Draft:Southside Craft Soda

Southside Craft Soda (Southside Bottling Works, Inc.) was founded in late 2017 by Andrew M. Anguiano and Gregg Spickler. Drawing inspiration from the flavors of their hometown, San Antonio, Texas, and the South Texas region, the duo crafts familiar yet distinct craft soda profiles.

In February of 2019, with the backing of family and friends, the company bottled their first beverage branded Texa Cola. This marked the return of a privately owned soda company after 60 years since the Garza Family, makers of Hippo Soda, ceased operations in the 1960s.Moreover, this represented a pioneering occasion where a Tex-Mex inspired soda was crafted, manufactured, and distributed in the American market.

The duo, previously employed by the local craft brewery Alamo Beer Company, aimed to create a Texas-inspired name for their first soda akin to Alamo that would have regional appeal. Texa Cola was created. The original Texa Cola formula was crafted in small batches and featured real citrus, local honey, and pure cane sugar. Shortly after its creation, 11 out of the initial 16 pallets of craft soda were swiftly purchased by the specialty grocery store H-E-B Central Market. This move catapulted the brand into major markets, including Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and their hometown, San Antonio. By the summer of 2019, Texa Cola had secured placement in over 125 stores of the Texas grocer H-E-B.

Finding initial success with its first brand, Texa Cola, the company launched a lemon-lime soda inspired by South Texas fruiterias, named Limoncito, and a distinctive spiced cherry soda called Beeville Honey Vanilla. Buzz around the brands quickly spread throughout Texas, with the Dallas Morning News asking if Southside Craft Soda was the next Dr. Pepper.

As part of Southside Craft Soda's venture into elevating soda into a culinary experience, the company aimed to infuse a Texas essence into the classic American root beer. Gregg Spickler, a Culinary Institute of America - Hyde Park graduate renowned as both a trained chef and an accomplished brewer with expertise in crafting recipes for beer, seltzers, and CBD beverages, developed a method to extract the flavor of mesquite beans and incorporate it into Southside Craft Soda's Root Bexar (pronounced "Bexar" like "behr," named after the county in which San Antonio is situated). This innovation marked the inaugural use of mesquite beans as an ingredient in root beer, imparting a distinctive touch of their hometown to the product.

Southside Craft Soda remains headquartered on the Southside of San Antonio, and in March of 2024, the company will transition from its original glass bottle packaging to cans. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/news/2024/02/12/southside-craft-soda-cans.html