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 he DISTILLERS at ANCHOR present this whiskey in commemoration of the 1906 San
Francisco Earthquake and Fire, and in celebration of our indomitable City's rebirth.
One hundred years ago, earthquake, fire, and dynamite
destroyed nearly 4.7 square miles of San Francisco, a
swath of destruction that claimed 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
wicked ways. Thanks in no small part to the pluck,
resolve, 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," as the Argonaut would later report, thousands of "barrels of highly inflammable whisky were preserved intact in the heart of the tremendous holocaust."
After the fire, UC Berkeley Professor Jerome Barker Landfield bumped into poet and wit Charles Kellogg 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?'"
This unusual whiskey has been aged for more than eleven years in once-used, charred oak whiskey barrels. Many of the finest Scottish "single malts" are aged in the same manner. The method of producing this Hotaling's Whiskey is identical to our other Old Potrero whiskeys—it is a
pot-distilled spirit from a mash of 100% malted rye.
Only the barrel aging is different. At more than ten
years in barrel, we were surprised and delighted
to see this product develop a fine, mature, and
mellow character. It has been a long time in
developing, but it has been worth the wait!
Find
out more about our:
OLD POTRERO SINGLE MALT HOTALING'S WHISKEY, 50% ALC/VOL (100 PROOF), IS DISTILLED, AGED AND BOTTLED BY ANCHOR DISTILLING COMPANY, SAN FRANCISCO, CA.
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View PDF of Hotaling's Whiskey Flyer
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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.
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