Born, bred in S.F.: Brand dates back to Gold Rush tradition
There’s no doubt about it: The Anchor brewery and the steam beer it still makes are as important to San Francisco as the fog.
“Anchor Steam is a San Francisco product,” said Robert Chandler, an author who for 32 years was the chief historian for Wells Fargo Bank, another San Francisco institution. Anchor Brewing, Chandler said, is part of the city’s fabric, like Levi Strauss jeans, sourdough bread, the cable cars, Ghirardelli chocolate and It’s-It ice cream sandwiches.
Though beer is an ancient product, steam beer, brewed with lager yeast and without refrigeration, is thought to be the only one native to America. It is most closely identified with the West, and particularly San Francisco.
Steam beer dates from the Gold Rush of 1849, along with sourdough French bread.
“People know about steam beer, but they don’t know about the role of the fog and the climate in cooling the beer,” said H. Joseph Ehrmann, a student of beer history who owns the Elixir, a San
Francisco bar that dates to 1858. “There was no way of cooling the beer then, so they used open-air fermentation.”
The beer was good on a hot day, but the cool, damp summer fog was what made the difference. The city’s fog worked the same way with the sourdough bread, producing a unique flavor.
The result was a beer with a thick, creamy head, like a head of steam.
Steam beer flourished in the boom times of the Gold Rush. Contemporary accounts note that steam beer was hardly the Champagne of brews. “It was workingman stuff,” Ehrmann said. “They’d send somebody down to the corner saloon for a bucket of beer.”
In “McTeague,” his classic 1899 novel of San Francisco, author Frank Norris wrote that his main character, a Polk Street dentist named McTeague, drank steam beer by the bucket when he was poor. When his fortunes turned, he drank lager beer or other better-class brew in bottles.
There were dozens of steambeer breweries in San Francisco and California in the later 19th century and up until 1920, when alcohol became prohibited.
The company that became Anchor started in 1872, when a man named Gottlied Brekle bought a billiards-and-bar place on Pacific and Hyde streets, and opened a steambeer brewery.
He called it American Brewing. It later operated under the name Golden City Brewing, Chandler said. In 1896, Brekle sold the brewery, and the beer was then sold under the Anchor name.
The company changed hands several times. In 1933, after Prohibition was repealed, it reopened on Eighth Street as Anchor Steam beer.
Anchor Steam had a niche market. Most San Francisco beer was considered “Western beer,” which sold at a lower price than national brands, like Budweiser and Schlitz.
San Francisco had several breweries, producing such brands as Burgermeister, Acme, Regal Pale and Lucky Lager. Anchor was the smallest and least popular brew on the local market.
Eventually, the local beer market dried up, done in by major national brands. By 1959, Anchor
closed down, to open again not long afterward. But sales continued to decline, until the beer was clearly failing and the company was nearly bankrupt.
The story goes that Frederick Maytag III, a Stanford graduate student who had money, heard about the plight of Anchor Steam while having a beer with dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach,
Maytag, whom everyone calls Fritz, bought a 51 percent share in the antiquated brewery in 1965. “I did it not so much as an investment but as a lark,” he once said.
The beer was not very good, and the property was outdated. “I bought a medieval brewery,” he said later.
But Maytag, heir to the washing machine company known for quality products, rebuilt it and eventually produced a superior beer. The trick was to sell it.
His timing was excellent. The American public had become tired of mass-market beer, with its bland taste, and gradually began to turn to something different. It turned out to be the beginning of a craft beer revolution, and Anchor was at the forefront.
When Maytag took over Anchor, there were only 70 breweries in the country. By 2016, there were over 5,234 breweries in the U.S., and all but 80 made craft beer. There were 700 craft breweries in California alone. Craft beer had become an industry with nationwide sales of $23.5 billion.
Maytag cashed in on the San Francisco brand to sell his beer by using the city’s name in his advertising. In this way, Maytag took advantage of San Francisco’s reputation as a center of innovation, particularly in technology and quality products. Anchor also introduced distilled spirits, including a rye whiskey called Old Potrero and a gin named for Junipero Serra.
Anchor became part of the city’s mystique. “We had become what the Japanese call meibutsu, which means a famous local product,” Maytag once said. ”I think Anchor has become that — part of the color of San Francisco, which after all, is a city that’s had a lot of color in its time.”
Chandler, who has written books on the city and its institutions, agrees. “Anchor is a true San Francisco product,” he said. “It’s part of the city’s image.”