Texas Independence Week: 5 historic beers beyond Lone Star and Shiner

Editor's note: It is Texas Independence Week. Each day this week, we'll offer a new list of Texas topics. 

Texas was abundant in breweries before Prohibition. A few answered to St. Louis beer magnate Adolphus Busch, but for the most part, they were small, maybe regional, and answered to no corporate bosses – just themselves and their customers.

Today, the micro-brewing scene in Texas today is much the same. Central Texas, in particular, is a hotbed of small breweries, pushing out whatever beers their brewmasters' imagination will come up with.

But in between these magnificent times for beer connoisseurs – there was the Age of Texas Giants. In the time between Prohibition and the new millennium, there was a great flood of pale yeller liquid.

Here in Austin, you’ve probably heard of two survivors: Lone Star Beer, born in 1940, and a cultural touchstone for armadillos and outlaws. And Shiner, created in 1909 and one of the few Texas breweries to survive Prohibition.

But there were several more important Texas beers during this period. As we kick off our Texas Independence Week series, here are 5 historic Texas beers beyond Lone Star and Shiner …

1. Southern Select:In 1912, Houston Ice & Brewing hired the Belgian-born Frantz Hector Brogniez as brewmaster, Brogniez brewed his first batch of Southern Select and shipped it off to compete in the World's Fair in Ghent, Belgium, in 1913. The judges apparently didn’t know Texas was a heathen backwater, because the Texas beer won theDiplome de Grand Prix ... Southern Select was No. 1 of a world’s worth of beer (beating more than 4,000 competitors).

Houston may have been somewhere still between mud and money, but until Prohibition they had a top-notch beer. When Galveston Brewing and Houston Ice & Brewing joined forces, post-Prohibition, Southern Select was revived and remained popular until the company went out of business in the mid-1950s. Even then, the Southern Select brand was purchased by Pearl and brewed for awhile in San Antonio before finally succumbing to history.

2. Grand Prize:Howard Hughes didn’t mess around. In 1932, Houston Ice & Brewing had rehired Frantz Brogniez (who had spent Prohibition in El Paso, where he brewed beer in Juarez). Hughes had no intention of trying to compete with the celebrated brewmaster in his own hometown – so he just hired him away.

Hughes would be known for other things, of course, but for a bit after Prohibition, he dabbled in brewing, building the ultra-modern Gulf Brewing Co. facility on the grounds of the Hughes Tool Company in Houston. Grand Prize — named after the award Brogniez won for Southern Select — quickly became the best-selling beer in Texas. Gulf Brewing was putting out a quarter-million barrels a year in the early 1950s, selling across Texas and the neighboring states. Hughes pulled the plug on Grand Prize in 1963.

3. Mitchell’s Beer:The El Paso Brewing Co. that existed before Prohibition became the Harry Mitchell Brewing Co. in 1933 and produced a beer that went through names like a self-conscious teenager:Harry Mitchell Beer, Mitchell’s Beer, Mitchell Beer and Mitchell’s Premium Beer were produced during a 20-year run from 1935 until HMBC went out of business in 1955. The brewery was purchased by Falstaff Brewing in 1955 and it produced Falstaff until 1967.

4. Bluebonnet beer:The Metroplex tried hard, but could only look at the longevity of San Antonio and Houston beers and hang its head. Schepps Brewing Corp. existed from 1934-1939 (giving us Schepps, Highland Park and Black Dallas, among others) before becoming Time Brewing for a short time. Finally pulling it together as the Dallas-Fort Worth Brewing Co. in 1940, the brewery gave us Bluebonnet beer until shutting down in 1951. With an 11-year run, Bluebonnet was king in North Texas, but a youngster compared to …

5. Pearl beer: Pearl is the mother of Texas beers. Old, bold, bought, sold, betrayed and all but forgotten, the brewery has a history that incorporates just about everything you could want in an epic beer story … except, sadly, a happy ending. Sadder, still, because Pearl is still being brewed — available in Texas since 1886, but without the recognition Texans usually hold for such an icon.

Pearl survived Prohibition and was a heavyweight in Texas until the 1960s. Then the brewery consolidations began. Pearl began changing hands in the 1970s, but managed to keep its brewery open until 2001. Pearl now limps behind its more celebrated sibling, Lone Star, under the Pabst flag and is brewed by contract at the MillerCoors facility in Fort Worth.