Shiner Wild Hare Pale Ale brewed by the Spoetzl Brewery - Shiner, Texas

This classic American Pale Ale features two row barley malt with a blend of Munich and Caramel malt for rich malt flavor and golden color. High alpha Bravo and delicate US Golding hops are used in the kettle and fermenter for crisp bitterness and assertive fresh hop fruit and floral aroma. This is new territory for a Shiner Ale with more than one pound of hops per barrel, created in our most traditional cellars using legacy fermenters that have been pristinely preserved. Shiner Wild Hare Pale Ale is 5.5% ABV and has 32 IBUs.
     

    
Review by Beer Advocate
Golden-brown in appearance with a good 2 finger head after pour, with excellent lacing. You can definitely smell the hops- with tones of floral and citrus. It's pretty mellow, but you get a nice bite and hoppy character towards the end of the sip. Overall, excited about Shiner's first Pale Ale- It seems that Shiner is starting to get more creative and coming out with more complex beers.
 

     
Spoetzl Brewery History
Spoetzl was founded in 1909, and is the oldest independent brewery in Texas. A group of businessmen incorporated Shiner Brewing Association and placed Herman Weiss in as the company's first brewmaster. In 1914 a German immigrant brewer named Kosmas Spoetzl co-leased with Oswald Petzold with an option to buy in 1915. Spoetzl had attended brewmaster's school and apprenticed for three years in Germany, worked for eight years at the Pyramids Brewery in Cairo, Egypt, and then worked in Canada. He moved to San Antonio in search of a better climate for his health, bringing with him a family recipe for a Bavarian beer made from malted barley and hops.
 
    
 
During Prohibition, Kosmas Spoetzl kept the brewery afloat by selling ice and making near beer. After Prohibition only five of the original 13 Texas breweries were still intact. When the Prohibition laws were repealed larger beer plants, such as Anheuser-Busch, moved to Texas making life harder on the smaller independent breweries, but Spoetzl kept things small and simple never going more than 70 miles for business.

In the 1970s and 1980s the brewery's Shiner Beer and Shiner Bock had less than 1 percent of the Texas market. In 1983 Spoetzl produced 60,000 barrels of beer; in 1990 only 36,000. Sales improved after Carlos Alvarez of San Antonio acquired the brewery in 1989: Production grew to 100,000 barrels in 1994, and over the next ten years, production nearly tripled. As of 2011, it was the fourth-largest craft brewery and tenth-largest overall brewery in the United States.