 Thank you. While it's true, I did interview brewery owners all around the country and getting their stories that that is only fitting today for Litquake to read from a chapter on San Francisco's own anchor seam. It was started in 1896, but saved by Fritz Maytag in 1965. The name Maytag, yes, it's the same one that you find on your washing machines and for any true files in the audience same as on your Maytag blue. When his father Fred passed away in 1962, Fritz was still out in California. Growing up, he was not expected nor expecting to take over the appliance company. He explained that though his family held a fair amount, Maytag Corp was publicly owned. Quote, I'm extremely grateful nobody ever pressured me into feeling as though I had a heritage that I had to accept. When I was a boy, I never even thought of that. The dairy farm, that's a little different, I guess. Our family had this magical little business in that it interested me. Bacteria, yeast, and mold, all kinds of good stuff in there. So even from his boyhood, the blue cheese factory exposed Fritz to the chemistry of fermentation. Sitting with him, a man just entering his 70s, I could see him traveling back in time, revisiting his youth. Suddenly in front of me set momentarily young Fritz recounting experiments in his basement lab with the Baushanlam compound oil immersion microscope that his dad's friend had given him. As he grew up and through high school in Stanford, the microscope accompanied him wherever he went. Even today, he said, as if warping through time back to the present, I just get a thrilling feeling looking through a catalog of chemical apparatus. Reminding myself that he had attended university before the movie Animal House, I couldn't exactly ask about toga parties, but I still believe that college kids in the 50s partied even once who toted around microscopes. Fritz unexpectedly stated, I wasn't a great beer lover. Then he recounted a parable as jolting as if you heard your grandfather tell you that one should listen to popular music for the messages in the lyrics, or that sex is solely for procreation, and you wonder if it's merely his wholesome naivete, or if the good old days could have really been that simple. Quote, I drink beer like almost every young person does, because I didn't want to get drunk in social situations. You know, college students don't sit around drinking whiskey because you can't talk philosophy and drink a lot of whiskey. You can talk all night and drink beer if you don't drink the whole lot. I was at a loss. Then he proffered a delightful understatement or admonishment, depending on the audience. Beer is an ideal social interchange beverage. That's how he got started in his little experiment. I wanted to also jump ahead to Anchor's present. I asked if he had a brewmaster, or someone he's been grooming to take over, but I got a better story out of him. I'm the brewmaster. I have a wonderful man who's been with me since 1971, Mark Carpenter, in charge of production. I make a point of not giving up the title. Fritz explained that he feels strongly that in the small company there's a terrible danger that the manager could become uncertain about the product, lose the creativity, and the company would suffer as a result. Quote, I saw those old regional breweries where the owners, my acquaintances, knew nothing about brewing. In his rich Iowa accent, he continued, they were afraid and unable to go into the brew house and say, now look, everybody, I'm tired of this boring logger that we're trying to sell for less than Bush Bavarian. And I can't tell it apart, frankly. I want to make something interesting. I want to make something dark and hoppy, said Fritz theatrically, much to my merriment. Realizing he had given this caricature of a brewery owner a bit too much credit, he interjected, I didn't meet anyone who knew what dry hopping was, but let's just say he read about it somewhere. I silently went along with his supposition, bidding him to continue. His brewmaster would say, we can't do that. We can't have two yeasts in our brewery. It might get mixed up and ruin our wonderful flavorless logger. These guys were unable to go into the brew house and tell Otto what they wanted to do. So Fritz is in the brew house. Though he was cracking me up and the day grew colder, I knew Fritz had a million other things to do. I asked for his final thoughts, maybe what sort of legacy he felt he would leave behind. He said somberly, I'm most proud of the fact that our little brewery has succeeded by obeying the law. Most people would think I'm weird when I say that, but you see, the alcoholic beverage business is highly regulated. You could say, gee, I don't like regulation. Okay, but the law is the law. There's a stop sign over there, and if you watch it for a few hours, you'll be astonished at the way people drive nowadays by running stop signs. Fritz referred to what is known locally as the California roll, and I confessed to you, but I didn't to him that I've received that ticket. He continued, they say that's the law, but I'm so important and I'm in such a hurry, I could get away with it. And that's the way a lot of people in the beer business act. But we've tried very, very hard to follow the letter and spirit of the law. We don't do what other people do. I call it hanky-panky, but it's criminal. When Fritz first got started in the beer business, his sentiment was, gosh, we're going to make alcohol. Alcohol causes harm. It also causes a lot of good. People joke about beer guys being crooks. Could I possibly have to be a crook? It's not easy. We lose accounts every day to people who are fudging. Who'd want to lose an anchor account? I asked in shock. Oh, you'd be surprised. It's a tough world out there. Almost as surprising is that in a region imbued with free spiritedness and characterized by its granola past and silicon present, one midwesterner has remained so true to his roots.