“WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS,” ONE OLD BREWING ADAGE GOES, “make a batch of beer.” And indeed, from the advancements in medieval urban beer-craft that were made possible by the plague, to the American lagers that came about thanks to foreign revolutions, innovations in brewing have often been born of accidents and calamity. But an earthquake? No, I’ve never heard of any Richter-related beer. But as Mark Carpenter, the brewmaster at San Francisco’s legendary Anchor Brewing Company informs me, such a thing does exist, and it was during the Loma Prieta quake of 1989 that it came into existence. “We had the earthquake, the power shut down, and there were brews in process. Another brewer and I volunteered to spend the night, in case the power came back on. We had candles, we were having some beer, and as it happened, we were the first ones in the area to get the power back.”
And what did they do? “We finished the brew,” he tells me with a nostalgic and slightly mischievous grin, “although the batch had caramelized a bit from sitting so long. We thought about dumping it, but Fritz, the owner, had the idea of bottling it with an upside-down label.” This “Earthquake Beer,” as it came to be known, went on to become something of a collector’s item, and the distinctive bottles still turn up on eBay and other auction sites from time to time. It was the type of thing that could only happen in California, due in part to fault lines, but even more so to the sort of unexpected innovations that the folks at the Anchor Brewing Company seem to be adept at creating. Indeed, the brewery itself was something of an anomaly, back when Frederick “Fritz” Maytag purchased it in 1965 to save it from closing down. At the time, it was practically the last of its kind, one of the few remnants of an old San Francisco brewing culture that first came on the scene in the mid-nineteenth century, when the town was still a scrappy frontier port, and a local style of lager known as “steam beer” was the only thing on tap. The brewery survived the big quake of 1906 (the company if not the building itself), and if the old-timers in Potrero Hill are to be believed, it even continued to offer clandestine beer for weddings and special occasions right through Prohibition. But the nail in the coffin—it seemed, anyway—was the arrival of the mass-produced brews from places farther east in the middle of the twentieth century. Beer at the time was considered a uniform commodity, a bit like white bread, as Mark Carpenter remembers. It wasn’t expected to have any art or craft to it. Or very much flavor, for that matter. Anchor’s steam beer was noticeably maltier and hoppier than the watered-down macrobrews, although because of outdated equipment, batch consistency was always an issue, and its reputation suffered as a result. But on the brink of going out of business, the brewery was saved, by a prescient newcomer with a passion for beer. Fritz Maytag purchased the aging facility for next to nothing and worked hard to make it into something modern and respectable—without forsaking its unique San Francisco heritage. One of the first and smartest moves he made, was hiring a young local who happened to wander into the brewery. “I was real lucky,” Mark tells me as we leave his office and make our way toward the brew kettles. “I grew up here, and living through the sixties, many people were looking for different kinds of jobs and lifestyles. I wanted that, too. And I was always a beer drinker. In the early ’70s, I took a tour, and I thought it would be a good job while I was figuring out what to do with my life. Fritz hired me, and it worked out for both of us.”
The location has changed over the years, but the Anchor Brewing Company is still making distinct styles of local beer in the heart of San Francisco. Its famous Anchor Steam Beer has roots that stretch back to the earliest days of the Gold Rush, when ice for lagering was hard to come by, and beer was brewed and stored at warmer temperatures.
Courtesy of Anchor Brewing Company
More than forty years later, it still appears to be working out quite well. We pass the hop room and take a quick detour through the loading dock, where crates upon crates of packaged beer are stacked and waiting. For sure, there is the original Anchor Steam Beer, but now also Anchor IPA, Anchor Porter, Anchor Summer Wheat, Anchor Saison—all the rich brew styles you’d come to expect from a successful craft brewery. And as it turns out, Anchor Brewing Company isn’t just any old craft brewery. It was arguably the first craft brewery. And the movement it started in the late ’60s and early ’70s forever changed brewing in the United States.
Smiling in his spotless white workman’s jumpsuit, Mark leads the way and takes me back toward the cool invitation of the taproom, still as passionate about beer as the first day he walked in, still as enamored with the art and the craft of it as a brewer can be. A California original, any way you look at it.
A quick glance at my watch confirms that it’s perhaps a little early for a beer, but then again, the whole state is in the midst of one of its perennial droughts, and conserving water, as I’ve been told, is a civic duty.
So a cold Anchor Steam it is.
Trying to determine who brewed the first beer in California is a bit like asking who discovered America—it depends on who you ask. We can state with some assurance, though, that the first beer makers in the territory would have come from the same tradition of Native American brewers and vintners who were making chicha, pulque, and various wild fruit wines across the southwestern portion of what today is the United States.
