Prior to 1848, not too many folks had heard of San Francisco. There were just a thousand people living here. San Francisco, in fact, had only been part of the United States for a few years, after Mexico decided to hand it over at the barrel of a gun in 1846. The city was sparsely populated, thinly developed, and had an appalling shortage of breweries.

My what a difference a little gold can make. In 1848, the precious metal was found to the east of San Francisco, and the population exploded. In 1849, the first brewery in California was established and San Francisco immediately became much more livable. So much so, that by 1850, there were fifty thousand people here.

They worked hard in the hills and in the shipyards. And when they came back from a long day, they all had a mind to quench their thirsts with flavorful brews.

Golden Age
People can’t live like hooligans forever, unfortunately. Eventually they want to settle down, have families, raise kids, and drink good beer.

In the decades following the initial gold discovery, the population of San Francisco grew and diversified. Families came from across the country and across the world, softening the character of the city. By the 1880s, conditions were ripe for a brewing explosion: commercial refrigeration had become widely available, the city was growing, and San Francisco’s new designation as the banking center of the West meant investment opportunities were nearly endless. Also, there were well over six hundred saloons in the city.

Begin the Golden Age.

Or the English, German, and Irish Age. Despite the diversity of immigrants pouring into San Francisco, the brewing industry at the turn of the nineteenth century came to be dominated by our friends from across the pond.

German immigrant John Weiland typifies the story of these völken (folks). Eventually settling in San Francisco, he took over the Philadelphia Brewing Company in 1856, changing the name to John Weiland Brewery, creating a brewery success that would last until 1920. Throughout the city, brewing styles and products that originated in Europe cropped up: hefeweizen (wheat beer); bocks and dünkelbiers; and India pale ales that originated in the British Empire (a special brew for homesick Britons in India).

That isn’t to say that Americans were out of the game. John Burnell, trained in London, came to San Francisco at the age of nineteen. He built a castle in what is now Hunters Point, and started the Albion Porter and Ale Brewery in 1874. Burnell stored his beer in casks in the recesses of the castle, behind three-foot walls, claiming that his ales didn’t reach their full potential unless they had been aged for two years.

Old World know-how merged with American ingenuity to turn San Francisco into a brewing mecca on the West Coast. By 1890, there were over twenty-four breweries in the city limits, including St. Louis Brewery at Larkin and Polk, Pabst Brewing Company at Taylor Street, and Union Brewing at Eighteenth and Florida Street.

In 1896, one of San Francisco’s best-known breweries came into being — Anchor, created by German immigrants Ernst F. Baruth and his son-in-law, Otto Schinkel, Jr. Rather than adopt the brewing practices of the fatherland, they decided to continue the San Francisco tradition, making steam beer. (This decision, history has shown, was a good one.)

An Earthquake & Prohibition
In the early morning of April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake rocked the city by the bay. The quake, the deadliest in United States history, was followed by a massive fire that burnt most of the city to the ground. Many of the breweries damaged by the fire never reopened their doors.

In the years after the quake, San Francisco’s brewers struggled to recover from the quake and absorption by conglomerates. And a more sinister threat loomed: prohibition. In the early twentieth century, many states throughout the country enacted total bans on alcohol.

Brewers from other states moved their operations to California, believing that the good-time–loving people of the state would never agree to prohibition. They were wrong. Nationwide prohibition, which began on January 16, 1920, was the last straw for many of San Francisco’s breweries. Though San Francisco was one of laxest enforcers of prohibition, large breweries had difficulty remaining in operation.

The Golden Age was over.

Rebirth
Well through the middle of the twentieth century, San Francisco, as with the rest of the United States, wallowed in a dearth of options for quality beers. Brewers in the city turned to other means of survival, and even after prohibition was repealed, a great deal of beer-making knowledge had been lost or forgotten.

For most of the twentieth century, San Francisco was in beer decline. At one point in America’s great beer slump, there were only fifty-one breweries in the entire country.

Washing machine money had a hand in reversing this distressing trend. Fritz Maytag, of the washing machine Maytags, tasted an Anchor Steam at North Beach’s famous Spaghetti Factory and was entranced. In 1965, he bought the company and immediately went to work revitalizing its operations. It took nearly ten years to clean up and get Anchor in order. In 1971, a little over one hundred years after the original Anchor set up shop, the first modern Anchor Steam was bottled. The result was one of America’s first successful craft beer ventures.

In the decades following, a quiet revolution was fought, with small breweries and craft beer-makers springing up in the greater Bay Area. Now, San Francisco is home to a thriving brewing culture (see the SF BEER WEEK insert for some more contemporary history).

Mark Twain has been quoted as saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. For San Francisco and brewing, these words could not ring truer. As in the past, we are seeing a resurgence of local, neighborhood breweries creating delicious brews in small batches. We are seeing ingenuity and craft and quality over quantity. It’s the Golden Age all over again, but this time, without the dysentery.