Southern Select

I continue to be amazed (and occasionally led astray) by the amount of information available on the internet.

Just this morning, for example, I was planning to relate a story about my grandfather and wanted to do a quick fact-check about Southern Select beer.  I was bombarded – almost buried -  with historical information about Galveston-Houston Breweries, Inc.

All I was really looking for was the location of their Houston brewery - 715 Franklin at Travis.  I knew it was just down Washington Avenue from Pop’s favorite bar, but I didn’t know its history, or the fact that it is now both a Texas and a nationally designated Historical Building.  Now known as the Magnolia Ballroom, it can be rented for special occasions if you have a ton of money.

The old Galveston Ice and Brewing Company was originally founded in 1895 by Anheuser-Busch and some local investors.  They weathered the Great Galveston Hurricane, and when prohibition became the law of the land, they converted to the manufacture of soft drinks.  Their top brand, Triple XXX Root Beer, gave rise to a chain of root beer stands across the South, and along the West Coast from San Diego to Vancouver, British Columbia.

It wasn’t all Roses for Triple XXX, though.  In 1960, the United States Food and Drug Administration released a ruling that sassafras (oil of saffron) as a food and beverage ingredient was a suspected  carcinogen. Its use would no longer be permitted in a long list of items which included root beer. Beverage companies were given a "grace period" of one year to reformulate their root beer products.

Triple XXX Corporation's management, with the help of an independent flavor laboratory in New Orleans, was able to retain the "Triple XXX" root beer taste. But without oil of saffron, the traditional foamy head characteristic of draft root beer was pretty much irreplaceable. Eventually, the industry's flavor chemists found alternative ingredients that were close enough to produce the appearance of "draft style" root beer. And most important for fans of Triple XXX root beer, its distinctive creamy root beer taste was preserved.

See what I mean? I was supposed to be researching beer, or geography – not root beer!

Because of the high salt content of  the well-water, Galveston Brewing was forced to distill the water to make Southern Select.  They tried to turn that into a positive, pointing out in their advertising that Southern Select was the only beer in the South made with pure distilled water.

Another useless but interesting factoid I learned was that Shields Park (Sheppard Park on Google Maps) in Galveston was originally named Shield (singular) Park after the big sign on the brewery across the street.

The Galveston brewery was purchased by Falstaff, which dropped the Southern Select label after a couple years.  Falstaff was later acquired by Pabst; they quit making Falstaff in 2005.

The story about Pop and Southern Select? Well, this is getting pretty long – maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow.