Until last year, one of the few ways Texans living in New York could get a bottle of Shiner Bock, the popular craft beer from an 105-year-old brewery in Shiner, Tex., was to carry the beer back in their luggage. Or find a New York bar that had smuggled the beer into the city.

Rodeo Bar, a Texas-themed restaurant in Manhattan’s Murray Hill, claims to be the first bar in New York to sell Shiner, and for six years, the bar made regular monthly beer runs in a rented panel van to states that carried Shiner.

“At the beginning, we went down to Maryland,” said the Rodeo Bar owner, Mitch Pollak, a Queens native who first fell in love with the beer while in Austin, Tex. “We were going down there once a month for four years. Then Shiner Bock finally started going north. They got as close as New Jersey, and that’s where I was getting it the last couple of years.”

Selling the beer, a dark lager, in New York fell into a legal gray zone, so Mr. Pollak did not advertise. But word got around and the secret stock became a local legend among Shiner-starved Texans in New York. Mr. Pollak’s monthly Shiner hauls grew to more than 80 cases from 10.