Is it all over for Anchor Brewing or does hope still remain?

The copper brewing vessels and the coolships are all empty and the corridors empty at the shuttered historic brewery. It’s a bittersweet opportunity to think about Anchor’s legacy – and its future.

Sapporo USA’s decision to shut down San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing has been the talk of the beer world for weeks now. The news had been rumored, but the reality of it hit on July 12. Soon after, I had the opportunity to visit the historic brewery for a farewell tour organized by one of Anchor’s local sales reps, who invited Bay Area industry veterans for the impromptu event on Potrero Hill.

A coffee roastery when it opened in 1937, the building is a majestic sight, with a corner tower topped with a flag pole reaching to the sky. Stepping inside was like going back in time. Brewing had already ceased, although there was still beer in the tanks waiting to be packaged. But the copper brewing vessels and the coolships were all empty, with only a skeleton crew on hand, making it unusually quiet as we
walked the empty corridors.

While I was grateful to have a last look around and commiserate with colleagues, it was ultimately bittersweet. Steam beer has been synonymous with San Francisco since long before I moved here, almost 40 years ago. It would be a sad thing for it to disappear entirely from the Bay Area landscape. That has happened before — briefly — on three distinct occasions, but like the city itself, risen from the ashes like a phoenix.

The big question is, is Anchor really gone? Sapporo’s intends to liquidate the brewery, but a white knight — like Fritz Maytag in 1965, for example — has swooped in to save the company before.

One potential savior is Anchor’s own employees. The brewery’s union sent a letter to Sapporo USA on July 19 saying they intended to make a bid to purchase the brewery. Sapporo was open to that, as long as funding, of course, was in place. But the union’s latest announcement, delivered by union spokesman Pedro Sa last week, indicates they’ve run up against issues of time and access to Sapporo’s financial information. Sapporo told them on July 27 that they could not share their financial information because, Sa said, it was now “too close to the date when they would hand over control of their assets.”

When I spoke last week to packaging lead Patrick Machel, who’s active in the union negotiations, he was still cautiously optimistic, but noted that there were major hurdles to overcome. But he has been impressed by the outpouring of support for Anchor since the announcement. The sense of history at the brewery and the feeling of being part of the Anchor family is palpable, he said, and workers hope they’ll be able to create a “new generation of workers that respect the brand they’re a part of.”

It’s hard to overstate the brewery’s importance to today’s vibrant beer scene. The fact that you can walk into almost any local bar and drink a unique beer from one of almost 10,000 American breweries is due in no small measure to Anchor and its resurrection at the hands of Fritz Maytag, who bought the then-failing brewery in 1965.

Between the brewery’s founding in 1896 and the 1960s, it struggled through the 1906 earthquake and fire, Prohibition, multiple owners and several locations. In 1959, then-brewmaster Joe Allen announced he was closing the brewery, one of the last to brew steam beer in California. A white knight arrived from Marin in the form of Minnesota-born Lawrence Steese and his partners, who bought the equipment, moved the brewery again and by 1960, were making Anchor Steam Beer once more. But by 1965, with big national beer brands gaining traction with younger drinkers, Steese was struggling.

One of Anchor Steam’s most ardent fans was Fred Kuh, who owned the Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach. One night, he told one of his regulars, recent Stanford grad and fellow Anchor Steam fan Fritz Maytag, that the brewery was about to close, so he should go take a look around before then. Maytag did. By August, Maytag had purchased a controlling interest in the brewery.

The brewing scene in 1965 was a far cry from what it is today. Back then, it was dominated by just a handful of large national companies with a few older regional breweries hanging on by a thread. By 1980, there were fewer than 100 breweries left.

Of course, Maytag didn’t know he was going to change that trajectory. In 1965, he was trying to figuring out how to make steam beer the old-fashioned way. Steam beer was common throughout the American West in the 19th century and early 20th, but it died out thanks to Prohibition. After repeal, Anchor was the only brewery making anything like it, but it took several years of research and experimentation to re-create the original — and then bottle it for market beginning in 1971.

The innovations were just getting started. Porter, a dark style of ale, had all but died out in its native England when Anchor Porter debuted in 1972. A year later, Anchor made Old Foghorn, the first commercial barleywine style ale in the U.S. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride a year
before the bicentennial, Anchor created Liberty Ale, which is considered by many the first modern IPA. In 1997, they made the first modern small beer, brewed with the first runnings of Old Foghorn to create a low-alcohol beer.

There were side projects, such as Ninkasi Ale. Using an ancient Egyptian text known as the Hymn to Ninkasi they re-created a beer using the same methods and ingredients used in 1800 B.C.E. Ninkasi
was the Sumerian goddess of beer, and the hymn is essentially the earliest known recipe for beer.

And then there was the mentorship. Jack McAuliffe, who founded Sonoma’s New Albion Brewery, visited Anchor seeking advice before starting what is considered the first microbrewery built from scratch in 1976. So did Ken Grossman, before he launched Sierra Nevada Brewing in 1979.

Maytag made Anchor Brewery an inspiration for almost all that’s come since in the brewing world.