As for the first European-style brewers, though, it’s well worth remembering that long before Hollywood and the Beach Boys came along, California was part of the Mexican Republic. And in Mexico, Hispanic brewers were making New World beer a full century prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims. When the conquistador Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, hell-bent on conquering the Aztecs in the name of Spain, he did so with an entourage of Spanish soldiers who knew how to make beer. Barley-based beer had long been brewed in Iberia—it had been made by Celto-Iberians for centuries prior to the arrival of the Romans in the peninsula, and there exists at least a theory that the word cerveza, adopted early by the Romans in Spain, has its origins in the ancient Celtic word for the drink. Cortés’s men may have been predominantly wine drinkers, but they consumed beer as well, and according to some accounts, did attempt to make it in limited quantities. Any barley brewing that occurred in Mexico would have been small-scale, at least until 1542, when a district governor named Don Alonso de Herrero was granted a twenty-year license by Emperor Carlos V to brew beer in the city of Nájara. Ultimately, though, it seems Señor Herrero faced the same problems his brewing brethren faced in the English colonies just a bit farther north: barley wasn’t easy to grow in the warm Mexican climate, and any beer produced faced stiff competition from imported forms of tariff-protected alcohol. Domestic, European-style beer never thrived in Mexico during the colonial period, and the bulk of the beer produced would have been of the Native American variety. When both Baja California and Alta California were added to the empire of New Spain in the late eighteenth century, the pattern continued in those lands as well.
Anchor’s legendary brewmaster, Mark Carpenter, tending to a batch in the early 1970s. By sticking to traditional methods and remaining comparatively small, the company became one of the country’s first craft breweries without even realizing it. They were just trying to make great beer.
Courtesy of Anchor Brewing Company
California’s barley-beer drought would come to an end, though, with the arrival of the gringos. Even before the United States strong-armed its southern neighbor into handing over California in 1848 as a result of the Mexican-American War, Anglo-Americans had been wiggling their way into the territory and bringing their taste for beer right along with them. There is a legend, widely known although difficult to verify, that “Billy the Brewer,” purportedly a sailor named William McGlove, was making beer in California as early as 1837. And by 1843, bottled beer was definitely being shipped into the territory via ports for the first round of cautious settlers. These would have been small amounts of beer, though, for a relatively small number of beer-drinking newcomers.
Then, on January 24, 1848, everything changed. On that day, a humble foreman named James W. Marshall, working on the construction of a lumber mill at the mangy outpost of Coloma, California, noticed something sparkly in the water below. There was gold in them thar’ hills. His boss, John Sutter, sought to keep the news quiet, but failed in spectacular fashion. Within no time at all, a newspaper publisher by the name of Samuel Brannan had set up a prospecting supply store and was shouting through the streets of San Francisco at the top of his lungs: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” U.S. troops already occupied Alta California as the spoils of war; it was officially ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo less than two weeks after the discovery. It didn’t take long for the news to travel back east, with the New York Herald breaking the story that same summer. The California Gold Rush was officially under way, spurred on by the same conviction that would eventually lure everyone from Dust Belt Oklahomans to aspiring Hollywood starlets to try their luck in the golden West: California was a land of opportunity.
California changed drastically, and fast—to the detriment of the Mexicans and Native Americans who already called it home. At the start of the Mexican-American War in 1846, there were a mere 7,000 citizens of the United States living in the territory. By 1850, that number had boomed to a staggering 100,000. So rapid was its settlement and so promising its future, California became a state that same year. “Manifest Destiny,” the expansionist’s dream of a country that stretched from sea to shining sea, had become a reality faster than anyone could imagine. Gold veins were tapped, timberlines were cut, and Americans poured in like a human river. A prospector’s account from 1852, written near the Auburn Ravine in Placer County, gives some sense of the unbelievable growth:
When we came here, about six weeks ago there were only one or two tents in sight, and in one short week our tent is in the centre of a town, with six stores, two blacksmith shops, Drug stores, Taverns, Bakery, Circus etc. Verily, California is a go-ahead country.
