The beers will be released periodically throughout the year, starting with the first release in March and continuing until Sierra Nevada’s 30th Anniversary on November 15, 2010. These limited release, 750ml cage-and-cork bottles will be available at select retailers and beer-centric bars, and they will be much more than a tribute. Proceeds from the project will go to benefit charities chosen by the four pioneers.

When we gathered together at Anchor last December, the film crew began interviewing us by discussing our backgrounds and input in the creations. Grossman told me, “We wanted to pay tribute to the original pioneers who helped me and hundreds of others get started.” It was a fascinating day for all of us.

We listened as Fritz Maytag, one of America’s foremost brewers, related how he had saved America’s last “steam beer” brewery. At that time (in 1965) Anchor was not only America’s smallest brewery, but became the only one making really distinctive beer.

Joe Allen, Anchor’s owner, had revived the brewery in 1933, after Prohibition. His beer was not always up to quality for distribution to the 25 or so San Francisco bars still serving it. In 1959, he retired, passing it on to Lawrence Steed and Bill Buck, who moved Anchor from the original Kansas Street location to a smaller, ramshackle, un-brewery-like warehouse under the freeway at 8th Street. By 1965, production was down to less than 700-bbls (21,700-gals).

It was by a twist of fate that Maytag discovered that the beer and the brewery were in trouble. Maytag, at 27, was just out of graduate school at Stanford, and not particularly enthused to return to the family’s dairy farm in Iowa, so he borrowed $15,000 to buy a major share in the brewery. Over time, as he learned more about brewing, he was able to concentrate on basics: all-malt brewing, steady temperatures and rigid quality controls. With hard work he managed to get greater production and distribution and, in 1971, he installed a bottling line. Production increased to 7,000 bbl (211,000 gals) by 1975. By 1979, the brewery moved to a new location at 1705 Mariposa Street with much better brewing equipment imported from Europe.

Maytag found that there is more to beer than water, malt and hops: there’s also character, taste and tradition to consider. He discovered the way to success lay in producing a unique and distinctive product. Today, Anchor is ranked 15th largest among American craft breweries, mostly because Maytag tries to keep his production low. He is not interested in high volume sales.

From Wine to Beer

As for me, I had given up on insipid U.S. beer and had switched to wine. I became interested in making wine during the fall of 1969, and was teaching a home winemaking class for Portland Community College at a now defunct fermentation supply store called Wine-Art Oregon. They had a good recipe using reconstituted grape extract and an excellent production system featuring primary and secondary fermentation. The result was a good cheap product with almost no fermentation problems.

Wine-Art was part of a Canadian chain, whose founder, Stan Anderson, was also the author of a very interesting homebrew recipe featuring primary and secondary fermentation methods, and the actual addition of hops in a real kettle boil. This from water and malt extract syrup only, and little, if any, sugar, quite a difference from traditional homebrew recipes at the time. The resulting beer was very acceptable with none of the off-flavors that were so annoying about traditional recipes. Moreover, one could actually add ground malted barley directly to the kettle for a more authentic product. All of the ingredients were available at the Wine-Art store.

My first batch was a great success: it was a warm-fermented lager beer, not one of the English style ale brews described in the British homebrewing books they sold, but the recipe was a little disorganized so I re-wrote it. Owner Jack McCallum liked my new version of the recipe, and suggested I write a book. That was the last thing I’d had on my mind. I’d never written a book before and for a lazy person like myself, it sounded like a tremendous amount of work, but he kept telling me to get busy. A Treatise on Lager Beer (his title) was only 58 pages, but it proved quite successful (seven editions and 110,000 copies). It took me three months to write, which I did while sipping profuse amounts of cheap vin rose.

Out in Boulder, CO, a budding nuclear engineer turned kindergarten teacher obtained a copy and made good beer. Charlie Papazian started teaching homebrewing, in his home, to classes of up to 20. Before long, he started the American Homebrewers Association, and good homebrewed beer became evermore available. Today, he also heads the Brewers Association, publishing The New Brewer and Zymurgy magazines as well.

