Clean streets, cold beer make small town’s winning combination
SHINER — Let’s say you’re one of the beer aficionados from around the world who has made a pilgrimage to this pleasant German-Czech town nestled among rolling hills about halfway between Houston and San Antonio. Let’s say you’ve used up your quota of complimentary draws of beer — that would be four — in the tasting room of the state’s oldest independent brewery. To make sure you don’t leave town still thirsty, former Houstonian Beverly Sanders is happy to offer a quick guide to the distinctive personalities of the town’s three watering holes. She’s the owner of one of them, the quirky Antiques, Art & Beer.
Maybe the best known of the three is Howard’s, a convenience store on the edge of town where you can buy gas, groceries and ammo, rent DVDs and drink beer. The owner is Beverly’s friend Howard Gloore, a former dentist who quit molding crowns and filling teeth, he told me, “because I just needed to be in a place where people were happier to see me.”
The Shiner native, of Swiss
descent, bought the convenience store in 1984, built a covered patio with picnic tables in 1999 and, until recently, featured live music. These days, folks still gather on the patio to drink beer and visit, but the music’s only a memory. Licensing fees got to be a hassle, so Howard stopped engaging bands. A lifelong musician himself, he still plays guitar with a band called Los Kolaches, just not at Howard’s.
“Local alcoholics go to Howard’s,” Beverly says in her cheeky, irreverent way. “They get there early in the morning, and they’re still there late at night. He even leaves his patio open, so they can sit there and drink after the store closes.”
That’s not exactly how Howard sees it. The store, he says, is Shiner’s “Cheers.” “I wanted to have a place where people wanted to drop by and visit,” he told me. “Like a big family.” His wife Carol calls it “the Shiner Country Club.”
And then there’s SOS, Shiner on Sixth. The town’s only dive bar, SOS is “the loud music, pool tables, smoke, spit-on-the-floor kind of bar,” Beverly says.
Her own place, Antiques, Art & Beer, is a bit harder to categorize. Crammed into a narrow, dimly lit downtown building more than a century old are bottles of beer and wine from around the world, a confectionary counter with several types of fudge made on site, Shiner souvenirs and gift cards, antiques, original art pieces, Tiffany-style lamps, various kinds of soap, peanuts, popcorn and more of who knows what than I was able to take in. Her clientele, she says, is older and more refined than SOS regulars. They’re connoisseurs of fine wine and distinguished cheeses. Maybe they’ve driven in from the city to sample 387 different types of beer she has available, 285 different wines.
“It’s become a destination place,” she says. “People come here for beers they can’t get in Houston and Austin.”
Beverly also gets a fair number of brewery spillover. Spoetzl Brewery, where every bottle, can and keg of Shiner Beer is brewed, was founded in 1909 by thirsty German and Czech settlers who called themselves the Shiner Brewing Association. Unhappy with its own concoction, the SBA hired Bavarian-born Kosmos Spoetzl as brewmaster in 1914. Spoetzl, who had trained in Cairo (Egypt) and in Canada, bought the brewery the next year, perfected a recipe that pleased the locals and deftly navigated the business through the shoals of Prohibition and the Great Depression. The San Antonio-based Gambrinus Co., with Acapulco native Carlos Alvarez as the CEO, bought the brewery in 1989 and invested millions at a time when there was talk of shutting it down. These days the gleaming white plant near downtown, one of Shiner’s three major employers, produces 550,000 barrels of Shiner Beer a year. Once only a Central Texas brew favored by Austin hippies and rednecks, Shiner today is sold in all 50 states, plus Mexico and Puerto Rico.
Thousands come to Shiner to tour the brewery and sample the beer, but those who come to stay are likely to be young families drawn by the sterling reputation of the local schools, both public and Catholic, and by the Mayberry-like atmosphere. The population, a bit over 2,000, has remained stable for years.
“There’s no crime here,” said former Bellaire resident Fred Hilscher, a friendly and unassuming banker who moved with his family to Shiner 25 years ago and who has served as mayor since 2012. “We haven’t had a murder in 40 years,” he told me. ‘That’s what’s attracting the outsiders. Plus, we’ve got one stop light. If you don’t like it, you can go around it.”
The mayor says the city strives to adhere to its motto, “Cleanest Little City in Texas,” by keeping the wide streets in good repair and staying on top of abandoned houses or absentee owners who fail to keep up their property. “Neighbors will come out and tell you to clean up,” he said.
The “Cleanest Little City” slogan is what attracted Beverly, by happenstance, nearly 20 years ago. A widow and longtime Houston resident who had retired three times from positions in commercial real estate, with United Airlines and elsewhere, she had sold her home and was moving to Hawaii, where she had lived in years past. Tearing off strips of the Chronicle to wrap wine glasses, she happened to notice a real estate ad for a house in the “Cleanest Little City in Texas.” Where that city was, the ad didn’t say.
“It haunted me all night long,” she said, “so the next morning I called. I thought the man said the house was in China.”
Once she realized that Shiner, not China, was only a couple of hours from Houston, she drove west on I-10, found an old house she loved near downtown and promptly forgot about Hawaii. “I was smitten,” she said. “The streets were clean. They had curbs and gutters. No goats in the yard. No abandoned vehicles out front.”
As much as she loved Shiner, her house and the “falling-down building” she purchased a few years later, small-town ways occasionally confounded her. Not long after buying the house, she called a local electrician and began explaining what she wanted done.
The electrician interrupted her. “I’ll have to talk to the man of the family,” he said.
“He’s not available,” Beverly told him.
“Where’s your daddy?” the man asked.
Where am I? In the Twilight Zone?, she wondered.
When the fellow persisted, she couldn’t hold back. “He can’t talk to you!” she shouted. “He’s dead!”
Responding to her story, I said something like, “I’m guessing that after all this time you’ve learned to accommodate yourself to small-town ways.”
“I have not!” she said, blue eyes blazing.
I got the feeling at that moment it’s been the “Cleanest Little City in Texas” that’s done the accommodating. Both the town and Beverly seem happy with the arrangement.