The first settlers may have been content with circuses and bakeries for a time, but brewers were never far behind. In 1849, the Empire Brewery, at Second Street near Mission, was already turning out beer to the thirsty prospectors of San Francisco. That same year, a newcomer by the name of Mary Jane Megquier would write to her daughter back east, describing in detail a “nice thanksgiving dinner,” complete with copious amounts of porter and ale. That fact that they were drinking this instead of lager is not unexpected—in the 1840s, the more established English-style beers still maintained their hegemony in the American brewing scene and would continue to be prominent well into the 1850s. By 1852, San Francisco was alleged to have had 350 barrooms around the city, which meant in a town with a population of 36,000, there was roughly one legal saloon for every hundred people—reportedly one of the largest proportionate number of drinking establishments in the country. In terms of selection, the saloons ran the gamut, from the gilded gambling parlors of Portsmouth Square, to the cheapest and tawdriest of back-alley brothels. In places like the Bella Union and the El Dorado—which were definitely the former—the would-be gambler was greeted by baroque furniture, crystal chandeliers, mirrors of fine cut glass, and a host of attractive waitresses keeping time to a polished melodeon. In the dives of the Barbary Coast a short walk away, he would be just as likely to encounter a bucket of rotgut whiskey, some pretty rough customers, and a punch on the nose. But overall, thanks to its location as a port city, San Francisco attracted a more diverse crowd of migrants, and with it, a more diverse menu of drinks than many saloons in the American West. “Hail to the San Franciscan,” one contemporary extolled, “whose cool climate both fosters a desire for liquor and enables him to carry it.” The drink list of one California grog shop from 1850—a full 110 items long—lists such diverse options as Portuguese Port, French Champagne, Jamaica Rum, Holland Gin, Spanish Sack, and host of bizarre cocktails one rarely if ever encounters today. Tog, Smasher, Ching Ching, Vox Populi, Tug and Try . . . apparently all were big hits in Gold Rush–era San Francisco. In fact, a drink called Pisco Punch, made with Peruvian brandy, would go on to become the most popular libation of the day. Its recipe too has been lost to the ages, but one drinker remembered its main ingredient as follows:
It is perfectly colourless, quite fragrant, very seductive, terribly strong, and has a flavor somewhat resembling that of Scotch whiskey, but much more delicate, with a marked fruity taste. It comes in earthen jars, broad at the top and tapering down to a point, holding about five gallons each. We had some hot, with a bit of lemon and a dash of nutmeg, in it . . . The first glass satisfied me that San Francisco was a nice place to visit . . . The second glass was sufficient, and I felt that I could face small-pox, all the fevers known to the faculty, and the Asiatic cholera, combined, if need be.
Fancy cocktails and gilded saloons were obviously available for the upper echelons of San Francisco society. But for the average San Franciscan struggling to make ends meet while gambling away his gold dust, far more quotidian fare awaited, served at simple saloons with rough wood interiors. And while whiskey, with its lack of refrigeration and indefinite shelf life, was always the simpler choice, beer was also a popular drink. Many of said bars were, as one observer noted, “second-rate English drinking-shops” where a committed patron could “swig his ale.” But the propensity for top-fermenting brews was not to last. Bottom-fermenting lager yeast came with the Germans, and with its crisper, more refreshing flavor, it didn’t take very much time for it to win over converts in a place where the workdays were long, sweaty, and inevitably parching. In 1857, an Industrial Exhibition held in the city featured nine breweries, six of which produced porter and ale, and three of which were brewing lager. But by the close of the decade, lager yeast beer appears to have lapped the competition. Eighteen seventy-five is often given as the year of the first true cold-conditioned lager in California; however, historical records seem to indicate that the Bavarian style of beer arrived in the state very soon after its founding, albeit minus the extended time in an ice-cooled cellar. True, the Eagle Brewery and the Eureka Brewery would continue to make beer in the Anglo-American fashion, but they were soon eclipsed in San Francisco by their Teutonic rivals. The Philadelphia Brewery, the California Brewery, the San Francisco Brewery, the Bavarian Brewery—they were all captained by industrious Germans. A general lack of mechanical refrigeration did mean, however, that lager beers were forced to ferment and mature quickly, and at more ale-friendly temperatures. But German brewers were an obstinate lot—the idea that they could subsist for two decades in the Bay Area with nothing more than English-style ale to drink is not only implausible, but simply untrue.
The German thirst for lager produced an innovation out west, even if it came about by accident. By using lager yeasts in a more temperate, winterless, ale-conducive climate, the early brewers of San Francisco and its environs inadvertently created a distinctive style of West Coast beer—a hybrid, if you will, called “steam beer.” As for the name, there are contending theories to place its origin. One popular explanation states that the “steam” comes from the large metallic cooling vats, or coolships, that once stood atop many brewery roofs. Without ice or refrigeration, brewers often resorted to this measure as the most effective means of lowering the temperature of the freshly boiled wort prior to pitching the yeast. In the crisp evening breezes that came off the Pacific, this inevitably created steam—hence the name. The theory certainly is plausible, although it neglects to mention that rooftop coolships were not unique to California, and any steam witnessed would have been seen by only a very few people in the brewery’s immediate vicinity. A more plausible explanation is that the “steam” actually comes from the pressure that built up inside kegs, thanks to the combined effects of a warmer California climate and the popular practice of kräusening barrels. The latter, as the reader may recall, was a technique for improving the clarity and carbonation of beer in the keg, somewhat akin to the champagne method. But as anyone who has ever tapped a warm keg at a summer barbecue can tell you, when refrigeration isn’t available, things get messy. And at a time in American history when steam power was all the rage, it’s not surprising that a burst of foam and a hiss of vapor from a newly tapped barrel might be equated with the new technology.
