Closure of Anchor Brewing - Beer History

The beer world received a shock earlier this month:?San Francisco’s landmark Anchor Brewing announced that it is closing.?Or should I say that Sapporo, the giant company that acquired Anchor, announced that they were closing this iconic brewery.?Poor sales due to the COVID pandemic (a large majority of the beer was sold in bars) and due to… mismanagement frankly, meant that the brewery hemorrhaged money for several years.?Hope remains that someone will acquire the company and save it.

???????????A rescue happened once before, and this became the founders myth of Anchor Brewing.?Fritz Maytag (of the Maytag appliance family) was sitting in a bar drinking Anchor Steam, and the bartender said, “enjoy it, the brewery is closing soon.”?So Fritz acquired and revitalized the company.?Their signature beer is Anchor Steam Beer, of course, a traditional beer from San Francisco’s bygone days.?

???????????Anchor owns the exclusive rights to the term “Steam Beer” – any other brewery who would like to brew this historic style must call it “California Common.”?The origin of the term “steam beer” has several alternate explanations – San Franciscans named the beer “steam” either after the spray released when the keg was tapped or after the “steam” that rose from the open brewing vats in the cold San Francisco morning.?Formally it is a brew created by a lager yeast fermented at temperatures typically used to brew ale.?One time I argued with Fritz about the definition, and I gave him that definition, and he told me (he’s a contrarian), “no, it’s merely cheap beer.” ??Fritz always also said, “I don’t advertise – if I did, I’d have to expand.”?He was happy filling a specific specialty niche.??

But more than that, Anchor invented Liberty Ale (a great beer) in 1976 during the bicentennial.?This launched the California ale movement that later spread around the country.?Fritz helped start Sierra Nevada brewery – now a giant operation (a million barrels a year produced in Chico, California and 800,000 barrels per year produced in North Carolina). Rather than viewing other breweries as competitors, he worked to build the California craft beer industry as a whole.?

And he made beer history. ?Or perhaps better stated, he reenacted beer history. I tell this story in the beer class that I teach.?

Several debates rage to this day on the history of beer, and the role that beer played in human history.?Which came first, bread or beer??Did beer lead to the spread of the indo-European language? (With the language spreading due to an exchange of beer recipes rather than due to the previous assumption of war and conquest)??Where and when was the first beer brewed??Is Mesopotamian beer older than Egyptian beer? In the 1990’s, many of these debates were being examined by the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.?When Fritz became interested in the beer or bread debate, he invited bioanthropologist Solomon Katz to come to California.

Katz and his son were visiting California and dropped by the Anchor Brewery to hold a discussion on the origin of beer.?Maytag had read that a document, “The Hymn to Ninkasi” existed that had a beer recipe embedded in the text of the poem.?Ninkasi was the Sumerian goddess of brewing.?They enlisted the help of a cuneiform scholar to translate the poem with a focus on the 2,700 year old beer recipe.?They reenacted the recipe by baking barley loaves and allowing them to dissolve in the brew kettle.?Hops weren’t added to beer until the Middle Ages in Europe, so the beer remained unhopped.?Because they had put in that much work, they didn’t follow the ritual of throwing in dates early (likely an ancient yeast source – yeast was, of course, unknown to the Sumerians) and instead used Anchor yeast.?They bottled it in Champagne bottles to allow it to carbonate.

A little while later a Sonoma winery invited Fritz Maytag and hosted a Ninkasi beer tasting.?(Here’s where I got into the debate with him about the meaning of Steam Beer.)??My friends and I attended and we tried it.?

Ninkaski tasted like Anchor steam.?

For me, the story then shifts to a few years later.?I was at a conference and I was having lunch with the astronomers Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker.?They had been the keynote speakers for this conference held at the College of the Redwoods.?(They were famous because they discovered the comet Shoemaker-Levy; that’s the comet that slammed into Jupiter in July 1994.)?The husband and wife team at the time were searching for near earth objects.?They were especially interested in asteroids that posed a threat to the Earth.

At lunch Eugene told me about how he read about Fritz Maytag making the beer Ninkasi.?He had been so impressed with the story that he named a near Earth asteroid Ninkasi.??Formally 4947 Ninkasi, Carolyn discovered it one night in 1988.?Eugene told me that the asteroid Ninkasi was important because it passed very close to Earth – it was a near miss.??

I told Eugene and Carolyn that I had tasted Ninkasi, and related the story of Ninkasi night at the Sonoma winery.?They listened with great interest.?

Unfortunately Gene died soon after in an accident in Australia while he and Carolyn were ?observing comet Hale-Bopp.?I learned later that his ashes were carried to the moon, along with a picture of Hale-Bopp, the last asteroid that he and Carolyn observed together.?

When you encounter “collectable” stories in your life, you file them away and mentally catalog them.?And sometimes later they intersect.?

After the conference I wrote up the story of my lunch with the Shoemakers and the story about asteroid Ninkasi and how the beer had inspired them; I sent my account to Fritz Maytag.?Later he sent me a very nice letter, thanking me for relaying the story to him.?He ended it with:???

“P.S. I’m very glad that Ninkasi missed.”

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