It was made in San Marcos before the Alamo Brewing Company of San Antonio in 1874, the company was purchased by Anheuser-Busch in 1895 at which time it was housed in the Old Lone Star Brewery located on 200 West Jones Avenue. The original Lone Star Bottling Works opened in San Antonio in the 1890s and by 1903 was selling 65,000 barrels of beer annually. With the end of Prohibition in 1933, a new brewery under the name Sabinas Brewing Company was constructed at 600 Lone Star Boulevard and operated under the Sabinas name until 1939. The company then operated under name to the Champion Brewing Company until 1940, at which time it was purchased by the Muchlebach Brewing Company of Kansas City, Missouri. The company re-branded itself as the Lone Star Brewing Company and began officially producing Lone Star Beer that year. The brewery also produced Lone Star Light, low-calorie Lime Lager, and Brut Super Premium. It was not until 1940 that brewer Peter Kreil from Munich created the formula for the first beer to actually be called Lone Star beer. In 1949, under the leadership of Harry Jersig, Lone Star went public. By 1960, the brewery had 651 employees and by 1965, annual sales exceeded 1 million barrels. Olympia Brewing Co. of Washington bought Lone Star in 1976, and it changed hands again in 1983 when Wisconsin's G. Heileman bought Olympia. Detroit-based Stroh Brewery Co. then bought Heileman and closed the San Antonio brewery in 1996 moving beer production to Longview, Texas and signaling the end of San Antonio as a major brewing town. Milwaukee-based Pabst bought most of the Stroh brands, including Lone Star, in 1999, and began brewing Lone Star at the San Antonio Pearl Brewery to great fanfare. In 2000, the Pearl Brewery was closed because it was outdated and would have been too expensive to continue to operate or to bring up to date. Production of Lone Star is currently contracted out to non-Pabst owned breweries. In 1956, the Lone Star Brewery purchased the Buckhorn Saloon & Museum collection. Harry Jersig, President of the brewery and a friend of the Friedrich’s, continued to add to the collection and had a special building erected on the Lone Star grounds to house the collection. In the 1970s, Lone Star's sales benefited from Jerry Retzloff, former marketing and promotions manager for Lone Star Beer and his close association with Willie Nelson, the Austin music scene and their Giant Armadillo. The beer is mentioned frequently in the title track of Red Steagall's 1976 album "Lone Star Beer and Bob Wills Music". In 1999, the company began to sponsor Texas singers and musicians, such as Two Tons of Steel, with the beer's "It's a Texas Thing" advertising campaign and in the same time period Lone Star introduced Lime Lager to be one of the first brewery's to have a lime flavored brew. In the 1990s, Lone Star introduces Lone Star Ice and Lone Star Dry for a short period of time.
In popular culture
This beer is referenced in the Johnny Paycheck song, "11 months and 29 days" the lyrics go as follows "keep the lone star cold, the dance floor hot while I’m gone"
these lyrics infamously refer to Paycheck's jail sentence of approximately 11 months and 29 days.