Steam beer was a fast, convenient way to make a lager-style beer available in somewhat difficult circumstances. Lager style, mind you, because although it was made with lager yeast, there was generally no actual cold-conditioning or lagering involved. “Steam beer is allowed from ten to twelve days from the mash tub to the glass,” according to a beer drinker writing in 1898, meaning that a fresh batch was never more than a few weeks away—useful in the growing West, where a town’s population could virtually double overnight. Steam beer generally wasn’t of the highest quality—it did have something of a blue-collar reputation—but it was, according to that same writer, better than the alternative. “It is a pretty fair drink,” he went on to say. “At any rate, it tastes better than the raw hopped, bitter and turbid ales.” A decent way, it seems, to keep at least a form of lager available, at a time when icehouses and refrigeration were not easy to come by in the City by the Bay.
San Francisco was the primary hub of beer making in California, but it wasn’t the only brewing city in the far West. In fact, Sacramento followed right on its neighbor’s malty heels. Sacramento’s population doubled between 1850 and 1855, and with that growth came a healthy expansion in brewing. By 1855, the burgeoning town could claim five breweries to its name, capable of producing a total of 225 barrels a week. Nearby Stockton had a brewery as early as 1851, a facility that was, according to one report, powered by a windmill, but burned down on Christmas Eve of 1857. And of course, there’s Los Angeles—the city never acquired the same reputation for brewing as its northern neighbors, but it did have at least one beer-making outfit as early as 1854, when a Christopher Kuhn established a brewery there. Outside these growing urban centers, breweries also appeared in the peculiar collection of mining towns and trading posts that seemed to spring up, and then vanish again, with equal rapidity. Most of them, by the 1860s and 1870s, were captained by German brewers, and given the hardscrabble conditions and lack of cooling available, were likely brewing some early variant of California steam beer.* Generally, though, the farther south one ventured, the less likely one would be to find very much beer, due to climate, ingredients, and demographics.
North, however, was a different story altogether. Not just in Northern California, where beer abounded, but in the new Oregon Territory as well. By the time the border was finally established separating Oregon from Crown-controlled Canada in 1846, there were already several thousand Americans calling the Pacific Northwest their home. And as it soon became apparent, the city of Portland loved its beer then just as it does today. Early brewers included a Mr. Henry Saxer, who founded a brewery in 1852, and John Meany, who opened a successful brewery just across the Columbia River, to be hailed by some as “the leading brewer of the coast north of San Francisco.” Meany was eventually bought out by one of his assistants, an ambitious upstart named Henry Weinhard, who had done the traditional German immigrant hopscotch, going first to Philadelphia, then on to Cincinnati, later St. Louis, and eventually the West Coast. Weinhard ran a successful business, outsold his primary competitors, and assumed his predecessor’s mantle as the lead brewer in the region north of San Francisco.
Which, incidentally, was also where Henry Weinhard bought his malt and hops. In the decades following the Gold Rush, the top half of California had become a barley and hops powerhouse. According to one historian, California “produced in average years nearly as much barley as wheat, and in some seasons, even more.” Hops flourished in the temperate northern climate as well, which meant that beer was able to remain a local product. The conditions might not have been great for natural lagering, but they were superb—especially in the higher altitudes and in the cool shaded valleys—for producing the primary ingredients in beer. Barley and hops didn’t need to be shipped in from the farming centers in the Upper Midwest or Upstate New York—they could be grown much closer to home. By the turn of the twentieth century, the American hop industry was essentially based out of the Pacific Northwest, with the Yakima Valley in Washington destined to become the hop capital of the world. With beer being produced both inexpensively and locally, that also meant that imported beer from the brewing behemoths of St. Louis and Milwaukee would face some stiff competition—at least for a time. The macrobrews certainly had their eyes on the coast, but for a while—more than half a century, in fact—cities like San Francisco and Portland were part of a unique and truly regional brew culture, one that produced its own distinctive styles of bottom-fermenting beer, using locally grown barley and northwestern hops. The arrival of widespread mechanical refrigeration in the late nineteenth century meant that true, cold-conditioned lager could at last be made on America’s West Coast. But steam beer had secured its place in the heart of a region and would continue to be a mainstay of the California saloon—that is until the Big One hit.
Washington State’s Yakima Valley became the center for hop production in America and ensured that West Coast breweries always had a source nearby.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Brewing in the early days of San Francisco was a decidedly scrappy affair. Refrigeration was scarce, hours were long, and conditions could be primitive. But locals did whatever was necessary to keep the taps open.
