PINtPRESSEssay24 May 2026 · UK trade · Industry

Anchor Brewing's British heritage runs deeper than people realise

An October 1975 Yorkshire pub tour, two signature beers, a set of borrowed Fuller's kegs, and what a return to UK taps would actually depend on.

Anchor Brewing's revival is no longer rumour. Production paperwork is filed, the brewhouse is steaming, and Hamdi Ulukaya's two-year-old acquisition has moved into pre-production. The American coverage is largely focused on what kind of Anchor returns. We've covered that elsewhere.

This piece is about something the American coverage tends to skip: how thoroughly English Anchor's identity actually was. Two of its signature beers came home from a single October 1975 tour, and the hop that defined American IPA is part English by descent. The format of America's defining craft beer festival was lifted from CAMRA. Anchor first reached British draught in 1991 in Fuller's own kegs, and a specialist Halifax distributor kept it there for fifteen years after. None of which guarantees a return to UK taps in 2026 or 2027. But it changes what a return would actually mean.

The 1975 Yorkshire trip

In October 1975, Fritz Maytag, his operations manager Gordon MacDermott, and the photographer Lars Speyer, whom brewery historian David Burkhart calls "the intrepid California trio", toured British breweries to study how pale ale was actually made. The Brewers' Society supplied the list of brewers; all of them agreed to see him. The itinerary, per Burkhart (p.138): Young's Ram Brewery in Wandsworth, then Wadworth in Devizes, then Donnington in Gloucestershire (Claude Arkell's family brewery), then Marston's Burton Union system, then Samuel Smith's Yorkshire Squares in Tadcaster, and finally the one that haunted them most: Timothy Taylor at Knowle Spring Brewery in Keighley, West Yorkshire. (The same independent Yorkshire family brewer whose Golden Best is one of England's surviving pale milds.)

Maytag wrote afterwards to Taylor's head brewer, a Mr. Hey: "Your bottled Ale was the finest we tasted in England… In our mind Timothy Taylor stands out as the very model of a perfect small brewery." Maytag has long cited Landlord as an inspiration for Liberty Ale, and Pete Brown records it in the Oxford Companion to Beer. The dates complicate the simple version of that story. Liberty Ale was Brew #48 of 1975, and Fritz took its brew date from Longfellow: 18 April 1975, the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride, six months before the trio set foot in Keighley. The first one was not an English beer in disguise either. There was no Cascade left in the brewery, so Fritz used the Hallertau he had plenty of; the ale yeast came from Genesee in Rochester, the only American brewer then running a true top-fermenting strain; and it was dry-hopped for two months in a 52°F cellar.

But Burkhart notes something easy to skim past: the first brew was not all-malt, and subsequent brews would be. Liberty Ale changed after 1975. So both things can be true. Maytag named Landlord, and Landlord came too late to have started the beer. If Taylor shaped Liberty Ale, it shaped what the beer became rather than what it was.

The other English thread in Liberty Ale runs through the hop. Cascade, bred at the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station in Corvallis, USDA accession 56013, first selected in 1956, has English Fuggle in its pedigree, crossed with a male hop itself descended from the Russian Serebrianka and a Fuggle seedling. Cascade had made its Anchor debut by accident: a single bale used in Brew #22 of Steam Beer on 8 March 1974, logged by Phil Canevari as "mistakenly used in brewing, but not with adverse effects". The hop that would define an entire American genre was itself partly English, and it found its way into Anchor's ale by way of a mix-up rather than a plan.

