is a craft brewery in San Francisco, California that produces steam beer, one of the few American beer styles (see steam beer). Anchor has also been both inspirational and influential upon the craft beer industry as a whole, especially in its early days.
The Anchor Brewery is San Francisco’s only remaining historical brewery from the gold rush era, having originally been founded by George Breckle around 1874 as the Golden City Brewery on Pacific Street. In 1896, it was bought by German brewer Ernst F. Baruth, along with his son-in-law Otto Schinkel Jr, and renamed Anchor Brewery. After it was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the brewery was rebuilt at 18th and Hampshire streets.
Shortly after reopening once Prohibition was repealed in 1933, fire consumed the brewery and it was again rebuilt at 17th and Kansas streets, and then moved again in 1961 to 8th Street. The brewery struggled on under a variety of owners until 1965, when it was again on the brink of being closed. At that same time, recent Stanford graduate Fritz Maytag was a fan of their Steam Beer, which he enjoyed at his favorite North Beach restaurant, the Old Spaghetti Factory. See maytag, fritz. When Fred Kuh, the restaurant’s owner, told the young heir to the Maytag washing machine empire of the brewery’s plight, Maytag paid a visit to the brewery and ended up buying a majority interest in it.
When he bought Anchor Brewery in 1965, it was one of dozens of similar regional breweries struggling to compete against the big national brands. Maytag spent the next several years learning everything he could about brewing. He visited breweries in England, studied old texts, and investigated steam beer, one of America’s few unique beer styles. Anchor began bottling its current version of steam beer in 1971, striving to emulate the pre-Prohibition brew, the recipe and procedure for which had been lost by 1933. It marked the beginning of a prolific and innovative decade.
Anchor then bottled its first Porter in 1974, and even though porter is originally an English beer style, no brewers in England were making the style any longer. They then released the unprecedentedly hoppy Liberty Ale on April 18, 1975, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. It was one of the first beers to use Cascade hops, today the most popular hop variety used by craft brewers.
The first Anchor Christmas Ale, a brown ale, came the same year. Shortly thereafter, they began creating a new recipe, often spiced, and a new hand-drawn tree label, each year. Old Foghorn, the first barley wine-style ale to be brewed in America in modern times, debuted the following year.
In 1979, having outgrown the brewery on 8th Street, the brewery was moved to its present location on Mariposa Street, in an old coffee roastery that was built in 1937 on nearby Potrero Hill. In 1984, to celebrate their fifth anniversary in the new location, they brewed a wheat beer, which was possibly the first American wheat beer since prohibition. They also embarked on a series of special brewing projects, including the Sumerian Beer Project to make Ninkasi Beer, based on a 4,000-year-old Sumerian recipe, and a spruce beer based on colonial recipes. In 1993, Anchor added an in-house distillery where they make rye whiskey and pot-distilled gin.
In late April of 2010, Maytag announced he was selling the brewery, along with the distillery, to the Griffin Group of Novato, California. The Griffin Group is an investment company owned by Keith Greggor and Tony Foglio, who have extensive experience in the alcohol business, primarily with spirits such as Skyy Vodka.
