USA, CA: Anchor Brewing to expand

After years of running in place, with production hovering around 90,000 barrels a year, Anchor Brewing Co. is growing again, The Washington Post reported on August, 6.

Brewmaster Mark Carpenter says Anchor should produce 110,000 barrels in 2012, a company record. The brewery has added four 290-barrel cellaring tanks, and two more are on their way. Carpenter says a second brewery is an inevitability, although he adds it won’t necessarily be an East Coast branch of the sort Sierra Nevada and New Belgium are constructing.

Appliance heir Fritz Maytag rescued the San Francisco brewery from oblivion in 1965 and built it into the model of a modern craft brewery, augmenting the flagship brand, Anchor Steam, with Liberty Ale, Old Foghorn Barleywine and other trailblazing beers. Maytag, however, sold the brewery in 2010 to an investment firm called the Griffin Group.

“Fritz wanted to have a brewery small enough so he could know everyone, a single-shift, five-day-a-week operation. He wanted to have a business where he’d like to work,” Carpenter comments on the change in corporate philosophy.

The new owners, best known for turning Skyy Vodka into a multimillion dollar brand, “have as long a vision as Fritz had.” That vision involves growing the Anchor brand to keep pace with newer, more ambitious breweries.

The new ownership has given Carpenter the go-ahead to experiment with new beers, including his Zymaster series of single-batch, draft-only brews. Mark’s Mild is the second entry in the series. The first was a California lager of the sort San Francisco brewers might have crafted back in the 1870s. Carpenter hasn’t settled on a formula for the next Zymaster beer, but he says it will be “highly hopped and higher in alcohol,” and will appear in October about the same time as the Great American Beer Festival.

07 August, 2012