Anchor Brewing, 1896-2023
Stuff tends to gather inside old breweries as the decades roll by. Memorabilia, equipment, cases of beer, labels—and stories. At Anchor, the story with the most currency was always how Fritz Maytag saved the brewery in 1965 just weeks before it’s scheduled death. Like any enduring tale, it not only entertained, but came loaded with a powerful moral. In this case, Fritz did a lot more than rescue an old brewery that was making sour, often undrinkable beer. He preserved a unique American brewing tradition, a San Francisco landmark, and sparked a revival in small-scale brewing that would eventually transform an industry. It’s a lot of weight for one story, but rarely did anyone argue the point.
This morning, parent company Sapporo announced they were shutting Anchor down. Immediately. Sapporo reported annual losses in the millions, and national sales had dwindled to fewer than 600 barrels a month. As a consequence of industry changes or missteps or other, as-yet unreported factors, Anchor just wasn’t selling beer anymore. A lot of smart people with better information will write obituaries and explain how a brewery that Sapporo bought for $85 million could be sold for scrap six years later. For now, I’d like to return to that founding narrative and what it means to American brewing.
Anchor was never just a brewery. It was wrapped up in the myth of America. Throughout the country’s history, California played an important role as the place where the future was born. Decade after decade, strivers and dreamers poured into the Bay Area, from the prospectors who panned for gold to the entrepreneurs who sold them jeans (and beer) to the poets and musicians to the hippies and finally to the tech visionaries. All of that history was a part of the DNA of Anchor when Fritz Maytag bought the brewery. It didn’t brew ordinary lager, but rather a funny American style of beer developed specifically as a result of San Francisco’s unique location and history. And, a decade after Fritz bought it. Anchor became the Mecca young homebrewers visited, dreams of their own breweries sparkling in their eyes. Anchor was at once the past and the future, the proof that small breweries could exist outside an ecosystem of commodity canned lagers. If a little, independent brewery could thrive selling unconventional, traditional ales, why couldn’t another one make it?
The story of Fritz saving a brewery became a founding myth for American craft beer. I have no doubt small breweries would have come along had Anchor never existed, but the shape they took, their values and approach, might have been very different. Most of the breweries of the 1970s and early 80s started on the West Coast—young brewers from Ken Grossman to Rob and Kurt Widmer all made pilgrimages to San Francisco to witness this living blueprint for small-scale American brewing. They took away his commitment to traditional practices and ingredients as well as his defiance. There has always been something moralistic about American craft beer, an intentional rejection of the purely economic realities driving larger companies. Whenever anyone starts talking about Anchor, you can trace that approach right back to the door of Fritz’s office. American beer didn’t have to develop the way it did, with a new name signaling its virtue (“craft” beer), and commitments to certain ways of doing things that might have been more expensive and less efficient. As a contrasting approach, compare those founded in the shadow of Anchor with, say, Boston Beer. Things might have gone a very different way.
Perhaps we shouldn’t live in a world of myth and nostalgia. Such a framework can stifle and limit. But it is the world of craft beer—or was, until this morning. We’ve steadily lost our innocence with the consolidation of the past decade, along with the blows of the pandemic and its aftermath, the rise of seltzers and all the rest. We’ve lost many beloved breweries to acquisition or closure. We are no longer naive about what commercial brewing is.
And yet I can’t help but think that when Anchor closes its doors for the last time, the ground may suddenly feel spongy under our feet. Anchor wasn’t a craft brewery in the sense we understood the word—it was bigger than that. It stood as an example of endurance amid unbelievable change, of the possibility that little, quirky things can live in a world of hard-edged creative destruction. It was the ultimate metaphor for American brewing in all the ways that founding story hinted. Obviously, the brewing industry will carry on without Anchor, and it will do just fine. But it can’t continue as the same industry represented by Fritz Maytag’s wonderful, traditional, innovative, local, and independent little brewery if that brewery itself couldn’t survive.
Craft beer has been in transition for a long time. Anchor’s final legacy will be ushering it out of its founding era. Whatever craft beer is, it’s a different thing now that Anchor is gone.