The unanchoring of Anchor Brewing Our original craft brewery has changed radically since Fritz Maytag sold it in 2010. So who is it today?

The unanchoring of Anchor Brewing Our original craft brewery has changed radically since Fritz Maytag sold it in 2010. So who is it today?

A lot has changed at Anchor Brewing Co. in the last few years, but one thing hasn’t: how it makes steam beer.

On the second floor of the Potrero Hill brewery, built as a coffee roastery in the 1930s, workers still hand-crank the valve on the copper mash cooker, half a century old and shaped like an onion dome. In an adjacent room, steam beer, Anchor’s signature product, still undergoes fermentation in big, open-top steel bins. Almost all the time, the only temperature control is that chilly San Francisco Bay breeze, on which the original Anchor brewers wisely capitalized in 1896. The process is practically anachronistic.

Read more: The definitive timeline of Anchor beers

Anachronism has always been part of Anchor Brewing’s appeal. It was the brewery oblivious to the beer zeitgeist, known for old-fashioned styles like barleywine, porter and, quaintest of all, steam. Steam is balanced, clean, refreshing; it’s timeless, and it’s never been cool. When craft beer exploded in the nineties and early aughts with its insatiably hoppy IPAs, Anchor stayed true to its old ways. It felt like home.

Which is why, to those who grew up on the local institution, these can feel like bewildering times. Anchor was Fritz Maytag’s, it was San Francisco’s. Now, as of 2017, California’s oldest brewery is owned by Japanese beer corporation Sapporo. Anchor was always touted as the nation’s first craft brewery. Now the Brewers Association says it can’t be called “craft” at all. In lieu of having a brew pub, Anchor always just offered a free tour, with beer samples. Now it charges for tours, and it has a trendy taproom, Public Taps, complete with a Skee-Ball machine and limited-edition beers like Boys ‘N’ Blood, a fruited kettle sour.

Suddenly it looks as if Anchor has jumped on every possible bandwagon, making beer styles you could never imagine Maytag endorsing. Meyer lemon lager? Blackberry IPA? Brut IPA? In the 45 years that Maytag owned Anchor, the brewery released just 10 beer styles. In the nine years since he sold it, it’s put 30 new styles into distribution — and that’s not counting the 60-plus beers that have shown up on the taproom menu since launching a pilot brewery in 2017.

Has Anchor lost touch with its own identity?

By modernizing, does it risk alienating the people who love it most?

And, in an era when this city worries about these things, what part of San Francisco’s identity hangs in the balance?

Fritz Maytag did plenty of modernizing while he controlled Anchor, though he worked within historical frameworks. “Fritz was always an innovator,” says brewmaster Scott Ungermann, who joined Anchor in 2014. “He saved this brewery from extinction — saved a whole style of beer from extinction.”

The gospel of Fritz is well known. Anchor Brewing was on its last legs when Maytag, heir to the washing machine empire, bought a controlling interest in 1965. Prior to the purchase, the brewery made two styles of beer: steam and steam dark. A holdover from the scrappy days of the Gold Rush, steam beer was the low-tech solution if you didn’t have refrigeration, able to ferment at warmer temperatures with lager yeast. The style already seemed quaint in 1965.

The beer, by all accounts, was also not very good — sloppily made and frequently spoiled. With unwavering focus, for the seven years after he bought the brewery, Maytag worked only on improving steam beer, introducing modern technology to ensure a stable, consistent product. He didn’t even try to save steam dark.

“We had gone from the last medieval brewery in the world to the most modern small brewery in the world,” Maytag told The Chronicle in 2015.

So inextricable is steam beer from Anchor Brewing that many consumers mistakenly believe the brewery’s name is “Anchor Steam.” (The company trademarked “steam beer” in 1981; anyone else making that style today must call it “California common.”) It’s the ultimate blue-collar beer — no fancy refrigeration needed — yet also, in its way, a beer of terroir, indebted to San Francisco’s uniquely limited, Goldilocks-like temperature band.

“The one part I really stressed to Sapporo,” Ungermann says, “is that steam beer absolutely has to be made right here in San Francisco. I really don’t think it would work anywhere else.”