Two beers, one trip

Fritz puts the descent plainly: "The Christmas Ale and Old Foghorn were the product of the trip we took to England in 1975." Two beers, named by the man who brewed them, and Liberty Ale is not among them. Anchor's first Our Special Ale, what UK drinkers came to know simply as Anchor Christmas Ale, was Brew #151, put down on 17 November 1975 under the working title "2nd L.A.": a second Liberty Ale. Burkhart's account of its conception is emphatic about what it was not: "not anything at all like Ballantine's Burton Ale, Koch's Holiday Ale, or Noche Buena." It would be all-malt and dry-hopped, with "a novel, distinctly American twist": 100% Cascade in place of the Hallertau, the hop already proving itself in Anchor Steam. Fritz bristled at "Season's Greetings", vintage-dated the bottles like wine, wished his customers a plain "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year", sold it only at the brewery, and until 1987 shipped blank die-cut neck labels so people could write their own greeting and glue it on by hand. The label went to the ATF on 12 December and was approved in three days; the first Our Special Ale was bottled on 16 December 1975 at 6.5%. It came out slightly hazy, which Burkhart puts down to the Cascade, and Siebel's tasting panel, all eight of them, called it "robust and hoppy, with above average bitterness and afterbitter", giving Fritz his first A+. The English inheritance here is the occasion, not the beer. Fritz knew about dry-hopping, he says, "from our Liberty Ale, although with the exception of a very few draught ales in England it was no longer done, and those very lightly"; because that first Liberty Ale had not been all-malt, the Christmas Ale would be "the only all-malt and dry-hopped ale in the world, I think." The technique came from Anchor's own April brew, not from Yorkshire, and so did the hop. Old Foghorn, the brewery's barley wine, went into the kettle a week later, on 24 November 1975. Fritz had taken notes on barley wines at several English breweries, Marston's dry-hopped Owd Rodger above all. "A most unexpected result of my travels," he wrote to the Brewers' Society, "was that I fell in love with the wonderful Barley Wines." But Burkhart is careful here and so should we be: Old Foghorn, like Our Special Ale, "would not be brewed in imitation of anything" (p.142). The category came from England. The recipe did not. Two of Anchor's signature non-Steam beers were brewed within a week of each other in November 1975, a month after the trio came home. And what came home with them was not a set of recipes. Fritz returned, in Burkhart's phrase, "at once elated and very disappointed":

"We learned quickly that English brewing was not traditional at all, in the sense that they were all made with sugar. I never found out how they got that bitterness, but I'm quite sure they didn't get it from using a lot of hops. But we knew a lot about brewing by then and English ales were kind of a joke to us, just the way the English used to make fun of American beers. There's nothing wrong with either one of them."Fritz Maytag, in David Burkhart, The Anchor Brewing Story

Elsewhere he is more specific still: the trip "stunned us with the lack of traditional brewing — charming advertising sign at pubs, and charming 'cask conditioning' process by some brewers, but sugar and color and thin products." That is the assessment the tidy version of this story leaves out, and it is the one that makes sense of the rest. Anchor's all-malt creed predates England: Fritz had written to Esquire in 1974 that the brewery used "only malted barley, whole hops, yeast, and water… no additives, preservatives, or other '-ives'". What Yorkshire gave him was not a method but a conviction: "we came home," he says, "determined to do something really traditional and real and true." The new brew's working title was "2nd L.A.": a second Liberty Ale. It descends from Anchor's own April beer, and acquired its Christmas theme afterwards.

Christmas Ale became something particular over the years: a deliberately experimental annual beer with a fresh Jim Stitt-illustrated label and, less visibly, a fresh recipe. Fritz, in Burkhart's account: "Our theme for the Christmas Ale from the very beginning was not just that the label would change but that the brew would change. We did things that only a brewer would be interested in, but that a brewer would be very interested in. And we never mentioned it. We kept it a secret." By the late 2000s and early 2010s, The Rake in Borough Market, London's specialist beer shop, was, by reputation, among the UK bottle vendors that stocked multiple recent vintages of Anchor Christmas Ale side by side in their fridges. The annual American experiment had quietly become a small UK collector's ritual: an English-inspired beer made in San Francisco, shipped back to England, cellared by serious drinkers across years.

The borrowing went both ways at the institutional level too. The Great American Beer Festival, first held in 1982 and foundational to American craft beer ever since, was, per Burkhart, directly inspired by Charlie Papazian's experience at CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival. Anchor was one of only four microbreweries pouring at that inaugural 1982 GABF, alongside Boulder, River City, and Sierra Nevada. The signature American craft ritual, the festival itself, was, like Anchor's signature beers, a UK import.