It used to bug me a little, but nowadays I embrace it. I no longer mind living on the fringes of acceptability. The popular kids at school—the beautiful people—grew up to be mostly normal, average and boring non-entities. They constitute the vast majority of conventional, mainstream opinion. They’re the people eating white bread, processed cheese and drinking bland macros. They listen to whatever’s popular, watch what critics tell them, and go to bed early. They miss a lot.

As a child, of course, I read comic books. Didn’t all geeky kids? Thing is, I still do. And I recently noticed something about them that neatly parallels craft beer. The first comic books were collected strips from newspapers. Then in the late 1930s original stories with characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Captain America appeared. Sales skyrocketed faster than a speeding bullet. This became known as the Golden Age of Comics. In American brewing, the 19th century’s industrial revolution kicked into high gear so that by 1870 there were over 4,000 breweries. From then until World War I is likewise often referred to as the Golden Age of Brewing. This is when most of the familiar names in brewing history got their start. But when Prohibition began, it sounded the death knell for beer. The Golden Age was over. After 1933, when Prohibition finally ended, less than 1,000 breweries re-opened, effectively decimating the entire industry.

Meanwhile, back in the superhero world, the baby boom after World War II created a whole new audience for comics and publishers flourished selling books on every imaginable subject. But then “Seduction of the Innocent,” a propagandist tome, was published, weakly arguing that comics caused juvenile delinquency. It didn’t matter that the rise in delinquents exactly paralleled the rise in population. Parents and other misguided do-gooders panicked and Congress held hearings. The industry agreed to self-censorship and the “Comics Code” was born, limiting what they published to G-rated fare. Many publishers went out of business.

Then, like a flash, came…well, the Flash; and the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Iron Man and countless costumed crime-fighters and villains. In the 1960s, comics rebounded in a big way. This was the Silver Age of Comics. Most comic book characters you can name come from this flurry of creativity.

At around this same time, Fritz Maytag bought the ailing Anchor Brewery in San Francisco. Along with Ballantine, it was one of the few American breweries that wasn’t making interchangeable light lagers that could only be differentiated through vast marketing budgets. American beer continued its downward spiral as mergers and closings further reduced their number. Beer was not only on the ropes, but the referee had started counting. Only around fifty remained by 1980.

We all know what happened next. Chances are, if you’ve read this magazine all the way to this last page, you know the story, too. Inspired by Jack McAuliffe’s short-lived New Albion Brewery…and Anchor…and better imported beer…and homebrewing, the time was ripe. Ken Grossman, Bert Grant, Don Barkley and countless other pioneers started brewing flavorful ales at Sierra Nevada, Grant’s and Mendocino, along with plenty of others. This was the start of what I’ve taken to calling the Silver Age of Brewing, an age we’re still in the middle of. And like the comics silver age before it, ours is also defined by creativity, innovation and a break from what came before it while at the same time honoring its traditions. Many brewing superheroes have emerged from this time, and happily none have taken to wearing a cape. All kidding aside, it’s unquestionably the best time for beer in the history of the world. If the Golden Age was all about technology and creating the modern brewery, this Silver Age is about the art of flavor and craftsmanship. If you love beer, you couldn’t have picked a better time to be alive. Welcome to the Silver Age. I’m having the time of my life.

Or it may be an homage to founder Ken Grossman’s wife.

“‘Damn the torpedoes,’ as my wife said. She wanted to have a baby and so Sierra came along.”

That’s Sierra Grossman, not the brewing company, born in 1977. Her father divided his time between working at bike shops around Chico, CA, and his homebrew supply store. In the late 1970s, earning around a buck and a half an hour, Grossman mulled over an opportunity to buy a bike shop while his wife virtually raised Sierra in their homebrew shop.

Grossman recalls, “having a serious internal debate about doing the safer thing and buying the bike shop or risking it all and opening a brewery. I came to the conclusion that after a year or two, I’d probably get bored with the bike business.”