For most Americans, the date April 18, 1906, is not especially noteworthy or momentous. But for San Franciscans, it can still summon an ominous shudder. Because at 5:12 A.M., a 7.8 magnitude earthquake nearly shook the city out of existence. The tremblor didn’t last long, but the destruction it unleashed would obliterate much of the town. Between collapses and resulting fires, nearly 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed, and some three thousand people lost their lives. Three-quarters of the population became homeless refugees in a manner of minutes, while whole neighborhoods were razed to the ground and entire industries almost ceased to exist—including the brewing industry. This account of one brewery destroyed by the earthquake, published just one year after the disaster, gives some sense of just how structurally vulnerable many of the hastily constructed facilities actually were:
The plant of the Jackson Brewing Company, on the southeast corner of Eleventh and Folsom streets, was in [the] process of construction and was wrecked by the earthquake, the damage by fire being but slight. The brick walls were laid in lime mortar of poor quality. The steel beams and girders were supported by cast-iron columns. Many of the various steel members were bolted together with an insufficient number of bolts, the girders and beams resting upon walls without any tie; the columns, girders, and beams were not fireproofed, and in the eastern half the concrete floor slabs, 6 inches thick, were without reinforcement. Several persons were killed by the collapse of the tower. That this building should have been wrecked is not surprising, as the design was bad and the material and workmanship were very poor.
The Jackson Brewing Company was not the only beer maker that lost everything. According to one report, written by Theodore Rueger of the Benicia Brewery for the American Brewer’s Review, of the twenty-five breweries operating in San Francisco prior to the quake, fourteen were either badly damaged or totally destroyed, including the Willows Brewery, the Wreden Brewery, the Albany Brewery, and the Anchor Brewery. “Words cannot describe or picture show half the ruin and desolation wrought by the flames and earthquake,” he lamented, although his brewery-by-brewery account does paint a vivid picture. His friends at Anchor, it seems, got the very worst of it: “when we came there,” he wrote in his damage report, “we saw a [brew] kettle standing on the side of a hill, the only thing to indicate that the Anchor Brewery had been there.” But despite the devastation, he would also note that “the spirit of the people is not broken, and from this scene of crumbled walls will grow a better city.”
Courtesy of Library of Congress
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 didn’t just reduce much of the city’s architecture to rubble—it almost destroyed the city’s brewing industry, as demonstrated by the ruins of a brewery pictured above.
The city did recover. And the Anchor Brewery, although hobbled by the earthquake of 1906, would rebuild, opening a new location south of Market Street the very next year. But while many breweries did reopen, the brewing industry of the West Coast’s beer capital would never be the same. World War I would severely hinder brewing a mere decade later, and Prohibition would prove as disastrous for the breweries of the West Coast as it was for beer producers back east—in some cases, even more so. Unlike the large breweries of the Midwest and the East Coast, many local facilities lacked the refrigeration capacity necessary to switch production to ice cream and soft drinks—unable to adapt, most went under. And for the handful of West Coast breweries that survived the Volstead Act, by the postwar years, competing with the megabreweries was simply not an option. The few remaining local breweries did get a brief respite during the 1930s and 1940s, when a general leeriness of national advertising campaigns coupled with the substantial cost of shipping kept midwestern beers out of the West Coast markets. In fact, by 1940, California was the tenth-largest beer-consuming state in the Union, with much of that beer produced locally. But by the 1950s, those same megabrands had found a clever solution: build their own breweries on the locals’ turf. No longer content to simply ship in their beer via train at a prohibitive cost, most of the leading breweries in the Midwest opened satellite facilities in California to service a booming postwar population. With many of the old-time brewers unable to refrigerate or package their product as effectively as the big guys, or differentiate themselves in a commercially viable way, they had no way to keep up. The goliaths of the Midwest could prosper in a low-margin, marketing-driven, and increasingly technology-dependent industry, while the local brewers could not.
The physical barrier of the Rockies, coupled with a local supply of hops and barley, helped keep the large breweries of the Midwest away from the West Coast and allowed local brands to prosper—at least for a time. By the 1950s, the corporate giants had begun opening their own satellite breweries in California, bringing national brands to what had been a predominantly regional market.
Between 1947 and 1958, the number of American breweries dropped by 46 percent, from 465 to 252, while the combined market share of the five-largest breweries grew from 21 percent to 31 percent. The transition of beer drinking from a saloon-based activity to one centered around the suburban home transformed the industry, with increased investment in bottling and canning equipment, and improvements in preservation technology—hurting smaller, regional brewers that lacked the funds to put money toward either. As a result, the midwestern imports became known as “premium beer,” not because of the richness of their malts or the bouquet of their hops, but simply because they were reliably consistent. Back on the East Coast, there were still enough sizable local breweries to at least hold their own—names like Ballantine, Schaefer, Ruppert, and Rheingold. On the West Coast, however, where brewing had always been a smaller and scrappier affair, competing with the imports became less and less feasible. The Los Angeles Brewery, Acme, Rainier, Olympia, and General—the largest local breweries of the West Coast—all put up a fight. But in the end, they could not go up against the juggernaut of Busch, Pabst, Miller, and Schlitz. When the midwestern breweries entered the California market in 1953 and 1954, opening million-barrel facilities across the state, it was essentially game over. Their biggest competition came, in fact, not from the locals, but from the mountain brewers at Coors, who already had extensive experience distributing beer all over the West.
