Pearl Brewing Company
The Pearl Brewing Company (also known as the Pearl Brewery or just Pearl) was an American brewery, established in 1883 in Downtown San Antonio, Texas, USA. In 1985, Pearl's parent company purchased the Pabst Brewing Company and assumed the Pabst name. In 1999, the Pabst Brewing Company began transferring its production to Miller Brewing, on a contract basis, and closing all of its breweries. Pearl beer is still in production at Miller's Ft. Worth, Texas facility, but the Pearl Brewery in San Antonio was closed in 2001. Since then, the former brewery was purchased by Silver Ventures, Inc., which has made the property the crown jewel in revitalization efforts of southern Midtown and northern Downtown San Antonio.
Hibernia Brewing
As production dwindled and layoffs took place when the company downsized, Hibernia filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protections in February 1988. Good publicity was generated in June by the receipt of a silver medal for Hibernia Master Brew, in the European Amber category, in the 1988 Great American Beer Festival. An ambitious plan to build restaurants with miniature breweries—essentially a chain brewpub operation—in partnership with a Schaumburg, Illinois-based firm, and in which Hibernia possessed “the expertise and none of the capital,” failed to materialize, and on August 24 the brewery closed, ostensibly for a short time, because it lacked truck insurance coverage. By early September, Scheer had left for new employment, reluctantly leaving Hibernia for stable work in Michigan at the Frankenmuth Brewery, and the First Wisconsin National Bank of Eau Claire sought to sell Hibernia, with a stated preference for doing so to someone with the intention of keeping the facility open for production. What beer remained in the brewery tanks was kept refrigerated under orders of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, under the premise that it added value to the dormant brewery. In fact, it was the last brew that the century-old facility ever would manufacture.