Object Details
sova.nmah.ac.1591
- Creator
- Anchor Brewing Company
- Names
- Burkhart, David Aaron, 1954-
- Maytag, Fritz, 1937-
- Donor
- Minami, Mashashi
- Place
- California -- San Francisco
- Topic
- Beer
- Breweries
- Brewing
- Technical manuals
- Testing
- Provenance
- Collection donated by Anchor Brewing Company at Sapporo Beer, through President and CEO, Mashashi Minami, 2023.
- Creator
- Anchor Brewing Company
- See more items in
- Anchor Brewing Company Records
- Summary
- Collection documents the activities of Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco, California.
- Historical
- Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, California, was a tremendously influential American brewery that is widely recognized as the first American microbrewery. Under the influential leadership of Fritz Maytag III, its owner from 1965 to 2010, Anchor Brewing Co. initiated a phenomenal wave of growth in the global brewing industry that came to be known as the microbrewing—now "craft beer"—revolution. Anchor Brewing Co. was founded in 1896, closed briefly during Prohibition, and reopened following repeal. In 1965, Fritz Maytag III (a member of the Iowa-based washing machine-making family, as well as the producers of Maytag Blue Cheese) bought a controlling stake in Anchor Brewing Co. At the time, the American brewing industry was highly consolidated. In 1965, about 200 American breweries made approximately 108 million barrels of beer. About 40 percent of this total came from the nation's five largest breweries and the industry would consolidate even further over the next fifteen years (Stack, M. A Concise History of America's Brewing Industry, 2003; Beer Institute 1993: 8). American beer had become big business, and yet Maytag envisioned something different: a brewery that would produce beer in small batches using artisan ingredients, traditional techniques, and European recipes that had not been brewed in the United States for more than a century, if ever. Speaking in a 2017 American Beer and Brewing oral history, Maytag said, "I went down to see the brewery not because I loved the beer; I really was not a beer enthusiast." Rather, Maytag had been a science enthusiast since childhood. "I had no idea what is was...but it had a magic effect on me." He purchased the company and taught himself how to brew beer. With the guidance of an unusually erudite owner, Anchor's historic "steam beer" recipe improved. Maytag continued with recipes that swung ever farther from the mainstream, as he experimented with styles he had tasted while traveling in Europe. In the 1970s, virtually every beer on American supermarket shelves was a light lager style, often brewed with rice and corn. Anchor, in contrast, bottled porter, a dry-hopped ale, a barleywine, and its first annual Christmas Ale. In 1969, four years info Maytag's tenure at Anchor, his brewery produced only 800 barrels of beer. Maytag's revitalized brewery attracted waves of visitors—journalists, beer drinkers yearning for new flavors, and homebrewers curious about how he was making it all work—and the popularity of Anchor's beer grew. Over the course of forty-five years, Maytag navigated Anchor to the top of a new industry. Craft brewing started slowly in the 1970s, expanded geographically and numerically in the late 1980s—in 1985, for the first time, the U.S. counted more microbreweries than large-scale breweries—and exploded in the early 2000s (Elzinga, C. Tremblay, and V. Tremblay, "Craft Beer in the United States: History, Numbers and Geography," 2015: 252). Maytag shared ingredients with other upstart brewers, like Jack McAuliffe, founder of New Albion Brewing Company in Sonoma in 1976 (John "Jack" McAuliffe Oral History,2019-03-09 and Suzy Denison Oral History, 2019-11-17, American Beer and Brewing Oral History Collection, ). He inspired many others from afar, who experienced separate eureka moments tasting Anchor Steam Beer. When Maytag sold his brewery in 2010 to two investors from the spirits world--they vowed to build the Anchor brand into a new beer and spirits endeavor, but would sell the brewery in 2017 to Sapporo Holdings, who would liquidate the business in 2023--Admirers lauded Maytag as the nation's first microbrewer of modern times. Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of yogurt maker Chobani, purchased Anchor Brewing Company in 2024. The histories of Fritz Maytag and Anchor Brewing Company were interwoven with historical and cultural trends beyond beer: calls for consumer choice during an era of corporate consolidation; a spirit of entrepreneurial innovation that spurred novel modes of production, packaging, marketing, transportation, and advertising; and a return to slower, artisan production of food and drink following decades of increasing homogeneity. With origins in the counterculture, the consumer movement, and the "good food movement," microbrewing's impact rippled across realms of the social, the economic, and the gastronomic alike. In 2023, the United States countted nearly 10,000 breweries, more than 99 percent of them small operations. The brewing industry supported nearly 2.4 million jobs (Beer Institute). The pace of craft beer's growth from the 1980s onward and the creation of new or changed relationships among growers, brewers, equipment manufacturers, marketing representatives, distributers, retailers, the media, and consumers—-began in many respects with Anchor Brewing Company. "It's hard to pin down because I was in the middle of it," Maytag said, when asked to reflect on Anchor's place in such transformations. "(We were really the only ones in the early days .... We were sort of there at the very beginning .... [L]ater ... we saw that it was a movement" (Fritz Maytag Oral History Interview, 2017-03-28, American Beer and Brewing Oral History Collection, NMAH.AC.1595). Source Acquistion Information Sheet, Theresa McCulla, Curator, Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History,2023
- Extent
- 40 Cubic feet (102 boxes, 5 map folders)
- Date
- 1880s-2023
- bulk 1965-2010
- Archival Repository
- Archives Center, National Museum of American History
- Identifier
- NMAH.AC.1591
- Type
- Collection descriptions
- Archival materials
- Advertisements
- Articles
- Beverage labels
- Blueprints
- Business cards
- Calendars
- Color slides
- Compact discs
- Correspondence
- Financial records
- Invoices
- Labels
- Negatives
- Newsletters
- Notebooks
- Notes
- Photographs
- Receipts (financial records)
- 16mm films
- Trademarks
- Videotapes
- Citation
- Anchor Brewing Company Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History
- Arrangement
- Collection is arranged into nine series. Series 1: Background Materials, 1905-2021 Series 2: Beer Brewing Data, 1955-2023 Series 3: Subject Files, 1916-2021, undated Series 4: Financial Materials, 1930s-1993 Series 5: Legal Materials, 1979-2020 Series 6: Advertising, Marketing and Sales Materials, 1963-2020, undated Series 7: Photographs, Negatives, Transparencies, and Slides, 1880s-2008 Series 8: Oversize Materials, 1936-2007, undated Series 9: Audio Visual Materials, 1977-1999, undated
- Processing Information
- Collection processed by Alison Oswald, archivist, 2023-2024. An arrangement scheme for the papers was imposed during processing in the absence of a usable original order. Original file folder titles were retained in most cases.
- Rights
- Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives Center makes no guarantees concerning copyright restrictions. Other intellectual property rights may apply. Archives Center cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.
- Genre/Form
- Advertisements
- Articles
- Beverage labels
- Blueprints
- Business cards
- Calendars
- Color slides
- Compact discs
- Correspondence
- Financial records
- Invoices
- Labels
- Negatives
- Newsletters
- Notebooks
- Notes
- Photographs
- Receipts (financial records)
- 16mm films
- Trademarks
- Videotapes
- Scope and Contents
- Collection consists primarily of business records documenting the activities of Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco, California. Materials include meeting minutes, brew books, photographs, slides, advertisements, financial records, beer labels, testing records, correspondence, and audio visual materials.
- Restrictions
- Collection is open for research.
NMAH.AC.1591
https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ep8d2e6c9a3-d501-4c44-9aed-8fac2b786658
NMAH.AC.1591
ACAH
- Record ID
- ebl-1699544400757-1699544401193-0