The rise of the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s was reflected in our nation’s beer preferences. Breweries increasingly marketed their product to a suburban audience, one that preferred to enjoy modern products in the comfort of their own homes.
By the early 1960s, the rise of the American beer oligopoly was essentially complete. For the big-four breweries of the Midwest, competition was no longer aimed at local producers—who had already lost any advantages they had in regard to regional distribution—but at each other. They would jockey for position in the decades that followed with national marketing campaigns and sale-enhancing innovations. In an age when American foodstuffs were trading in flavor for profitability—just look at white bread, American cheese, or instant coffee—American beer followed suit. Seemingly everything was watered down and overhyped, and domestic beer was no exception. “Light Beer,” introduced to the mass market in the 1970s as a less-filling, low-calorie alternative to conventional brews, coincided nicely with the arrival of fad diets and disco crazes and cemented the notion of what good beer should be: refreshing, bland, and easy to drink. The pilsner-style pale lager introduced to the American market in the nineteenth century had become, by the latter decades of the twentieth, a wan shadow of its former self. The 1980s saw Spuds McKenize, the Bud Bowl, and the Swedish Bikini Team all cartoonishly promoting mass-produced beer to a general audience whose taste in beverages was not exactly what one might call sophisticated. By 1983, only forty-three brewing firms operated in the United States—this, in a nation that prior to Prohibition, boasted well over a thousand. And in the decade that followed, the market share of the four-largest breweries would swell to over 80 percent—up from less than 10 percent in the first decade of the twentieth century. There just didn’t seem to be any place for small-scale, locally made beer in a country that liked its drinks cold, convenient, and served in a can. Thankfully, the microbrew obituary would prove premature. Unbeknownst to anyone, a revolution was already brewing, and the West Coast was where it would all begin.
When the Mamas & the Papas released their 1965 hit, “California Dreamin’,” the group was expressing far more than a longing for sunshine and palm trees. They were providing the soundtrack to a generation of young Americans, and giving voice to the first rumblings of a counterculture that was rapidly expanding beyond the bohemian enclaves of big cities, and becoming something of a national movement. Mama Cass wasn’t the only one pining for California—the youth of America was getting the itch to ditch the suburbs and go out west, and the nexus of it all seemed to be the City on the Bay. From Jack London to Jack Kerouac, San Francisco had always been a destination for those seeking the freedom to explore new ideas and live in unconventional ways. Perhaps it was because of its unique history—both as a cosmopolitan port and a frontier outpost—it had served since the beginning as a haven for individuals from diverse backgrounds looking to try their hand at something new. Whatever the reason, the city and the band both struck a common chord. Just two years later, when Scott McKenzie crooned, “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,” the town had become all but a mecca for those wishing to experience alternative lifestyles. Flower power and free love became the words of the day, as adherents to new philosophies rejected what they saw as the military-industrial complex, and all the mass-produced conformity that went along with it.
To be sure, the counterculture movement that blossomed in California had its unsavory side—rampant drug use, cultlike communes, and, lest we forget, one terribly creepy guy named Charles Manson. But it certainly had its positive aspects as well, all of which contributed greatly to causes like civil rights, world peace, and gender equality. Those hippies may have had some peculiar notions of hair length and hem width, but their idealism helped guide American values in a time when a moral compass was sorely needed. Including, although it gets significantly less attention than those other causes, the value we placed on consumer goods. Coupled with their rejection of corporate greed and cultural conformity was a desire to explore older, more traditional ways of producing staples. Suddenly, many were wondering if perhaps it was better to grow your own organic vegetables than to buy them from a factory farm. If it was wiser, possibly, to knit your own sweater from homespun wool instead of shipping it in from a sweatshop in Asia. A little naive, maybe, but they were raising some important questions.
Many young Californians became interested in getting back to the land with a “do it yourself” mentality. Guides like The Foxfire Book taught lost arts such as cabin building and folk healing to children of the suburbs, and troubadours like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger exposed a fresh new crop of listeners to the old folk tunes of the American canon. In the postwar years, Americans had embraced wholeheartedly the glitz and glamour of the atomic age. Keeping up with the Joneses meant buying sleek, mass-produced products that were convenient and uniform above all else. By the late ’60s, however, the baby boomers who had grown up in that era were left wondering if that quest for modernity and convenience had even been worth it. If maybe, just maybe, we had lost a big part of ourselves in the process.
