Here’s why you can’t find Lone Star Beer in San Antonio or the rest of Texas

Beer shelves statewide are full of empty spaces where tallboys and longneck bottles of the self-proclaimed “National Beer of Texas” once stood.

In case you hadn’t noticed, San Antonio and Texas are experiencing a Lone Star Beer shortage. But there’s good news for fans of the brand: shelves should be restocked later this month.

After nearly two decades, the contract to brew Lone Star and Lone Star Light has moved from the Molson Coors brewery in Fort Worth to a Houston facility run by Belgium-based Anheuser Busch InBev. Production stopped as a result of the handoff, according to officials with San Antonio-based Pabst Brewing Co., Lone Star’s owner. 

“Our planned production hiatus to prepare our new brewing location in Texas is almost complete,” Pabst Senior Vice President of Brewing Operations John Kimes told the Current in a written statement. “We will be packaging and shipping Lone Star and Lone Star Light in the next few weeks and will recover all wholesaler and retailer inventories in March.”

Pabst gave Lone Star distributors a heads-up before the transition, according to Pabst officials. That allowed them to stock up with at least two months of inventory to resupply retailers, bars and restaurants.

Officials with Southern Glazers Wine & Spirits, which distributes Lone Star in the San Antonio area, were unavailable before press time to comment on the supply shortage.

Texas and Oklahoma accounts will be the first to see the return of the Lone Star and Lone Star Light, Pabst officials said.

Lone Star has a complicated brand history. Pabst has owned it since 1999, when the beer conglomerate bought out Stroh Brewing Co. of Detroit.

However, Lone Star traces its roots all the way back to the early 1880s, when Adolphus Busch took over the Alamo Brewing Association and turned it into the Lone Star Brewery, now the site of the San Antonio Museum of Art.

The production site shuttered with the onset of Prohibition in 1919, but a new Alamo City brewery with no ties to the pre-Prohibition Lone Star popped up in 1933 on what’s now Lone Star Boulevard. A few years later, that morphed into Lone Star Brewing Co., which began cranking out Lone Star-branded beers the same year.

The brewery operated independently until 1976, when it was acquired, and through a series of consolidations eventually ended up in the hands of Pabst. It was brewed in San Antonio until Lone Star Brewery closed in 1996. After that, production shifted to Longview until returning to San Antonio in 2000 for a brief stint at the Pearl Brewery, which closed later that same year.

Pabst sold or closed all its breweries and began having them contract-brewed by Miller throughout the country. Despite litigation between Pabst and Miller Coors — now part of Canadian-brewing firm Molson Coors — Lone Star stayed at the Fort Worth plant until the planned transition to a new contract with Anheuser Busch InBev.

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This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.