Texas is home to a number of historic, distinctive, legendary food and drink icons -- such as Blue Bell Ice Cream, Dublin Dr Pepper, and Shiner Beer.

Fine books have been published in recent years about Blue Bell and Dublin Dr Pepper, and now author Mike Renfro has teamed up with Bright Sky Press to tell the Shiner story in a wonderful coffee table book called Shine On: 100 Years of Shiner Beer ($34.95 hardcover).

The book is billed as "the one coffee table book that looks better if you set your beer on it."

If you can tell a book by its cover, then that's a good place to start in talking about Shine On. The cover unfolds to become a 20-by-30-inch vintage Shiner poster. So the book is, in more ways than one, a work of art.

Sort of like the beer, one might say.

Shiner Beer is brewed by just 55 folks at Spoetzl Brewery in the small South Texas town of Shiner, population around 2,000. The brewery was founded by German and Czech immigrants in 1909 and five years later was leased to Kosmos Spoetzl, an immigrant born in Bavaria.

"Ours is a pre-fab, tear-it-down-if-it's-old, corporate outsourcing kind of world," Renfro writes. "But even amongst all that, our lives are occasionally brightened by someone or something that remains un-strip-malled and genericized."

Such is the case with Shiner Beer.

Beginning with Spoetzl, who reigned from 1914-1950, there have been just six brewmasters at the Shiner plant. Jimmy Mauric, the current one, has worked there 30 years, starting at the bottom at age 17 and working his way up.

Shiner faced hard times at several junctures in its history and was near death's door in 1989, when Carlos Alvarez, an immigrant from Mexico, took over the brewery. He changed the focus to producing more dark beer, raised its price, invested in upgrading the facilities and marketing the beer, and literally saved the day. Sales doubled in two years, and in 1993, Shiner sold a million cases for the first time.

A particularly interesting chapter in the history of Shiner Beer deals with the Prohibition era from 1918-1933. Most small breweries went out of business, but Spoetzl changed the production to a "near beer" and to ice.

But old-timers around Shiner, Renfro reports, "will tell you without hesitation they never stopped making beer down at the brewery. They remember a ride in Dad's truck through town, with a stop at the loading dock to 'get some ice.' There was always that extra box or two that got loaded into the truck along with the ice."

The 192-page volume is filled with old and new photos of the brewery, as well as color pictures of the various Shiner Beer bottles, cans, labels and signs through the years. A nice touch, I thought, was including individual pictures of the employees, much like in a school yearbook, giving each one's name, nickname, job description, and years employed.

* Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him by e-mail at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.