At the same time that Maytag was re-working steam beer, the light lager was storming the nation. The ’60s and ’70s were the eras of Coors Banquet, Miller Lite and Schlitz. Steam was the opposite of these beers. It was a lager, but it drank like an ale. It was amber. It was flavorful. It was homegrown. And to those who could tell the difference, it was the best alternative to the big light lager brands.

Fritz Maytag, 1965 Fritz Maytag, 1965 Photo: Courtesy Anchor Brewing Photo: Courtesy Anchor Brewing Image 1 of / 6 Caption Close Is San Francisco's Anchor Brewing having an identity crisis? 1 / 6 Back to Gallery

“Jack London drank steam beer. It was a workingman’s drink. It was cheap. The country club set drank lager,” Stanton Delaplane wrote in his Feb. 7, 1977, Chronicle column. “Now Anchor, the only brew left from those leisurely days, gets the gold medal.”

It was 1972 before Maytag (and longtime brewmaster Mark Carpenter, who joined in 1971) released a second Anchor beer, and it was a porter — hardly less old-fashioned than steam. Next, in 1975, came Liberty Ale, also a throwback, commemorating the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s ride.

Liberty Ale revived the lost art of dry hopping, a process that would come to influence a generation of craft brewers. “The last time there’d been cask conditioning on hops must have been the 1700s,” Ungermann estimates. That doesn’t mean it was state-of-the-art, though. Anchor’s dry-hopping process, still implemented today, consists of simply filling big mesh bags with whole-cone hops and throwing them into a tank.

And 1975 was also the year that Anchor introduced Old Foghorn, the first barleywine of the modern era, and the perennially changing Christmas Ale, a precursor to the holiday beer craze still to come. For quite a while, that was it. Anchor introduced just one new beer in the ’80s (summer wheat); one in the ’90s (a low-alcohol English style dubbed small beer); and two in the decade preceding Maytag’s sale of the brewery (bock and humming ale).

Meanwhile, in the early aughts, the rest of the Bay Area craft beer movement was fomenting around it, hooking customers on double IPAs with can-you-even-believe-it IBUs. Anchor remained its quaint, quirky self.

Maytag sold Anchor in 2010 to the Griffin Group, a local investment firm run by two former Skyy Spirits executives, Keith Greggor and Tony Foglio. They did what any investor would do: grew the company, then sold it. Maytag must have understood that, though “I don’t think Fritz expected them to flip it that quickly,” Ungermann says.

In August 2017, Anchor was part of Sapporo.

The explosion in new Anchor beer styles revved up under the Griffin Group, fully taking off around 2014. “I pushed for it,” Ungermann says. “We needed to innovate.” Many of the Anchor releases from this period have clear precedents in the contemporary craft-beer world: a series of fruited beers (Meyer lemon lager, blood orange blonde, mango wheat), a callout to 21st Amendment’s Hell or High Watermelon. The Double Liberty IPA, their own Pliny the Elder.

But in today’s craft-beer landscape, putting new recipes into glass bottles doesn’t count for innovation. A defining feature of the most recent wave of local breweries — the Fieldwork and Cellarmaker set — is the flavor-of-the-week model, releasing new, one-time-only beers constantly, often limited to one’s own taproom. Unlike these new outfits, Anchor could no longer make claims to independence. It was no longer the only alternative to Miller Lite, by a long shot.

“We don’t get the beer geeks,” says Ungermann.

What always seemed most charming about Anchor — its penchant for the old-fashioned — started to just feel dated.

Anchor Public Taps opened a few months after the Sapporo purchase in 2017. Just across Mariposa Street from the brewery, the building was originally a soy sauce factory, and for a time Maytag used it as a winery for his York Creek Vineyards. A miniature brew system next to the bar allows pilot brewer Dane Volek to experiment within plain sight of the communal tables where customers sip their beer flights.

The goal of the pilot brewery is twofold: It’s R&D for future year-round beers (“a lot of it has been toward finding the next IPA,” Ungermann says), but it also helps Anchor answer the demand for the flavor of the week in the taproom. New products bear the requisite beer-geek puns, like Draywatch IPA, named for the Golden State Warriors’ forward. They’ve come a long way from naming beers after the Revolutionary War.

This about-face is a post-Maytag thing, not just a Sapporo thing. In fact, many of the changes that will come under the new ownership have not yet been implemented. Sales, for instance, remains to be integrated.

