Information

History

From Anchor Brewing Co.s homepage:(2003)

The rich history of Anchor Brewing can be traced all the way back to the Gold Rush, when German brewer Gottlieb Brekle arrived in San Francisco with his wife Marie and infant son Frederick. Brekle applied for citizenship in 1854, and his brewing and business acumen would soon lead to his ownership of a little San Francisco brewery on Pacific, between Larkin and Hyde, which would one day become known as Anchor.

Every Anchor Steam® Beer label says, Made in San Francisco since 1896, because that is the year German brewer Ernst F. Baruth and his son-in-law, Otto Schinkel, Jr., bought the old brewery on Pacific (the first of six locations around the City over the years) and named it Anchor. Baruth and his previous partner, Henry C. Kroenke, had been co-owners of the American Brewery on Green Street. Schinkel, just twenty-six years old, was employed as their driver. No one knows why Baruth and Schinkel chose the name Anchor, except, perhaps, for its indirect but powerful allusion to the great Port of San Francisco.

Anchor Brewery inherited a long tradition of brewing what had come to be known as steam beer, one of the quaint old nicknames for beer brewed along the West Coast under primitive conditions and without ice. Today steam is a trademark of Anchor Brewing

Beginning in 1906, a series of tragedies hit Anchor hard. Co-owner Ernst Baruth died suddenly in February. Two months later, the devastating fire that followed San Franciscos great earthquake completely consumed the Anchor Brewery, still on Pacific between Larkin and Hyde. In January 1907, as the process of rebuilding the Brewery at a new location (18th and Hampshire) neared completion, its thirty-seven-year-old owner, Otto Schinkel, Jr., boarded a streetcar near his Bryant Street home. As the car lurched forward, Schinkel was thrown to the street, run over, and killed.

Fortunately for Anchor Steam Beer lovers then and now, German brewers Joseph Kraus and August Meyer, along with liquor store owner Henry Tietjen, were able to keep Anchor going, until Prohibition shut them down in 1920.

Will Rogers quipped, Prohibition is better than no liquor at all. But a great Anchor bootlegging story—indeed any Anchor bootlegging story—has yet to bubble to the historical surface. Some San Francisco breweries survived Prohibition by making malt extracts and tonics, or by bottling nonalcoholic beverages. Unfortunately, there is no record of Joseph Kraus or his Anchor Brewery doing anything—legal or illegal—during Prohibition, other than waiting with the rest of San Francisco for the return of Anchor Steam.

Prohibition, Americas notorious experiment, came to an end for California beer drinkers on April 7, 1933. Anchor owner Joe Kraus began brewing his uniquely San Franciscan Anchor Steam Beer once again, after a hiatus of more than thirteen years. His newly reopened Brewery (now at 13th and Harrison) went up in smoke the following February.

After the fire, Joe Kraus reopened Anchor in an old brick building at 17th and Kansas, just a few blocks from where the Brewery is today. Soon, Minnesota-born Joe Allen joined Kraus in a brewing partnership that would last until the latters death in 1952.

Joe Allen valiantly and lovingly kept Anchor afloat, but by late 1959, Americas—even San Franciscos—new-found taste for mass-produced heavily marketed lighter beers had taken its toll on Anchors already modest sales. In July of that year, at the age of 71, Joe Allen shut Anchor down.

Fortune soon smiled on Anchor and San Francisco once again, as Marin-ite Lawrence Steese bought the Brewery, reopening it in 1960 at yet another location, on 8th Street between Brannan and Bryant. Wisely, he hired back former brewmaster Joe Allen to help him carry Anchors long brewing tradition forward into the new decade.

But one of Anchors oldest and best accounts, the Crystal Palace Market, had already closed its doors in August 1959. And Steese, despite all his hard work, was having an increasingly difficult time convincing the remaining handful of loyal Bay Area bar and restaurant owners to continue to serve Anchor Steam. One such loyalist was Fred Kuh, whose Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach was to play a pivotal role in saving San Franciscos Anchor Steam. By mid-1965, Lawrence Steese—like Joe Allen six years before—was ready to shut the Brewery down.

In the summer of 1965, a young Stanford grad named Fritz Maytag frequented the Old Spaghetti Factory, a restaurant in San Franciscos North Beach known more for its eclectic decor, bohemian clientele, and Anchor Steam Beer than its spaghetti. One fortuitous day, as the great-grandson of the founder of the Maytag appliance company sat at the bar enjoying his glass of Anchor Steam, the restaurants owner, Fred Kuh, mentioned to Fritz that if he liked Steam Beer, he had better hurry down to see the Brewery. Kuh, who had always proudly served just one beer on draught, Anchor Steam, knew that Fritz would appreciate the historic little San Francisco brewery that was about to close its doors forever.

When Fritz arrived at the Brewery on 8th Street, it was love at first sight, somewhat blinding him to equipment that was practically medieval, cleanliness (the most unsung secret to consistently good beer, as Fritz would soon discover) that was not even a low priority, and a Brewery bank balance (as of December 31, 1964) of $128. On September 24, 1965, Fritz bought 51% of the operation—for a few thousand dollars—rescuing Anchor from imminent bankruptcy. That was the easy part, for it would take Fritz the next ten years to turn the ailing Brewery and its Steam Beer around.

In early 1969, after a whirlwind four years, Fritz Maytag became the Brewerys sole owner. Two years later—and one hundred years after German brewer Gottlieb Brekle founded the brewery that became Anchor—Fritz began bottling Anchor Steam Beer. This was the first bottled Anchor Steam in modern times. By late 1975, Anchor had produced four other distinctive beers, Anchor Porter, Liberty Ale, Old Foghorn, and its first annual Christmas Ale. Though the term micro-brewing had yet to be coined, it was already becoming clear that a brewing renaissance was in full swing in San Francisco.

By 1977, Anchor—though still very small—had nearly outgrown its Brewery on 8th Street. After a long search, owner Fritz Maytag purchased a wonderful old coffee roastery, built in 1937, on nearby Potrero Hill. On August 13, 1979, Anchor brewed its first Steam Beer at its new Mariposa Street home.

In 1984, Anchor celebrated its fifth anniversary at its new home by brewing a special wheat beer, believed to be the first wheat beer in America since Prohibition, and now known as Anchor Summer Beer.

In 1989, Anchors pioneering spirit and reverence for the timeless art of classical brewing led to its Sumerian Beer Project and Ninkasi, a beer made according to a 4000-year-old recipe. Later that same year, the Brewery was rocked but not damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake, out of which Anchors Earthquake Beer was born.

In 1993, Anchor Brewing became the first brewery in the world with its own in-house distillery. Anchor Distilling, doing for micro-distilling what Anchor Brewing had done for micro-brewing nearly thirty years before, began making rye whiskey as it might have been made by George Washington. And then, in 1997, Anchor Distilling began making its unique pot-distilled gin, Junípero.

Today, Anchor Brewing remains one of the smallest and most traditional breweries in America. Though its beers—especially Anchor Steam Beer—are known throughout the world, they are all still handmade in its handsome copper brewhouse in San Francisco, a veritable museum of the traditional breweries of old.