The rich history of Anchor Brewing can be traced all the way back to the Gold Rush, when German brewer Gottlieb Brekle arrived in San Francisco with his wife Marie and infant son Frederick. Brekle applied for citizenship in 1854, and his brewing and business acumen would soon lead to his ownership of a little San Francisco brewery on Pacific, between Larkin and Hyde, which would one day become known as Anchor.

Every Anchor Steam® Beer label says, "Made in San Francisco since 1896," because that is the year German brewer Ernst F. Baruth and his son-in-law, Otto Schinkel, Jr., bought the old brewery on Pacific (the first of six locations around the City over the years) and named it Anchor. Baruth and his previous partner, Henry C. Kroenke, had been co-owners of the American Brewery on Green Street. Schinkel, just twenty-six years old, was employed as their driver. No one knows why Baruth and Schinkel chose the name Anchor, except, perhaps, for its indirect but powerful allusion to the great Port of San Francisco.

Anchor Brewery inherited a long tradition of brewing what had come to be known as steam beer, one of the quaint old nicknames for beer brewed along the West Coast under primitive conditions and without ice. Today "steam" is a trademark of Anchor Brewing.