The Food Disruptors

The Food Disruptors


#49 Alchemy + Integrity + History + Science + Art = Craft Beer

August 15, 2019

 

"There’s nothing more interesting than a brewery in terms of a combination of chemistry, physics, biochemistry, engineering. It’s a wonderworld of basic science. And in fact, much of modern science came out of breweries." -- Fritz Maytag, 2017

Fritz Maytag disrupted the huge market for industrially processed, pale lager beer in the 1970s. Father of the microbrewery (a term he coined) movement, he created Anchor Steam Beer as the first craft beer in America after decades of consolidation in the industry.

Like many a Food Disruptor of old, Maytag was an autodidact, in his case in the beer industry.

He purchased the nearly defunct Anchor Brewing company of San Francisco in 1965, more or less on a lark. But almost immediately, he fell in love with the ancient brewery, and more, with the process of brewing. The small business he acquired used medieval processes, and the resulting brews were frequently contaminated.

To revive Anchor Brewing, before anybody had heard of "craft beer," Maytag ferreted out old methods, often from ancient books, and brought modern equipment and science to bear on his brewing process. In his early days as brewmaster, he had to cobble together equipment, since there was no craft brewing infrastructure.

He not only heeded the science behind a great brew, but also taste. Cuing off of the approach of the small but growing ranks of wine connoisseurs in California, he developed rich, flavorful beer designed not just to flatter tastebuds, but to surprise and delight them.

 

Fritz Maytag

So much for the art. Keeping Anchor Brewing alive presented Maytag with huge risk. To build a modern brewery, he levered his personal stock holdings to the hilt, and then had to watch the financial horror show of the mid-seventies as his stock declined in value and interest rates approached 20 percent. Many an entrepreneur has folded under less pressure. 

 

Anchor Brewing changed the beer-drinking culture of America. At an annual U.S. beer consumption of 6.3 billion gallons and counting, that's a big cultural dial to move. Notably, Maytag succeeded by emphasizing quality over quantity. And after a nearly a century of mass-marketing by Big Food and Big Beer, Maytag took a low-key, word-of-mouth approach and built his distribution and loyal following beer-by-beer.

 

Check out this Prime Rate timeline 1974-1980. It was scary to live through.

The U.S. Prime Rate Reached an All-Time High 21.5% in 1980

The Alchemist of Anchor Steam, INC. Magazine, 1983

BeerHistory.com