One California transplant who embraced the ethos of “bigger isn’t always better” was the very Frederick “Fritz” Maytag mentioned in the beginning of this chapter—a young man who also happened to be, somewhat ironically, the direct descendant of the founder of the Maytag Washing Machine Company. After graduating from Stanford and bouncing around several unfulfilling jobs, he came to San Francisco, as so many of his generation did, to collect his thoughts and figure out what, exactly, he wanted out of life. By 1965, he still hadn’t quite figured it out, although he knew he appreciated the distinct character and history of the city, along with some of its historic bohemian haunts—one of which was the Old Spaghetti Factory, a place known more for the price of its beer than the quality of its pasta. Fritz became friendly with the owner and fond of the only brew it had on tap: Anchor Steam Beer, a peculiar relic from the old days, when early San Francisco brewers had to make their lager yeast concoctions without the benefits of refrigeration. Only, according to said owner, the brewery was going to go under any day. He urged the twenty-five-year-old to visit the brewery while he still could—its days in San Francisco were apparently numbered.
Fritz didn’t just visit the insolvent brewery—he ended up buying it, for “less than the price of a used car,” as he would later recall. He had no brewing experience, but he had business acumen and an appreciation for craft. He had grown up on his father’s dairy farm back in Iowa, famous for its traditionally made European-style cheeses, and he understood the importance of proper ingredients and attention to detail. It was quality, not quantity, he reckoned, that would keep his new brewery alive. “I want to make all our beer in this building—hands on,” he insisted. “I mean this: we do not—emphatically do not—want to get too big.” An American entrepreneur who specifically wanted to keep his operation small? At the time, the idea wasn’t just unorthodox, it was practically treasonous.
It took years to turn a profit, and serious investment in equipment and training, but this new philosophy began to pay off. Maytag returned his Anchor Steam Beer to its original nineteenth century pure-barley recipe, tinkered with ways to lengthen its shelf life without unsavory preservatives, and capitalized on the beer’s unique heritage: “Made in San Francisco since 1896,” stated the label, which was accurate, but also humble. Truth be told, the company’s origins went all the way back to the Gold Rush, when a German Forty-Eighter named Gottlieb Brekle decided to become a Forty-Niner. But 1896 was the year that the name “Anchor” was first attached to the beer, and that became the official date. By the mid-1970s, the brand was picking up steam, no pun intended, and many could feel, if not come out and say, that something was changing—the tide was turning. Suddenly that old-timey beer with the funny labels was starting to look and taste more appealing than the canned Middle American brews that still dominated the store aisles. The addition of a “Liberty Ale” to the Anchor repertoire to commemorate Paul Revere’s ride just before the bicentennial not only brought a practically defunct style of yeast back to the American brewing scene, it also included a new variety of local Cascade hop from the Yakima Valley, just to the north. At the time it was no great shakes, but the first small rumblings of something far bigger were beginning to shake the foundations of America’s beer establishment.
A young Fritz Maytag enjoys an Anchor Steam Beer circa 1965. In saving a relic from San Francisco’s golden age of brewing, he also helped restore craftsmanship and individuality to American beer—not to mention inspire a whole generation of ambitious young brewers, both in the West and the East.
Courtesy of Anchor Brewing Company
The entire Anchor staff in 1978—a group of people who obviously enjoyed their work. The craft beer revolution didn’t begin in corporate offices or boardrooms, but in small, local breweries like this.
Courtesy of Anchor Brewing Company
As it turned out, Fritz Maytag wasn’t the only one in California intrigued by the notion of brewing a high-quality, small-scale beer. But while he had put his plan into action by purchasing an existing local brewery, a man named Jack McAuliffe actually had the novel idea of starting his own original microbrewery and producing his own original beer. It all started, interestingly enough, in Scotland, a long ways away from the sunny shores of the Golden State. While stationed there during a stint in the U.S. Navy in the ’60s, he had discovered what locally made, Old World beer tasted like, and had taken it upon himself to try making his own. Home brewing was just taking off in the United Kingdom, thanks to the lifting of a licensing law that had been on the books for eighty years. It didn’t happen right away, but eventually McAuliffe was able to turn out a brew that fellow servicemen and locals alike were more than happy to imbibe. And when he returned to the States, fully aware that the traditional British-style ales he had become accustomed to would no longer be available except as expensive imports, he decided to take his kit and his skills with him back across the pond. Settling in California, ostensibly to attend school, he also discovered that the abundance of wine-making supply stores that catered to the vineyards surrounding the Bay Area could just as readily supply much-needed brewing equipment. When a chef named Alice Waters opened the legendary restaurant Chez Panisse nearby, using local ingredients and gourmet methods to prepare her food, something clicked. Between the resurgence of Anchor Steam Beer, the growth of a respected local wine industry, and the arrival of a new food culture that valued quality and tradition, the table appeared to be set for something new. With help from investors Suzy Stern and Jane Zimmerman, he opened the New Albion Brewing Company in 1976, in Sonoma, California—ground zero for the explosive new American food and drink movement that was taking hold in the region. They would go on to brew a wide variety of porters and ales, and lobby for laws that would eventually allow breweries to serve food and alcohol on premises, essentially paving the way for the arrival of brewpubs.
