Essay24 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 — what 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 — Burkhart puts that 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, 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.

At a Thames America party at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, San Francisco, the importer Jeffrey House introduced Anthony Fuller to Fritz Maytag. House 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 — ESB in particular acting as a blueprint for a generation of American brewers looking for something to aim at. House's 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 Steam, Liberty Ale and the 1991 Christmas Ale, 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's position, put to us directly, is that those were the first American craft ales poured on draught in Britain, and in Europe. He has since supplied Anthony Fuller's written confirmation of the 1991 episode, and says Fritz Maytag has confirmed it to him in writing as well — so the account rests on all three principals, not one man's memory. What is still missing is a contemporaneous document: a bill of lading, an invoice, a trade-press cutting. The public record neither confirms nor contradicts them. Boak & Bailey's world beer timeline has bottled Anchor Steam at CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival as early as 1979, and Liberty Ale merely "available" by 1993, which brackets the winter of 1991 on both sides without settling it. What isn't in question is the shape of it. The beer Maytag built from a Timothy Taylor blueprint came back to England in Fuller's own kegs.

The return leg kept going. House says Liberty Ale was an important influence on Dave Wickett, a fellow Sheffield economics alumnus. Wickett's Kelham Island Brewery subsequently produced Pale Rider, an American-hopped pale ale that in 2004 became the first Champion Beer of Britain winner brewed with American hops. Whether Liberty Ale was a direct model for Pale Rider remains an intriguing but unresolved part of the story. Wickett was instrumental in getting Thornbridge started not long after, and Jaipur followed from there.

The yeast crossed too, at least once. 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. Who propagated it afterwards, and how far it travelled, isn't established, and House doesn't claim it was routinely shipped in trade. But a live English brewing yeast was standing on a trestle table in San Francisco in 1983, which is its own kind of freight.

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.