Starting with a tumble-down plant and a vision of "the perfect beer," Fritz Maytag proved that even in an industry dominated by giants, small can be beautiful.
It is 6:15 a.m. as president and master brewer Fritz Maytag comes downstairs from his tiny apartment on top of the Anchor Brewing Co. building to check his Christmas ale. At 45, after 17 years of making, selling, living, and dreaming beer, the vision of his own brewery still enchants him. Office, brewhouse, quality control lab, and taproom, each opens on to the others, a vista of varnished oak walls and spotless glass partitions around the three giant burnished copper kettles: It is magic to him.
The spires of downtown San Francisco, a mile away, are bathed in Friday's pre-dawn darkness, but Anchor has been awake for an hour. The joy of the small businessman, Maytag tells friends, is in being the head of a chicken, not the tail of an elephant. His great-grandfather built Maytag Co.; Fritz built a brewery. It was Fritz's capital and imagination, his product development, package concept, market plan, and management strategy. It was his single-minded devotion that disproved the assumption that there was no place in the industry for the small brewer.
Measured by the numbers -- more than $3 million in sales with a volume of 28,500 barrels a year -- Anchor Brewing is but a tiny drop in the $30 billion, 177 million-barrel U.S. brewing oeean. Anchor produces less each year than the industry's two giants -- 40.3 million-barrel Miller Brewing Co. and 54.3 million-barrel Anheuser-Busch Cos. -- brew in a few hours.
But Anchor Steam is considered the beer of connoisseurs. It was the grand prize winner of New West magazine's 1977 taste test and was labeled the "Rolls Royce" of American beers by Joseph Owades, director of the Center for Brewing Studies, and "The Best Beer in America" by Quest magazine.
While the accomplishments were Maytag's, the burdens were his as well. For 10 years he fought to make the company profitable. With the business barely out of the red, an initially unfinanced multimilliondollar expansion pushed him harrowingly close to bankruptcy. Then came illness, the death of a son, the end of his marriage. He felt like a rubberband stretched too far; his natural resiliency nearly gave out. Today, high brown shoes scuffed, collar stays forgotten, he still looks less the middleaged scion of privilege that he is than a barefoot boy from the Midwest grown tall and rugged, ruddy from the outdoors. But the signs of age are visible. His brown hair is tinged with silver. Furrows cross his forehead. He laughs less than he did once, more often now in irony.
This year, he has told his full-time staff of 11 people, will be his sabbatical. He is going to step away from the business, assess his past, and plan a future. Today he could fly down to Los Angeles and see his horses, perhaps, or take the Dulci Bella, the little boat he keeps on a trailer beneath the brewhouse, out for a sail. He has told himself repeatedly that after 17 years he owes himself something more than an obsession with the business.
Nevertheless, this morning, like most, finds him at the brewery, coffee cup in hand, sleeves rolled up, watching through his thick rimless glasses as the plant goes to work. Although he knows he is not really needed -- his people can run the operation; he taught them himself -- he is still drawn there, captured by the promise of the packed cases rolling off the bottling line, the mystery of brewing, and his eagerness to check the Christmas ale.
The Christmas ale is his special favorite, brewed but once a year. He concocts the formula and designs the label. Last year's, he thought, was a failure -- too sweet, too easy for people to like. It sold like hot-cakes. This year's will be different, as bitter and rich as the ales of tradition. "I know I could sell more if I made the product less shocking," Maytag says, "but the idea is to surprise people."
Maytag has been surprising people since 1965, when he paid about $5,000 for the controlling interest and debt of a failing brewery. At the time, Anchor was brewing only 600 barrels a year for a mere 10 or 12 customers. But Maytag had a prescience of a market beyond a few nostalgic bar owners. Imported beers began selling in San Francisco well before they became significant nationally. He saw his contemporaries moving away from the light, bland, undistinguished froth that was becoming the national norm to buy European beers instead, both for the flavor and for the image of sophistication. He would brew for them cognoscenti and status-seekers alike. His beer would be rich and thick, heavily hopped and bitter, unique among American malts.
He decided not to use the standard approaches of selling a lot of beer at a small margin, taking advantage of economies of scale in production, and building brand loyalty with a massive advertising campaign. Instead, he would follow a family precept -- "make better, not more" -- selling a little handmade beer at a high price and letting its reputation spread by word of mouth.
Today Fritz Maytag has become, in the words of one small brewer, "the father of the microbrewery movement." Just as restless attorneys and tired corporate warriors dreamed of opening a restaurant in the '60s and of starting a winery in the '70s, many dream in the '80s of their own brewery. Like the microwineries that mushroomed up around the industry giants, selling traditional methods and the personal touch, microbreweries are springing up, all trying to follow the path that Maytag cleared (see box, page 38).
"Hey, what's the deal with this ale?" Maytag asks his general manager, Gordon MacDermott, peering into the fermenting room. Instead of the two batches he expected, there is only one at work in the shallow stainless steel pans, the yeast forming a rich cappuccino-like froth as it turns the sugar to alcohol.
"We lost one, Fritz," says MacDermott. Although both batches were brewed in exactly the same way, the breakdown of the malt enzymes from starch to sugar was incomplete in the second. "We'll have to brew again."
"Isn't that weird," Maytag marvels. "So whose paycheck gets docked for this?" His face is solemn for a moment, then he and MacDermott both break into grins. Maybe the ale could have been saved. They could have added an enzyme or two, or blended the two batches together, but everyone at Anchor knows Maytag's feelings about quality control. Regardless of the cost or the work involved, he thinks dumping an occasional batch is good for morale, a reminder that he won't compromise.
Brewing is an art, not a science, after all, more alchemy than chemistry, Maytag believes. "You don't make beer," he says. "You get everything together as best you can. Then you let the beer make itself." That is the magic.
The bottling line looks just as Maytag imagined it when he first began dreaming of the perfect brewery. To make it a pleasant place to work, he had it built against an east wall so the morning light could stream in. To please his own aesthetic sense, he designed the ease conveyor to run beneath the floor, neatly and without clutter, rather than hang over the bottlers' heads. He likes to stand and watch, to listen as the bottling line clanks and jars up to speed.
