Anchor Steam Beer beer bottle
date: label: date made
content: 2000
name: label: maker
content: Anchor Brewing Co.
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) beer bottle
label: Description (Brief)
content: Co-branded Anchor Steam Beer and Windows 2000 beer bottle. Brown bottle with blue cap and yellow labels. Brown bottle with blue cap and yellow label around the center. "Anchor Steam Beer" "Made in San Francisco since 1896". Yellow label around the neck: "Microsoft Windows" " Windows 2000: Developed in 130 distinct dialects of 23 different languages at 300,000 corporate sites, in 50 different countries. Feb. 17, 2000: Windows 2000 launched in San Francisco." "The Windows 2000 team was compromised of 5000 people. 90,000 email messages were generated by the team each day. Each build was tested on 1200 different computers." Blue and white label on the reverse of the bottle: "Microsoft Windows 2000" "Bottled to Celebrate the Release of Windows 2000" "San Francisco, February 17th, 2000"
label: Description
content: This 7-oz. bottle of Anchor Steam Beer were commissioned by Microsoft from Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, California, to celebrate Microsoft’s release of the Windows 2000 operating system. At the time, Anchor Brewing Co. did not yet have a website.
label: Description
content: Nevertheless, Anchor’s owner, Fritz Maytag III, was an early enthusiast of the home computer and saw many parallels between microbrewing and home computing. As Maytag explained in a 2017 oral history, “I had one of the very first Apple II’s, long before I knew Steve [Jobs] I had an Apple II, and we had used it at the brewery and I was very aware of the whole…micro-computer world. IBM was…the big guys, and Apple was making little computers for little guys like us. But we were just real people and we had our own computers. Years later there was a program on PBS, talked about the earliest, the Microsoft, Apple, Steve Jobs and Gates....[T]he little committee [of] people that used to meet...one of their names was the Steam Beer Club because after these meetings they would go over to The Oasis and drink Anchor Steam….I realized how fortunate we were that these guys literally brought the computer right into our house. Until then, computers were mysterious things that the government had, or IBM, or General Motors, or something, but suddenly we had one. And we could program it. And we could hit return and it would do things, and we learned what it was, right in the living room.”
label: Description
content: In 1965, Fritz Maytag III had 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
place: label: place made
content: United States: California, San Francisco
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: 2023.0113.09
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.09
objectType: label: Object Name
content: bottle, beer
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: glass (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 7 1/2 in x 2 in; 19.05 cm x 5.08 cm