By the time his third child arrived, he no longer needed to work at a bike shop. He put in 14-hour days on average with his “fourth child”—the brewery. Grossman’s son, Brian, now 24, remembers being stuffed into “a case of Pale Ale and he’d push me down the bottling line. That’s just what we did if we wanted to see Pops.”

Today, Sierra Grossman is the brand manager. Initially, she planned on a career in healthcare. But she quickly returned to the fold. At 15, her first job was washing dishes at the on-premise brewpub, the Taproom. That led to career advancements: hostess, accounting, merchandising and various non-production jobs. Brian Grossman similarly climbed the company ladder. Ken Grossman, 54, didn’t ask his kids to work for him—they demanded jobs. He merely enforced the work-from-the-bottom-up method.

“I had to start in the cellar handling beer,” Brian Grossman explains. “I showed up for work and there’s a couple of buckets. I expected to be brewing and it was, ‘No, you gotta go scrub the fermenters out.’ I was like, what?!’” In hindsight, he recognizes how important that was. Though he completed the police academy intending to become a sheriff, he now tackles the production side of the business.

That parents with one or more hungry mouths to feed could quit their careers to open a brewery is no longer such a kooky concept. Each year, a handful of new craft breweries open. Successful family businesses often need to start small and it helps if they are rooted in small towns.

Chico is one example. So is Dexter, MI, where Ron Jeffries, inspired by the creativity of barrel-aged farmhouse beers, founded Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. After brewing professionally at four different breweries, Jeffries decided it was time to take on the challenges of starting his own in 2004.

“I had hoped they both would want to work at the brewery, “ says Jeffries, referring to his wife, Laurie, and his 19-year-old son, Daemon. Laurie Jeffries is the office manager, logistician and “the friendly face in our brewery retail area.” For Daemon’s part, his father had been a brewer since he was five, so he grew up around the business. By the time he turned 15, Jeffries says Daemon knew plenty about “schlepping kegs, helping at festivals, eating fries and drinking root beer at the bar while Dad checked fermentations and the like.” He adds that it’s only natural his son started bottling, labeling, building pallets and loading trucks.

My tinkering transferred naturally to beer. I’ve been fascinated by beer since I was a kid. It started with my neighbor and best friend’s father. He was an avid home brewer and I loved to watch (and smell) his brewing. I started homebrewing myself when I was quite young, and the tinkering applied there as well: I malted all my own grains and roasted my dark malts in the oven. I even had plans of converting a front-loading washer-dryer into a little malt-house, which I never got around to building.

In 1976, I opened a homebrew shop above a storefront in downtown Chico, CA, but I dreamed of opening my own brewery. Two years later, inspired by people like Fritz Maytag and Jack McAuliffe, I sold the shop and came up with a business plan for Sierra Nevada.

In the early days, there wasn’t any equipment to make beer on a small scale. Everything I could think of had to be salvaged, reconfigured, or built from the ground up. I could have gone to Germany or England to buy ready-made brewing equipment, but even if I had been aware of that at the time, I couldn’t have afforded it. Our starting budget for opening the brewery was $50,000, but we ended up spending about twice that much.

I traveling up and down the west coast buying everything I could get my hands on to bang together into a brewery. I bought pieces from a company that was scrapping the old Falstaff and Lucky Lager breweries in San Francisco. I didn’t really know what I needed, so I bought a variety of things, thinking I could use them someday.

At Butte Community College, I signed up for any class that would allow me to utilize the metal shop: agricultural welding, farm mechanics, anything where I could get in and access tools. Other students were working on tractor equipment, ploughs, and things like that; I was working on a brew kettle and a lauter tun. I spent days on a drill press making thousands of holes in the plates that would make up the false bottom in the lauter tun. I converted a steam-jacketed tank and a fruit hopper into a brew kettle. Thankfully, my teachers were sympathetic.