How Anchor actually reached UK taps

That was the recipe and the ritual. The trade route is older than this piece first had it, and the first leg of it ran through Chiswick.

Jeffrey House recalls introducing Anthony Fuller to Fritz Maytag at a Thames America reception at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, San Francisco. He had founded Thames America Trading Company at the turn of 1980 to take Fuller's into the United States, and London Pride and ESB became American staples on the back of it, with ESB in particular acting as a blueprint for a generation of American brewers looking for something to aim at. His further suggestion was the one that mattered on this side of the water: fill Fuller's own 50-litre returnable kegs (about 13.2 US gallons) with Anchor's beers and send them back the way they had come.

The first shipment reached London in November 1991. Fuller's test-marketed it in three of its own pubs: the Mawson Arms at the brewery gate in Chiswick, the Dove in Hammersmith, and the Churchill Arms in Kensington. House remembers Anchor Steam, the Christmas Ale, or both, going on in those pubs that November and December: the first American craft beers poured on draught in Britain, and in Europe. Both other principals have since backed his account, Anthony Fuller in writing in August 2026 and Fritz Maytag, as House relays it, from his own recollection.

The printed record bears out the arrangement. Roger Protz’s chapter “The Beer Invasion”, in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide 1993 (p.19), says plainly who was carrying the range: “All Maytag’s beers are sold in Britain by Fuller’s. They include a porter, a remarkable barley wine called Old Foghorn and a Christmas Ale with a different specification each year. My favourite is the fruity Liberty Ale, with a massive hop aroma from the use of the home-grown Cascade strain.” Michael Jackson, in the Independent of 4 July 1992, wrote that “his Anchor Liberty Ale appears on draught in Britain today for the first time at the White Horse pub, Parson’s Green, Fulham, London”. The piece survives in Jackson’s own archive, the Beer Hunter Online Library at Oxford Brookes University. The two accounts sit comfortably together: House does not place Liberty in the Fuller’s trial, and the White Horse, a free house, could take Liberty from a distributor in its own right. Boak & Bailey's world beer timeline has bottled Anchor Steam at CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival as early as 1979, and Liberty Ale "available" by 1993. What is still to be found is a contemporaneous document for the 1991 shipment itself, such as a bill of lading, an invoice or a trade-press cutting, and neither Anthony Fuller nor Maytag recalls the Mark Hopkins evening. What isn't in question is the shape of it. The beer Maytag has always said Landlord inspired came back to England in Fuller's own kegs.

The return leg kept going, and the best-known chapter of it was written in Sheffield. House sees Liberty Ale as an important influence on Dave Wickett. The two read economics at the University of Sheffield, as House has it, though they never met.

Wickett was lecturing in economics at the polytechnic that is now Sheffield Hallam when he opened the Fat Cat in the Kelham Island district in 1981, and he sat on CAMRA's Economics Committee. He added the brewery in 1990. “I decided to add a brewery in 1990 on the day the government announced the Beer Orders and the guest beer policy, as I saw an opening for a small brewery,” he told Roger Protz in 2004. He had a transatlantic connection of his own by then as well, or said he did: he told Protz he had launched a brew-pub called the Old Toad in Rochester, New York State, and that it was “still brewing real ale to this day”.

Pale Rider was first brewed in 1993, from an original recipe House credits to Patrick Morton. Wickett told Protz that customers found his beer “too bitter and hoppy so I thought we’d try a beer that is full flavoured, with a good aroma but not too bitter”. Protz described the result as 5.2%, brewed only from pale malt and using American and German hops. It was named Champion Beer of Britain in 2004.

His influence ran on into Derbyshire. Thornbridge was, in Protz’s account, the brainchild of Jim Harrison and Simon Webster at Thornbridge Hall; Harrison loved Pale Rider and discussed setting up a brewery at the hall with Wickett’s support. The brewery hired two young brewers, Stefano Cossi and Martin Dickie, and Jaipur followed. Harrison told Protz that Wickett had said they needed “a beer that would turn people’s heads”, and that after one sip of Jaipur he called it “a world beater”.

