Anchor Distilling - Old Potrero Single Malt Hotaling's Whiskey

he Distillers at Anchor present this whiskey in commemoration of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and in celebration of our remarkable city’s rebirth.

In 1906, earthquake, fire, and dynamite ravaged San Francisco, claiming 28,188 buildings and an incalculable number of lives. After the disaster, several clergymen asserted that the catastrophe had been divine retribution, visited upon the City by the Bay for its sinful ways. Thanks in part to the pluck and ingenuity of its staff, however, A. P. Hotaling & Co.'s Jackson Street whiskey warehouse survived. And so, "while millions of dollars worth of normally non-inflammable material was reduced to ashes," the Argonaut observed, thousands of "barrels of highly inflammable whisky were preserved intact in the heart of the tremendous holocaust."

After the fire, UC Berkeley professor Jerome B. Landfield bumped into Stanford grad Charles K. Field. "He accompanied me to Berkeley," Landfield recalled, "and I put him up at the Faculty Club for the night. As we walked down to the station on our way back to San Francisco, Field asked me for a blank piece of paper on which to write. I handed him a used envelope. On the back he penned these lines:

'If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling’s whiskey?'"

Hotaling's Whiskey neck label

All of our Old Potrero whiskeys (including Hotaling's) are pot-distilled from a mash of 100% malted rye. Only the barrel aging is different. This release was aged 15 years in one once-used, charred oak barrel, creating a uniquely delightful whiskey of impeccable character.

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OLD POTRERO SINGLE MALT HOTALING'S WHISKEY, 50% ALC/VOL (100 PROOF), IS DISTILLED, AGED AND BOTTLED BY ANCHOR DISTILLING COMPANY, SAN FRANCISCO, CA.

View PDF of Hotaling's Whiskey Flyer

Pre-earthquake A.P. Hotaling & Co. back-bar decanter

Much of the rescued Hotaling's whiskey was bottled and sold under the brand name, "Old Kirk." In Charles K. Field's autobiography, "The Story of Cheerio by Himself," Field himself recalls the last line of his earthquake poem as having referred to Old Kirk rather than Hotaling's. The Hotaling's version, however—due in part to A.P. Hotaling & Co.'s own post-quake marketing efforts—stuck.

Thanks to the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, an invaluable resource for 1906 earthquake research.