In 1980, with all secondhand equipment and a converted soft drink bottling line, we made our first batch of Pale Ale on my homebuilt system. I always wanted to make the kind of beer I liked to brew as a homebrewer: for me that meant hops. I wanted my beers to be something new and different, using West Coast American ingredients. Instead of always looking to Europe for beer, I thought why not turn the focus back home and make something truly American?

It’s been a strange ride. I remember in the early days, thinking that we would never be able to produce and sell 10,000 barrels of hoppy, bottle-conditioned beer. Now we sell fifty times that much. I still stay involved with all aspects of the brewery as possible. When we installed our new bottling line, I spent days working from early morning until late at night making sure everything went right. I could hire people to take care of it, but I have so much of myself invested in the brewery that I can’t imagine not being there. Working with equipment is something I know pretty well, and I guess I just like projects.

Ultimately my passion lies in all things beer: beer, brewing and brewing history. Throughout the process of building the facility we have today, I was able to collect parts and pieces from salvaged breweries and yards. Instead of throwing them away, we decided to make art out of them. Touring our brewery you notice little things, like doorknobs made from the brass fitting from the Falstaff Brewery, that help add to the whole.

For me, these pieces of brewing’s past connect this brewery to that history, and the tinkering keeps me connected in a physical way to beer’s future.

The restless people who kept moving west and further west had to stop here or step into the ocean: maybe all that restlessness got channeled into innovation?

Viewed from afar, West Coast-style brewing is a phenomenon: audacious, ground-breaking, and hop-heavy. There are communities “ out West” where craft beer outsells the Big Three, where it must be as daunting to open a new brewery as it is to open a new restaurant in New York.

The hard brewing facts support the sense that this is special territory: the four American states and one Canadian province that make up the West Coast of the United States and Canada contain over 30 million people, about 15% of the total. However, they are home to over 440 breweries, microbreweries and brewpubs: about 25% of the total.

The western states and British Columbia gave their countries their first brewpubs and they take home a disproportionate share of national brewing awards. In short, things are happening there.

For 15 years, Celebrator Beer News has been the voice of West Coast beer. We asked Tom Dalldorf, Celebrator’s publisher, to help us make sense of it all.

—AAB

A Stanford University graduate student in Japanese studies had only lunch and a cold beer on his mind that fateful afternoon in July 1965. But when Fritz Maytag ordered his usual Steam Beer, the server suggested that he savor it because the brewery was to be closed.

Fritz, the scion of the Maytag washing machine family, was by his nature positively Jeffersonian in his eclectic pursuit of quality and substance in everything he found worthy. He saw in that quirky beer brewed under primitive conditions something that was distinctly San Francisco and he had to learn more. Thus began an almost single-minded dedication to reviving lost traditions of brewing that is the hallmark of the Anchor Brewing Co.

Fritz dropped by the brewery and discovered that it was indeed to be closed after so many years, having survived even the devastating consequences of Prohibition. He wondered what he could do to help out. With a small investment and a lot of hard work, Fritz became the proud owner of a historic brewing property with rather poor prospects. Even with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Fearless Spectator Charles McCabe singing its praises, Anchor’s Steam Beer was a bastard child of the beer business and an unruly one at that. Fritz set to work cleaning up the brewery and stabilizing the beer.

Eventually, Maytag discovered the adage to be true in beer as it is in wine: the way to make a small fortune is to start with a really big one. This expensive avocation could not continue for long. A new location and some more modern equipment and quality control improved his product to the point where Maytag could actually sleep at night without worrying about the beer going bad.

Anchor produced fewer than 800 barrels of Steam the first year, but demand increased after the quality issues were addressed. Maytag’s research and travels to England and Europe convinced him that other styles might be equally attractive to a country notably devoid of beers of color or flavor. He introduced Liberty Ale in April 1975 to commemorate the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and the beer became so popular that he had to make it a year-round brand. Old Foghorn, a traditional English-style barley wine, was introduced that same year—another first. This was Anchor’s most extreme beer yet. Given its high alcohol and robust flavor profile, it must have been quite a radical move in a beer market awash in an ocean of light industrial adjunct lager.