When a group including Webster and Harrison stepped in to save Kelham Island from closure in 2022 and bring back Pale Rider, Webster put the debt plainly: “They were the reason we started the business. Theirs were the first beers we brewed and Dave Wickett was a guiding hand in the early days of Thornbridge.”

House put the question to two beer writers, and both answered in the affirmative. On 12 October 2026 he asked Roger Protz whether Liberty Ale had been influential in Britain’s pale-and-hoppy movement, and whether it must have been for Wickett, Pale Rider and Jaipur. Protz’s reply was two words: “Very influential.” He put a narrower question to Aaron Gore, an Advanced Cicerone who writes as The Ale Chaser: did Liberty Ale influence Dave Wickett and his use of Cascade hops? Gore’s answer was yes, and he gave it in his own words with the reason he would not put it more strongly attached: “that would be overstating it, as I don’t have enough direct contact with Dave to confirm. But that is my understanding, correct.” He approved the quotation, caveat and all, for this piece.

Protz’s two words answered a question that bundled the movement with Wickett, Pale Rider and Jaipur. On Wickett himself he points to Yorkshire: in the same correspondence he named Timothy Taylor’s Landlord as Wickett’s major influence and said he did not recall Wickett discussing American beers with him, and his 2004 profile gives Landlord as Wickett’s inspiration when he started. It leaves a neat symmetry: the Yorkshire beer Maytag credited for Liberty Ale is the one Protz records as Wickett’s own.

Cascade was in Jaipur from the beginning, and the brewers said at the time what they were copying. Jonny Garrett, writing for Good Beer Hunting in October 2020, has the two brewers, Martin Dickie and Stefano Cossi, given free rein once the early contract brews for Kelham Island were out of the way, and setting out “inspired by Wickett’s beers and their own experience of American craft brewing”, using American hops at low strengths for a British drinker. That plan lasted until the summer, when they had a 6% American IPA in tank, saturated with Cascade, Chinook, Ahtanum and Simcoe, and poured it at a garden party at the hall. It went down well enough to be named after the city where Jim Harrison had married, and Dickie told Garrett what they had been after: “Jaipur was the first one where we tried to mimic the American IPA.” That is the brewer’s own account of the intention, and it dates the hop to the first batch rather than to a current ingredient list.

Pete Brown, quoted in the same piece, puts the beer at the start of everything that followed: “For me, Jaipur was the start of the British craft brewing scene. BrewDog brought the attitude, the packaging, the language, but Thornbridge were the trailblazers.”

Cascade, the hop Protz singled out in Liberty Ale, is in all three beers as they are brewed now. Pale Rider, as Thornbridge sells it today, lists Chinook, Willamette, Crystal and Cascade. Jaipur lists Chinook, Centennial, Ahtanum, Simcoe, Columbus and Cascade. From Thornbridge, the brewery Wickett guided in its early days, Martin Dickie went on to become one of the founders of BrewDog, and BrewDog’s own recipe book, DIY Dog, calls the original Punk IPA “James and Martin's original take on an American IPA”. Its recipe for Punk IPA 2010 - Current, first brewed in October 2010, puts Cascade in the dry hop alongside Chinook, Ahtanum, Simcoe, Nelson Sauvin and Amarillo; the original Punk IPA 2007 - 2010 used Ahtanum, Chinook, Crystal and Motueka, without Cascade. Garrett arrives at the same place from the other direction: Punk, he writes, started with a similar malt and hop bill to Jaipur, set apart by the New Zealand hop Motueka.

So the link from Liberty Ale to Wickett’s own brewing rests on Gore’s understanding, on Protz’s judgement of Liberty Ale’s influence on the movement Wickett led, and on a hop that is in all three beers. What the record does not hold is Wickett’s own word on it, or any note of who chose Cascade for which recipe.