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Still, there has been turnover. Ungermann reports that every position in senior management has been vacated in the last year, except for his own.

Below senior management, too, Anchor’s workers have shown discontent. In March, they voted to unionize for the first time in the brewery’s 123-year history. “In the 3½ years I’ve worked at Anchor, we’ve seen a systematic rollback in our wages and quality of life,” says Garrett Kelly, who works in the fermentation department and sits on the union’s bargaining committee. Their sick time was cut in half, and starting wages are lower than they were five years ago, Kelly says.

Kelly emphasizes that many of these cuts were made under the Griffin Group ownership. However, with the purchase by Sapporo, “we’ve seen them continue,” he says. “My personal belief is that it was an attempt to make the company more appealing to a potential buyer.” The bargaining committee is currently preparing to begin negotiations with management.

When you step back, it’s hard to keep count of all the ways in which Anchor has changed since those halcyon days of 2010.

But here’s the thing. Anchor needed to change.

This is a tough time to be Anchor, or any midsize regional brewery for that matter. Its plans to open a taproom at Pier 48 were canceled (and its Giants-branded Mexican-style lager, Los Gigantes, discontinued). Last year, the brewery produced about 90,000 barrels of beer, down significantly from the post-Maytag peak of 150,000.

Selling beer on a national scale when you’re not part of the ever-consolidating AB InBev or Miller-Coors wholesale networks is becoming a Sisyphean task. But is selling beer locally when you lack the street cred of independent ownership any easier?

No matter how many brut IPAs it makes, Anchor continues to defy categorization. The way we talk about beer today operates along a dichotomy that doesn’t allow for much nuance: You’re either craft or you’re industrial; hyper-local or hungry for world domination; an artisan or a sell-out. Anchor doesn’t fit in either binary. It’s owned by a big beer corporation, but not one of the big beer corporations. It’s no longer “craft,” but its product is still made intensively by human hands. Sure, it sold out, but Anchor had sold five times already by the time Maytag bought it in 1965. As I’ve written before, Anchor is the rare brewery that has always been a little bit David and a little bit Goliath.

Yes, the bandwagon-jumping feels very off-brand. The roster of experimental beers coming out of the pilot brewery can read as gimmicky. Hibiscus saison, Joe-Joe’s cookie stout, POG kettle sour … from Anchor? What happened to good old barleywine?

But then again, through a certain lens, the pilot brewery is quintessential Maytag, a direct descendant of his relentless tinkering, his tireless quest to get a beer recipe just right. The pilot brewery is also a blip on the Anchor radar: Steam still represents more than half of its production.

No beer better illustrates this tension than San Franpsycho IPA, which was created last year and will remain available in cans through September, to which apricot and peach puree are added during the secondary fermentation. Like the old-school Anchor beers, it’s intensely rooted in place, a collaboration with another beloved, homegrown institution, the Outer Sunset clothing company San Franpsycho. On the other hand, it’s a fruited IPA; what could be trendier? Either way, it’s a well-made example of that trend, with juicy aromas, bright hops and fresh, lively fruit flavors that don’t veer artificial. Bitter plays off sweet, all without sacrificing a core of toasty malt that tells you it’s a beer.

As I sit with Ungermann and pilot brewer Volek at one of the communal tables at Public Taps on a recent afternoon, we taste Volek’s latest flavor-of-the-week creation, which he extracts from a tank: a salted IPA. He plans to call it Salted C’s, a pun alluding to the recipe’s Centennial, Calypso and Citra varieties of hops. It doesn’t taste salty. The salt balances out the beer’s bitterness, like a light sprinkling would do for a bitter vegetable. This tastes crisp and round, with tropical fruit flavors that whisper rather than scream. It tastes good. What’s more, as gimmicky as it may sound, underneath it still tastes like clean, balanced, refreshing Anchor.

What I can’t stop wondering is: At precisely what moment will this demand for the bizarre in beer start to give? Pendulums never stay at one pole for long; extremes can’t last. When the fever for fruited kettle sours finally breaks, I am confident that beer drinkers — that San Franciscans — will return to the types of beers that never go out of style. The clean, the balanced, the refreshing. You know, like Anchor Steam.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob