Cheers to All That

Every craft beer nerd knows (or should know) the story of appliance heir Fritz Maytag walking into San Francisco’s funky Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant and bar one day in August 1965 and ordering his usual.

This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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The story goes like this: Fred Walter Kuh, the bar’s savvy owner, casually as he could, mentioned that the maker of Maytag’s usual—the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco—was on the verge of closure due to neglect by a rotating cast of owners and an acute case of novelty. It was the last independently owned brewery in the United States using an all-malt recipe and more-traditional brewing methods. Other beers were being made by wheezing regional breweries or global megabrands like Miller and Anheuser-Busch using shortcuts like rice and corn, but Anchor was staying true.

“Fritz, have you ever been to the brewery?” Kuh asked.

“No.”

“You ought to see it,” Kuh is said to have replied, knowing his customer’s net worth. “It’s closing in a day or two, and you ought to see it. You’d like it.”

Maytag walked over the next day to the cramped brewery, then at Eighth and Brannan Streets, and he bought control of it for what he later described to a reporter from Investor’s Business Daily in 2010 as “less than the price of a used car.”

Maytag would get the full company within a few years and run the place with almost freakishly prescient vision, defining nearly all of what would become staples of craft beer in the United States: traditional ingredients and small batches. Mainly, though, he understood the things that make any small-batch beer special: indie ownership and spirit.

Anchor belonged to the Bay for decades: For a long time after Maytag bought the company, its beer was barely distributed beyond the Bay Area. It didn’t even start bottling its beers until 1971 and only started canning decades later. Sapporo, the Japanese liquor giant that’s owned Anchor the past six years, announced the brewery’s closure on July 12. (The taproom might stay open through July 31, but the brewery has gone quiet, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.)

“We recognize the importance and historic significance of Anchor to San Francisco and to the craft brewing industry, but the impacts of the pandemic, inflation, especially in San Francisco, and a highly competitive market left the company with no option but to make this sad decision to cease operations,” an Anchor spokesperson told the press.

The “highly competitive market” bit was unintentionally ironic, given that Anchor served as the template for the thousands of craft breweries that came after, beginning in Northern California, then the Pacific Northwest, then Colorado, then everywhere.

Folks earnestly swirling goblets of porter, stout, or strong ale; holding up sparkling pilsners and IPAs to the light; discussing hop aromas and bitter aftertastes; understanding beer beyond Bud and PBR—nearly all of that stems from Maytag’s early Anchor moves. Under his ownership, the brewery would tick off a number of firsts: first modern seasonal beer in the United States (what became Anchor Brewing Christmas Ale); first modern porter anywhere; first modern barley wine in the U.S.; first craft brewer to use an American-grown hop (Cascade) for aroma rather than simply bittering; and in 1975 its citrusy Liberty Ale would serve as the inspiration for the rise of IPA. Anchor’s signature Steam defined the style, figuratively and literally—Maytag obtained the federal trademark to “steam beer” in 1982.

At the same time, any number of would-be professional brewers made the pilgrimage to Anchor to see how it was all done. These included a young Ken Grossman, who would cofound Sierra Nevada Brewing in Chico, California. Maytag would often lead the informal tours himself. Why not? It didn’t take long, and that was part of the beauty.

“Sure, growth is exciting, satisfying, profitable,” Maytag told the Stanford alumni magazine in 1996. “But I mean this: We do not, emphatically do not, want to get too big.”

By the time Maytag said that, Anchor had stayed small—especially compared with the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Miller, which might’ve produced tens of millions of barrels of beer annually (just in the United States) to Anchor’s tens of thousands. Craft beer in general was getting big. Tax changes in 1976 and the federal legalization of home brewing in 1978 had touched off a craft brewing bonanza. People like Grossman, whose Sierra Nevada opened in 1978, followed Maytag’s lead in using traditional ingredients and methods to make beer in small batches at several, then dozens, then hundreds and thousands of independently owned breweries.

Maytag would sell Anchor in 2010, just as craft beer went into a period of explosive growth. The number of U.S. breweries—nearly all of them on the smaller side, modeled after Anchor—would grow from around 1,800 that year to more than 9,000, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group that itself traces its origins to Maytag’s late-1970s culinary earthquake.

Shortly after that sale, I toured the Anchor Brewing Company with Keith Greggor, one of the investors who’d bought out Maytag and who was the company’s new CEO. By then, the Mariposa Street location—an old coffee roastery where Maytag had moved the brewery in 1979 for more room—was probably San Francisco’s biggest manufacturing business. The brewery had become culturally entwined with the City by the Bay, even for people who might not ever tip an Anchor to their lips.

“What makes it irreplaceable is that San Franciscans felt ownership in Anchor,” Steve Shapiro, cofounder of Beer by BART, emailed me after the closure. (The website is exactly what it looks like: a guide for drinking good beer off the Bay Area’s mass transit stops.) “It was our brewery. But I am not talking about only craft beer lovers, but even among Bud-Miller-Coors drinkers and even non-indulgers. It occupies a psychic space not unlike Coit Tower, cable cars, or the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Before he sold the company to Sapporo in 2017, Greggor was well aware of Anchor’s significance in the city and its place in American brewing, pledging to me and to others to continue Maytag’s legacy of traditional and small.

It was that kind of a craft beer scene at the time, too. I remember cold-calling and emailing brewery founders and CEOs for interviews for a book on the history and business of craft beer and more often than not hearing back from them personally—and quickly. That never happens now. It’s a much more commodified field, and the distance between producer and consumer can feel chasmic. Your favorite craft brewery is as likely to be a line in a private equity firm’s or an international conglomerate’s balance sheet as it is to be independently owned.

That’s how Anchor ended up.

When Greggor and partners sold the brewery, they cited market conditions and the sheer value of the San Francisco real estate the brewery occupied.

Greggor was right, in a way. The craft beer market has shifted dramatically between 2017 and today. Millennials and Gen Zers, who’ve come of age and risen to consumer prominence, simply don’t drink as much alcohol as their forebears did. Plus, hard seltzer shot in under a decade from having a marginal share of the booze market to accounting for perhaps one-fourth of alcohol sales (some estimates place it at half!).

Maybe there was no place left for an Anchor. It was most certainly no longer a plucky startup, and it would never grow into a worldwide brand. Its innovative days were way behind it, but its influence lasts.•