Anchor Brewing Company label die
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) label die
label: Description (Brief)
content: Metal die for creating labels that would be applied to a beer bottle.
label: Description
content: This metal die was used to make the label for the beers produced by San Francisco, California’s Anchor Brewing Company. When designing a label for the first time in 1968, former Anchor owner Fritz Maytag III based the label’s signature horizontal oval shape on the oval labels of Sapporo beer (rotated 90 degrees) that he had encountered when traveling in Japan in 1959. “I purposely made our Anchor Steam package very, very plain,” Maytag explained in a 2017 oral history. “[A]s I began to study the packaging [of beers on the market], I took a lot of the beers we were gonna compete with and I lined them all up. And it was obvious to me that they were all trying to look like champagne,” with shiny foil and embellished labels. Maytag designed his Anchor Steam Beer label to look very different, predicting that simplicity would communicate authenticity. “It was flat, it was common, it looked like we didn’t know what we were doing. Just [a] real little brewery that didn’t even know how to do packaging. It just made beer. And it worked.” He also filled the neck label with text—“so small that many people couldn’t read it. ... [I]t sends a message that ... this beer has a story.”
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
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: 2023.0113.30
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.30
objectType: label: Object Name
content: die
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: metal (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 1/4 in x 3 1/2 in x 2 1/2 in; 10.795 cm x 8.89 cm x 6.35 cm