Houston was said to have dozens of bars long before it had its first church and those bars were kept wet by up to a dozen family-operated breweries. But when it came time to bring industrial brewing to Houston, the king himself got involved.
Adolphus Busch began the American Brewing Association in 1893 with an aim to produce 100,000 barrels of beer a year “equal in purity and flavor to the best brands of St. Louis or Milwaukee and superior to any made in the South.”
Of course, he also sold his own established brands, Faust and Budweiser.
The grand opening in 1894 attracted 10,000 Houston residents who enjoyed “inspiring” music and “unlimited” beer. Notes from the Brewers Journal, compiled in “The Encyclopedia of Texas Breweries” show a brewery constantly building -- storage depots, stock houses, bottling works -- and fighting -- strikes, fires, hurricanes.
An 1897 newspaper ad shows the stoppered bottles selling for $1 for a dozen pints. An 1899 ad said “this beer is brewed to fill the needs of those who require a beverage to tone up a weak constitution.”
Though backed by Busch and in business until Prohibition shut them down in 1918, Houston’s American Brewing Association is largely forgotten today. We know they made Dixie Pale and Hackerbrau beers, as well as American Bock (seasonally), American Pilsener (“Pure as the sun’s rays”) and, later, American Perfect. Some of their advertising products were remarkably beautiful.
The brewery was razed during Prohibition and was not rebuilt. In the 1960s, construction of the Academic Building for the University of Houston-Downtown revealed it was being built on the site of the old brewery.
“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 the Diplome de Grand Prix ... Southern Select was No. 1 of a world’s worth of beer (beating more than 4,000 competitors).”
I wrote that a few years ago when I was just beginning to look into Texas breweries. A few more years of research has only confirmed my suspicions — when you’re talking about pre-Prohibition Texas breweries, Houston Ice & Brewing was the boss. Adolphus Busch might have had his hands in Houston and San Antonio, but the king of beers in Texas at the time was Southern Select.
Houston Ice & Brewing was incorporated in 1892 and opened the following year with a party that drew more than 10,000 and emptied 120 kegs of beer before noon. After a siesta, the party continued into the night: “Nobody thirsted and nobody rested,” a newspaper report said.
Within 20 years, what was called the Magnolia Brewery* covered four city blocks and brewed 175,000 barrels a year. In addition to Southern Select, they brewed Richelieu, near-beer Hiawatha, Reputation and Magnolia Pale.
Houston Ice & Brewing was one of the larger breweries in Texas, but it was Southern Select and Brogniez that secured the brewery’s legendary status. Here’s what I wrote about the brewmaster:
Houston may have been somewhere still between mud and money, but Brogniez was as worldly as they made ‘em. He was a student of biology and a composer of classical music – which he once performed for Kaiser Wilhelm. He stood toe-to-toe with Louis Pasteur and Henry Ford. He helped establish the Houston Symphony. His family had been making beer since 1752 and … just for good measure … he was fluent in multiple languages.
Prohibition hit Houston Ice & Brewing hard. They couldn’t find a viable business to make it through the lean years, then flooding destroyed portions of the Magnolia Brewery. Still, they did return in 1933 … sort of.
The brewery combined with the Galveston brewery (in Galveston) to form “Galveston-Houston Breweries,” which would continue until the 1950s.
(*Though Houston Ice & Brewing did brew a beer just called Magnolia — apparently in addition to Magnolia Pale — the beer you know is Magnolia Beer was brewed by Galveston-Houston Breweries in the 1930s.)