The Pearl: San Antonio's Brewing Empire
Near San Antonio, Texas
The story of Pearl beer begins in the early eighteen eighties, when a Czech-born brewer named Jaroslav Behloradsky opened what he called the City Brewery along the San Antonio River. The site was purchased in eighteen eighty-three by a group of local investors and reorganized as the San Antonio Brewing Association. The name Pearl came from a German brewmaster who compared the bubbles in a freshly poured glass to sparkling pearls, calling them Perlen. The description stuck, and Pearl beer became the brand.
By nineteen sixteen, Pearl was the largest brewery in Texas, producing one hundred ten thousand barrels a year. The red brick complex along the river was one of the most recognizable industrial landmarks in San Antonio. Then Prohibition arrived, and the Association was confronted with a choice familiar to every American brewery: adapt or close.
The woman who saved Pearl was Emma Koehler, the widow of the brewery's president, who took control after her husband died in nineteen fourteen. During Prohibition she pivoted the operation to produce near-beer, bottled soft drinks, commercial ice, and dairy products. She even ran an outdoor advertising company. When Prohibition ended in Texas on September fifteenth, nineteen thirty-three, the brewery was ready. One hundred trucks and twenty-five boxcars loaded with Pearl beer left the grounds within fifteen minutes of the law changing.
Pearl survived, expanded, and became one of Texas's most recognized brands through the middle decades of the twentieth century. But by two thousand one, with the regional brewing market collapsed under national competition, Pearl shut down after one hundred eighteen years of production.
Silver Ventures purchased the twenty-three-acre site and began the conversion that created the Pearl District. The Culinary Institute of America opened here in two thousand ten. Hotel Emma, built inside the repurposed brewhouse, opened in two thousand fifteen. The tanks and catwalk that once measured out thousands of barrels of beer now hang above a hotel lobby. The river that ran past the brewery still runs past it now, and the neighborhood that grew up around the Pearl is among the most visited places in San Antonio.
