Quick answer
Anchor Brewing was the first and oldest craft brewery in the United States, founded in San Francisco in 1896 and famous for its steam beer, fermented with lager yeast at higher temperatures. Fritz Maytag bought it for a few thousand dollars in 1965 and built it into a national brand. Sapporo shut it down in July 2023 after 127 years; a new owner bought the company in 2024 and plans to restart it.
Full transcript
The Brewery That Would Not Die
Anchor Brewing began in 1896, when Ernst Baruth and Otto Schinkel took over a small San Francisco brewery making an old working-class style called steam beer. The fires after the 1906 earthquake destroyed the original plant; it was rebuilt, survived Prohibition, and burned again in 1944. In 1959 the brewery shut down for good — until the next year, when a buyer reopened it. The rescue that mattered came in 1965: Fritz Maytag, an heir to the Maytag appliance fortune, bought 51 percent of the failing company for a few thousand dollars. Maytag learned brewing from scratch and had Anchor in bottles by 1971.
The Steam and the End
The style is the point. Steam beer is lager yeast fermented at warm temperatures in shallow open tanks; Anchor's story is that hot wort was pumped to the roof to cool in the ocean air, which is where the steam — and the name — came from. Anchor trademarked the name in 1981. By then it was the grandfather of American craft brewing, and in 2019 its workers voted to unionize, the first craft brewery in the country to do so. In 2017 Sapporo had bought the company for 85 million dollars, and on the 12th of July 2023 Sapporo announced it was shutting Anchor down — 127 years after it opened. In 2024 the founder of Chobani bought the brand and said he would bring it back to life in San Francisco.
What to Do
The brewery fills a block of Mariposa Street on Potrero Hill, and the building still wears the Anchor name. There is no taproom and no tour — after the 2023 shutdown the plant sat waiting, and a new owner has been slowly bringing it back. What you can do is stand where the story happened and read the building itself: the brick, the old brewing halls, the hill the city grew around it. Walk up to the top of Potrero Hill afterwards and look back down at the block — from up there you can see the ocean air that cooled the wort and made the steam, which is the whole reason any of this exists.