Anchor Liberty Ale Dates to ... 1983?

Anchor Liberty Ale is rightly described as a legend. Released in 1975 in advance of the American bicentennial, it was reputedly made exclusively with native Cascade hops and, for good measure, dry-hopped with them as well. That is a very early description of what would become the blueprint for tens of thousands of subsequent American IPAs. For that reason, a story, which the brewery has happily adopted, goes like this: “As the first modern American IPA brewed after prohibition and the first modern American single-hop ale and dry-hopped ale, Anchor’s Liberty Ale® is the original craft brewed ale and the historic beer that started a revolution.” But is it true?

I stumbled across a video of Fritz Maytag describing that beer, and it would seem to complicate the narrative. The description starts at around the 7:00 minute mark and I’ll include a transcript below.

“We brewed the first brew of Liberty Ale on April 18th [1975]… Also ale being, in modern times, considered to be a British specialty, I thought we would brew an ale better than anything in Britain, and we’d call it Liberty and we’d win on all accounts. And so we did that, and the ale was terrible. I just didn’t like it at all. I didn’t want to sell it—I wanted to dump it.”

“And then we brewed a Christmas Ale, which was a tradition that I was very familiar with…. And then we brewed Christmas Ale every year for years. Different every year; we didn’t have capacity to brew it regularly. But in 1983 we had moved into this brewery, almost 20 years after I had started. Now we had capacity, and the 1983 Christmas ale—different each year—but that Christmas Ale was a smash success. And we suddenly thought, ‘Aha! That’s it. That’s Liberty Ale! We’ll re-do Liberty Ale. So today’s Liberty Ale is exactly the brew we made for Christmas 1983.”

What we appear to have here is a romantic fact. Your thoughts?

Update. On Facebook, Steve McKinney posted the shot of tasting notes from from James Robertson’s The Connoisseur's Guide to Beer (1984). We’re beginning to get a clearer picture of all this. Liberty Ale in 1975 was not the beer we know now—not remotely. Sounds porter-ish. Meanwhile, Christmas Ale was apparently not always a dark, spiced ale, either.

In a comment below, Stan Hieronymus adds a bit more context. As late as the early 1990s (at least), it wasn’t even a single-hop Cascade beer. So a whole lot of this story is hogwash. Here’s Stan:

In MJ's first pocket guide, published in 1982, so based on tasting before then, he writes “Anchor makes a different Christmas Ale each year. To date, these top-fermenting ales have been dry-hopped with Cascade hops, and have had enormous hop bitterness.”

A fax from Anchor to Jackson in 1992 states Liberty is “a blend of several varieties of ‘whole cluster’ hops in the kettle and also for dry hopping.” Doesn't sound like a single hop beer.