How America’s First Craft Brewery Was (Re)Born

Explicit content warning

06/06/23 • 67 min

The year was 1965 when a young Fritz Maytag acquired 51% of a failing San Francisco concern known as "The Steam Beer Brewing Company." The success the industrial scion had transforming what we now know as Anchor Brewing Co. is the stuff of beer industry legend, and many point to it as the moment American craft brewing was born. Joining Taplines to tell us how the "Gentleman Brewer" handled his first few years at the helm of this storied brewery is Dave Burkhart, a three-decade Anchor employee, the author of "The Anchor Brewing Story," and a personal friend of Fritz's to this very day. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

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Previous Episode

Solving the PBR Paradox

Pabst Blue Ribbon has been sold in these United States since the late 1800s. It's fine, nothing special. But around the turn of the 21st century, something... changed. People started drinking PBR. Like, cool people, and a lot of PBR. What happened next would become the stuff of brewing industry lore, as this middling lager basked in the word-of-mouth indie sleaze cachet that big corporate beer brands would kill for. Joining Taplines today is Steve "Stix" Nilsen. These days, he's the vice president of "cult indoctrination" at Liquid Death, but from 2009 to 2018, he was part of the lifestyle marketing team at Pabst tasked with boosting Blue Ribbon’s bona fides in the scene — like, *every* scene — without going bust. It’s PBR, it’s Stix Nilsen, it’s the Blue Ribbon hipster halo, and it’s right here right now, on VinePair’s Taplines. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

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Next Episode

The End of the Light Beer Wars

Don’t call it a comeback, listener, but today Maureen Ogle is making her triumphant Taplines return to take us back to the frontlines of the Light Beer Wars, that ferocious 20th-century struggle for swill-based supremacy between America’s emerging macrobrewers. After talking about how Philip Morris and the Original Lite Beer from Miller hit the brewing industry like a less-filling freight train in the mid-’70s in our first outing, this episode is all about the second half of the conflict, after Schlitz went down swinging, and big bad Anheuser-Busch got involved in earnest. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

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