Anchors away! (Fritz Maytag)
Jack Curtin talks to Fritz Maytag, a man largely responsible for the growth of the microbrewery movement in the United States
The legend of Fritz Maytag and his Anchor Brewing Company is essentially true.
The 28-year-old Maytag, heir to a family washing machine fortune, was sitting in his favourite watering hole, the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco’s hip North Beach neighbourhood, sipping a pint of Anchor Steam Beer in August 1965 when restaurateur Fred Kuh told him the brewery was due to shut down. He did dutifully trot over the following afternoon and plop down a $5,000 check to save the place. He did soon take complete control and dragged the “medieval” brewery in to modern times to begin making some world-class beer.
What the legend gets wrong is implying that the beer Maytag set out to save was actually good. And what it sometimes — inexplicably — overlooks is that Maytag’s rescue of Anchor Brewing was nothing less than the “Big Bang” of the American craft brewing revolution. Everything flowed from that moment.
“Anchor Steam in those days was more often than not terribly sour,” Maytag recalls. “I enjoyed drinking it more for the experience, for the idea of consuming a beer made right here in the city, than for the beer itself. When I wrote that check, I saw myself as a kind of angel who helped out and would come by now and then to see how things were going.
“But it didn’t take long before I saw how difficult it was to sell sour beer and it bothered me terribly that people had such a low opinion of ‘my’ brewery.
The brewery was ancient and dirty and I realised that I had to roll up m.....
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By Jack Curtin
Section : Modern Pioneers
Page number : 48