The yeast crossed too. At the 1983 KQED Beer & Cider Festival in San Francisco, Thames brought over polypins of cask-conditioned Fuller's beer, and a polypin of cask beer contains live yeast by definition. House says those were London Pride vessels, which matters more than it sounds. John Keeling, who joined Fuller's in 1981 and was its head brewer from 1999 until 2017, says the brewery propagated one house yeast from London Pride fermentations and pitched it into Pride, ESB and Chiswick Bitter alike. Whatever was alive in those polypins was the yeast Fuller's used for everything. Wyeast Laboratories wrote in September 2023 that their 1968 London ESB Ale strain had been isolated for the Wyeast Culture Collection thirty years earlier. Where that sample was first collected, and its link to the 1983 polypins, are still being researched. How a yeast catalogued as Fuller's came to ferment Firestone Walker's beers is the subject of our companion piece, Why Firestone Walker chose Fuller's yeast. But a live English brewing yeast was standing on a trestle table in San Francisco in 1983, which is its own kind of freight.

The traffic ran in the tanks as well as the kegs. Wyeast’s own history of strain 1272, American Ale II, has it coming from “a mixed morphology yeast originating from Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco, California”. While Fuller’s yeast was going west in a polypin, Anchor’s was going into a yeast bank in Oregon.

Fifteen years on, the route had a new owner. From the mid-to-late 2000s, Anchor was imported into the UK by James Clay & Sons, the Halifax specialist distributor whose roster reads like a careful drinker's reference library: Brooklyn, Victory and Flying Dog from the American side; the full Trappist line (Orval, Chimay, Westmalle, Rochefort, La Trappe); the German heritage names (Schlenkerla, Schneider Weisse, Erdinger). By the mid-2010s, the relationship was visibly mature: James Clay's 2016 catalogue listed seven core Anchor beers, with Anchor Steam available on 20-litre American Sankey-coupler kegs alongside bottles. Steam on UK draught was a real, if quiet, thing.

Not many pubs poured it, but the ones that did were the right ones. The trade reputation that Steam "didn't travel well" was a quality argument about what arrived in the glass, not an availability constraint. The British beer writer Des de Moor reported a working theory for why Anchor bothered with UK exports at all despite the modest volumes: partly to keep commercial use of the trademarked "Steam Beer" mark active in international markets. Mark Carpenter, Anchor's brewmaster through most of the modern era, was known to admire English session-drinking culture.

What 2023 broke. What still works.

The 2023 closure took the UK line with it. There was nothing left to import. James Clay's American roster shrank by one of its anchor names, pun semi-intended, and Anchor's quiet UK draught presence stopped being a draught presence at all.

But the trade infrastructure that brought Anchor over didn't go anywhere. In November 2025, the same Halifax distributor became the launch partner for Augustiner Helles on UK draught, rebuilding a different cult-status premium beer's UK trade route with characteristic exacting cellar terms: 4°C cellars, wide-bore lines, 100% CO₂ top pressure, mechanical line cleaning. Those terms filter the accepted-venue list to operators that are independent, careful, and committed; six months on, the British venues pouring Augustiner are a small, identifiable network of beer-led pubs across London, Manchester, Newcastle, Luton, and Glasgow. A returning Anchor could slot back into a known network of UK landlords already running similar product, with a distributor who has done it before.

So will it come back?

Whether Ulukaya's team rebuilds UK shelf or draught presence isn't a question they've answered publicly. A brewery rebuilding its core American distribution first, and the COLAs filed so far are for the US market, has a long list of priorities before British supply chains. None of that should be brushed past. The American craft market is meaningfully smaller in 2026 than it was when Anchor closed, and Anchor's national distribution evaporated entirely during the closure. Rebuilding domestic shelf presence is, by some distance, the more urgent problem.

But the question of can Anchor return to UK taps, the logistical question, is, on the evidence, essentially solved. The distributor exists, knows the brand, and has just rebuilt a comparable premium-import draught programme. The venues that would pour it exist and are visible in UK tap data. The route works. What's missing is a strategic decision and the beer to put down it.

If Anchor Steam shows up on a UK tap line at some point in 2026 or 2027, most plausibly via James Clay given the historical relationship, that will be a small, specific signal worth flagging. Not because it tells you anything definitive about the wider revival, but because it tells you the international specialist-beer trade has voted on whether the founding myth still earns a tap line in 2026. Given how deep the English roots already ran in 1975, it would also complete a small circle.