Floor Tile from Anchor Brewing Company
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) floor tile
label: Description (Brief)
content: Blue square floor tile.
label: Description
content: This blue tile is a sample of the tiles that covered the floor of the brewhouse in San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company. The color is a custom “Anchor blue,” the same color of the anchor featured on the label for Anchor Steam Beer.
label: Description
content: In a 2017 oral history, former brewery owner Fritz Maytag III described, “When you come up those stairs and walk in, you see the brewhouse…right there. And you see the offices all around the brewhouse. When we did that, we moved in in August of ’79, there was no brewery in the world even remotely like that. We put the place where we make the stuff right in the middle of the people managing the company. And we tried to focus everything we could on this floor in the building, so that all of the employees would be constantly seeing each other…. Everybody that was in managing the company sat here right around the brewhouse, looking at each other through the windows, and it was all very intentional that we were proud of what we did….I used to say when…they [visitors] come in that door I want them to fall down because it looks like you had dreamed that somewhere in the world a brewery would look [like this].”
label: Description
content: In 1965, Maytag purchased the historic but struggling Steam Beer Brewing Company (later, Anchor Brewing Company). With his entrepreneurial roots and zeal for science, Maytag revitalized the brewery. He perfected the brewery’s recipe for steam beer, an effervescent style that had originated in nineteenth-century San Francisco, and brewed European styles—porter, barleywine, pale ale—then unfamiliar to many Americans. As a self-taught brewer and savvy entrepreneur, Maytag inspired many who dreamed of opening their own small breweries. Historians consider Anchor Brewing Company to have been the first post-Prohibition American microbrewery. Microbreweries, brewpubs, and “craft” breweries proliferated throughout the nation in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. In August 2023, Sapporo USA liquidated Anchor Brewing Company.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Food Technology
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Anchor Brewing Company through Mike Minami
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2023.0113.27
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.27
objectType: label: Object Name
content: tile, floor
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 6 in x 6 in; 15.24 cm x 15.24 cm