San Francisco Beer by Bill Yenne

Author:Bill Yenne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Acme’s selling point was that, as a light lager, it “quenches.” By mid-century, beer was being seen primarily as a thirst quencher. Author’s collection.

In 1950, Acme rolled out a new can that was designed to look like beer in a glass. Courtesy of the North Coast Brewing collection.

A fourth player among those ambitiously reaching for national prominence was the Falstaff Brewing Corporation of St. Louis. It chose Northern California rather than the Southland, buying the Pacific Brewing & Malting facility—formerly Fredericksburg Brewery—in San Jose in 1952.

In 1953, the same year that Pabst bought into Los Angeles, an ambitious outsider acquired the property of an earlier ambitious outsider in San Francisco. After nearly four decades, Rainier sold the massive brewing plant on Bryant Street, across the street from San Francisco’s Pacific Coast League baseball park, and withdrew into its home turf in the northwest.

The buyer was the Theodore Hamm Brewing Company of St. Paul, Minnesota. Like Falstaff, it was a well-established regional company with national ambitions. It arrived in San Francisco with an enthusiasm driven by the creative genius of the Campbell-Mithun advertising agency, which had memorably defined Hamm’s as the beer “From the Land of Sky-Blue Waters” and now helped drive Hamm’s distribution throughout the West. Between 1951 and 1954, Hamm’s moved from fifteenth to eighth place among American breweries and was eager for a greater place in the scheme of things.

The most conspicuous manifestation of Hamm’s presence in San Francisco was a massive neon beer glass on the brewery roof, which dominated the skyline of San Francisco’s South of Market area for nearly two decades. The 39-foot glass, with its 2,300 feet of yellow and white neon tubing, was visible throughout the city and from the Bay Bridge as it was “filled and drained” tens of thousands of times before the brewery was finally closed in 1972.

With the arrival of Hamm’s, the fortunes of the once-great Acme declined precipitously. In 1954, as the big breweries crowded into California, Acme went on the block. The company, along with both its San Francisco and Los Angeles breweries, was acquired by Liebmann Breweries of New York. The idea was to brew Liebmann’s famous Rheingold brand on the West Coast. This venture ended four years later. Liebmann pulled out of the Golden State, selling the Los Angeles brewery to Hamm’s in 1958.

Acme’s nearly new San Francisco brewery, which had been heralded in 1942 as “one of the world’s most beautiful industrial buildings,” was simply closed in 1958. It was demolished for an off-ramp from San Francisco’s Central Freeway. No trace remained. Long considered an eyesore, the Central Freeway itself was completely demolished by 2003. The Los Angeles brewery was used to brew Hamm’s until 1972, at which time it was closed forever.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.