. When Lone Star was acquired by Pabst, it returned briefly to San Antonio and was produced at the Pearl Brewery until that closed in 2001. Since then, Lone Star has been brewed at the Molson Coors facility in Fort Worth.
Through all those owners, Lone Star stood by its real history. A fiftieth-anniversary edition of the company magazine in 1990 does mention the 1884 company, saying the two are related “in name only.”
So why has the company changed its tune? Kieffer say it’s honoring the origin of the Lone Star Brewing Company and offers a comparison: “It’s similar to how Texans celebrate July Fourth to honor the independence of the United States in 1776,” even though Texas wasn’t part of the United States until 1845. “We still celebrate the history of the nation we are a part of today.”
Okay . . . but on the topic of nationhood and statehood, there’s one more thing to clear up. Before Lone Star adopted the “Since 1884” tag on its products, it spent quite a bit of the 2010s with a “Since 1845” tag. What was that about? If it was meant to honor Texas, why not “Since 1836,” when it became a republic?
Kieffer cut this line of questioning short, explaining that the 1845 tagline was adopted two owners ago. “There is no one currently working for Pabst who was around during this time,” he said, “nor do we have archives that can answer this question.”
It would seem it’s up to us beer enthusiasts to keep the history straight.
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