Shlachter & Co.: The beer's still free, but now there’s a fee

Rahr & Sons, Cowtown’s very own microbrewery, has altered its free-beer Saturday tradition.

The prize-winning suds are free, from 1 to 3 p.m. at 701 Galveston Ave., just south of downtown. But now you must pay a $5 "admission charge," which gets you a Rahr beer glass and a guided tour.

If you bring a Rahr-logo glass, the $5 is donated to an ever-changing array of local charities. The next benefits a black Labrador rescue group.

No one’s bellyaching, insists the brewery’s managing partner, Tony Formby, who began charging the fee two weeks ago.

According to Formby, reactions include, "It’s still the best deal in town," and "Really couldn’t understand how you could do it for free so long."

Meanwhile, Rahr hopes to soon sign a deal that will fill any gaps in statewide distribution, he said.

The allure of wildlife

When the family-run Two Buck Discount Beverage outgrew the 7,000-square-foot building it’s occupied since the late 1940s in Fort Worth, it put up a 21,000-square-foot structure right behind it and recently celebrated its opening.

But after tearing down the old building at Interstate 35W and Felix Street, the Russell family put back the 35-foot-long sign that customers consider a landmark.

A new sign would have run about $15,000, but the Russells spent $20,000 sanding down the old one, replacing the rusted bits, repainting the two giant deer and outlining the antlered critters in new neon.

Steve Russell said his late grandfather, Elvan "Buck" Russell, would be "tickled to death" by the expansion and sign restoration.

Starting out as a bootlegger in his father’s footsteps, Buck Russell made his first fortune distilling and selling Old Possum, a Somervell County moonshine purportedly made with water from a well near Glen Rose where an unlucky opossum met an untimely death, his grandson said.

The animal carcass was never recovered but was said to add a certain something to the white lightning. Still-distillation made sure whatever possum residue remained was gone, his grandson assured us.

Credit on the cheap

Cypress Software Systems, a North Richland Hills company that specializes in the financial-services industry, says TCM Bank, part of the Independent Community Bankers of America, will use its software to automate credit-card applications.

TCM Bank, based in Tampa, Fla., serves about 600 community banks across the country. Cypress’ Mark IV system takes application information, retrieves credit reports on the borrower, reviews the borrower’s capacity to pay and produces a decision using the bank’s loan policies.

The bank said the system should reduce its cost of originating new credit-card accounts.

Stephen Sargent, president of Cypress, said the bank will use a version of the software that allows it to avoid upfront hardware costs. That model, called an application service provider, uses Cypress’ data center, which clients then access online under their service contract.

Cypress, founded in 2000, has 34 employees. It has clients in 16 countries that use its software to process consumer and small-business loan applications.