New Albion closed after six years, despite some national press and a solid reputation—perhaps it was just a touch too far ahead of its time. But its legacy was profound. In 1978, America lifted an old Prohibition-era ban on homemade beer, enabling many others to pursue their passion for brewing quality ale. With making beer at home no longer a federal crime, home-brew enthusiasts were able to come up from their basements and practice in the open—including a western transplant and nuclear engineer named Charlie Papazian. As the home brewers stepped out of the shadows and revealed themselves, Papazian and his brewing buddy Charlie Matzen formed the American Homebrewers Association to better serve their interests. The AHA brought new disciples to the cause and helped spread the gospel of good beer by publishing a number of home-brewing guides, some of which are still used by hobbyists to this day.
In 1979, just one year after legalization, a pair of California home brewers named Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi decided to turn their formerly illicit hobby into a business, founding the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in the town of Chico, just a little ways north of Sacramento. To get their venture off the ground, they relied on advice from fellow brewers Fritz Maytag, Jack McAuliffe, and Charlie Papazian. Far from being competitors, they were instead collaborators in the same cause—to bring high-quality beer back to America. And all that collaboration paid off with the release soon after of the trailblazing Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, as well as a subsequent India Pale Ale—an even maltier, hoppier style first developed by the British to survive the long, hot journey to colonial India. However, by using a high dose of whole American Cascade hops, robust malts, and bottle conditioning, they essentially created a new West Coast style of craft beer. And they proved that an original, small-scale brewery could actually be commercially viable—the company produced 950 barrels of beer in its first year, and doubled its output in the year that followed. By 1983, it was turning out some 30 barrels a week. Not huge numbers, certainly, but there was steady growth. This new style of locally made ale was selling, and in no time, other “microbreweries” were cropping up across the northern half of the state, all seeking to duplicate Sierra Nevada’s success. The first tremors of the craft beer revolution were already starting to rattle the West Coast drinking scene.
And they didn’t stop at the state line. North of California in Oregon and Washington, the Pacific Northwest was experiencing a brewing renaissance of its own, building on a century-old tradition of using locally grown barley and hops. A Portland beer evangelist named Fred Eckhardt—also an acquaintance of Anchor’s Fritz Maytag—had long been advocating for a return to traditional, carefully made brews. His self-published journals and brewing guides catered to home brewers, expounding the importance of craft when it came to making beer—and folks started to listen. As early as 1980, Charles and Shirley Coury of Portland were selling a light ale from their Cartwright Brewery for one dollar a bottle. The brewery ran into fiscal hardship and did not last, but other Oregon brewers picked up the baton, including the Columbia River Brewery and the Widmer Brothers Brewing Company. And farther north yet, the Redhook Ale Brewery was turning out West Coast–style ale to the thirsty people of Seattle starting in 1981. Like morels after a soft spring rain, microbreweries were springing up across Northern California and the Pacific Northwest both. It had experienced a few hurdles at the start, but the craft beer movement was picking up steam.
All that was needed was someone to take this new notion of “good beer” and introduce it to the American public at large. By the early ’80s, craft beer existed in America, but it was still a niche product—something to be found in a few obscure specialty stores in a few discreet corners of the country. Defined by a smaller size, more traditional methods, and independent ownership, craft breweries were easily overshadowed by the macrobrews that dominated the supermarket shelves and media airwaves. To most people in the United States, “beer” still meant a beverage that was served in a can and nearly clear as water. Malt, yeast, and hops were all secondary considerations. What was needed was that special someone with the proper pedigree, an appreciation for craft, and a little marketing savvy. After all, convincing an entire generation raised on light beer to embrace something darker, richer, and more complex was hardly a walk in the park. A new way of making and selling craft beer was needed.
Fortunately, the West Coast beer community didn’t have to wait long for its message to go mainstream. In 1984, some three thousand miles and a full beer book’s worth of history away, a young Jim Koch, inspired by the spirit of those early pioneers, used his own family’s long-forgotten recipe to create Samuel Adams Boston Lager. In doing so, he took what had been a local movement and introduced it to the American people, ushering in a true renaissance of local and regional beer. By 1990, the number of American breweries had increased to nearly three hundred. By 1995, it stood closer to a thousand. And by the turn of the twenty-first century, American breweries, which had numbered only in the dozens just a few decades before, were more than fifteen hundred strong. The tide had turned and the nation was changing, with something new to the beer scene appearing every day. Harpoon, Dogfish Head, 90 Minute IPAs, Imperial Stouts, Brooklyn, San Diego, Russian River, Pliny the Younger . . . well, you know the rest.
And the rest, as they say, is history.