Sometimes two books with nothing in common turn out to share a character. Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses (2005) is a sweeping history of civilization told through beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola. Bo Burlingham’s Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big (2005) profiles businesses that deliberately turned down rapid growth. The link between them is a man named Fritz Maytag.
Beer at the dawn of civilization
Standage begins with beer, which he argues helped shape the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Grain could be stored and brewed. Beer was safer to drink than much of the water. Workers were partly paid in it. Some of the earliest writing records beer rations. One Sumerian hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing, is in effect a recipe.
A brewer who chose to stay small
Fritz Maytag, an heir to the Maytag appliance family, bought a struggling San Francisco brewery called Anchor in 1965. He rescued it, revived its traditional “steam beer” and is widely credited with helping start America’s craft beer movement. He also kept Anchor relatively small and focused on quality, which is why Burlingham included it in Small Giants.
Maytag’s curiosity extended to history. In the late 1980s Anchor worked with researchers to brew a beer based on that ancient Sumerian hymn, an attempt to taste what Mesopotamians might have drunk.
What happened next
Maytag sold Anchor in 2010. Japan’s Sapporo bought it in 2017 and closed the brewery in 2023, a blow to San Francisco. In 2024 Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of the yogurt company Chobani, bought Anchor’s assets and pledged to revive it. If he succeeds, one of the oldest stories in brewing, which reaches back to Mesopotamia, will get another chapter.
Sources: Tom Standage, Wikipedia; Anchor Brewing Company, Wikipedia; Hamdi Ulukaya Acquires Anchor Brewing Company, Business Wire; Ninkasi, Wikipedia.
