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Anchor Brewing Company is an alcoholic beverage producer, operating a microbrewery and distillery on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California. The brewery was founded in 1896, and was purchased by its current owner, Fritz Maytag, in 1965. It moved to its current location in 1979. It is one of the last remaining breweries to produce California Common beer, also known as Steam Beer, a trademark owned by the company.
Anchor Brewery is largely responsible for the growth of the microbrewery movement in the United States. After Prohibition ended in the U.S., many small, locally-operated breweries were able to re-open and recommence brewing (although many more, perhaps most, were not). The vast majority of these concerns served only the immediate vicinty of their sole plant, a radius of a few miles to perhaps 100 or so. Local breweries and beers were the source of local pride in many communities, especially those with large populations of German, Polish, or Czech extraction. Many of these thrived on through World War II and into the 1950s. Most did not survive the 1950s, however, due to the influence of television advertising and the mass marketing tactics of major national breweries such as Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, and Miller. The whole idea of such beers and breweries was largely forgotten in the U.S. Maytag desired to establish such a small-scale brewery, with small-town quality and taste being the hallmarks of his beer. He was already a fan of Anchor Steem Beer when he learned that the brewery was about to close. In 1965, Maytag purchased 51 percent of the brewery for a few thousand dollars, and later purchased brewery outright.
Anchor Steam Beer 12 oz. bottle Things began to change in the 1980s when Maytag's signature brew, Anchor Steam Beer, began to achieve national notice. Demand skyrocketed from only a few thousand cases a year that he had been making in the old tradition. His success prompted many imitators, which he welcomed, since he could not have produced Anchor Steam in the mass quantities of Budweiser or similar mass-marketed brands and made a product with which he and his consumers would have been satisifed. The rise of modern microbreweries also encouraged the establishment of "brewpubs", where beer is brewed on the premises in small batches for consumption in what is often something of a fine-dining restaurant setting. Anchor and other microbreweries have been the beneficiaries of a trend to drink smaller quantities of higher quality alcoholic beverages of all types which has been developing in the United States since the 1970s.
In 1993, the company opened Anchor Distillery in the same location as the brewery, and began making a single malt rye whiskey, named Old Potrero after the hill. In 1997 the distillery began producing gin, called Junípero - Spanish for juniper, and a possible reference to the name of Junípero Serra, an important figure in California's history.
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