Postscript on Dating Breweries

Happy leap day!—I hope you’re all using this extra 24 hours frivolously. I plan to use it as an opportunity to follow up on my previous post addressing the difficulties of dating breweries. (Whether that’s adequately frivolous is up to you to decide.)

For this discussion, I submit to you the Anchor Brewery of San Francisco, along with the following hypotheticals. As it currently stands, there’s a good chance some entity will acquire the rights to the Anchor brand, but not the building. Let’s say AB InBev buys the brand and starts making Steam Beer again at its St. Louis plant. Would you say, for the purposes of dating Anchor, that this is adequate to maintain its existence as a 128-year-old brewery? Okay, probably not. But what if an independent group bought the brand and had San Francisco’s Cellarmaker brew it on contract? Or what if an independent group bought the brand and built a new brewery in the Bay Area, reformulated Steam Beer for modern audiences, and began making a bunch of hazies to boot?

I was thinking about all this because that last example is basically what Fritz Maytag did when he saved the brewery in the 1960s. The beer Anchor was making at the time was some terribly debased product employing sugar and caramel coloring. It was so poorly brewed it was often sour. Fritz entirely reformulated the recipe. It wasn’t the beer Anchor made in 1896, nor the one they made after Prohibition, nor certainly the one they were making when he bought it. He took the idea of steam beer and made an impressionistic evocation of it based on the ingredients available at the time.

Of course, he also started introducing new beers like Porter and barley wine, forming the template for the new breweries that would eventually come along. And then in 1979, he moved the brewery to its current (or I guess final) location.

So to recap: under Fritz, Anchor didn’t make the same flagship product for which it was famous, was not owned by the same family, was not located in its original building, made no beer for 13 years during Prohibition, and also made a bunch of beers it never had before. For the purposes of continuity, was this the “same” brewery founded in the waning years of the 19th century?

I am not writing this post to make an argument. I don’t think Anchor’s claim to be 127 years old when it closed was in any way controversial. Yet what we consider continuity is a pretty amorphous concept. In the end, the only thing that connected Sapporo’s Anchor to its original roots was the name. And at 128 years, Anchor is a mere pup compared to some of the really ancient European breweries.