Anchor Brewing Company sample dipper
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) sample dipper
label: Description (Brief)
content: Wooden-handled sample dipper with copper end shaped like a pot with a small spout.
label: Description
content: Brewers at Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, California, used this tool to remove samples of beer from the copper kettles in the brewery’s brewhouse. The tool was stored hanging on a wall hook in the brewhouse, next to a long-handled, wood mash paddle. Former Anchor owner Fritz Maytag III designed the brewery to feature the brewhouse, its brewers, and their tools as the visible heart of the brewery.
label: Description
content: In a 2017 oral history, Maytag 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 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: 2023.0113.02
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.02
objectType: label: Object Name
content: dipper, sample
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 71 in x 7 in; 180.34 cm x 17.78 cm