Old Potrero Blazed a Trail For Craft Rye Whiskey. Why Is It Perpetually Overlooked?

Imagine a craft whiskey with impeccable bona fides: delicious flavor, a genuinely interesting backstory, and a history of breaking new ground. These are qualities that all spirits, and especially craft ones, strive to achieve and proudly boast about. By all rights, such a whiskey should be wildly successful, popular, and beloved — and certainly not overlooked. Yet that’s exactly what’s happened to Old Potrero rye.

“It’s easy to pass over unless you know about it,” says Nick Madden, head bartender at San Francisco whiskey bar Elixir, who regularly recommends Old Potrero to guests. He notes that locals “gravitate toward Old Potrero,” especially since the Golden Gate Bridge on the label stands out, but even then, not everyone is aware of the whiskey’s history or Bay Area roots.

First made in the early 1990s at a tiny distillery in the basement of Anchor Brewing, Old Potrero has provenance in spades, yet it remains something of a hidden gem outside of its hometown of San Francisco — and sometimes even within it. That obscurity has nothing to do with merit: whiskey experts agree that Old Potrero is a delicious, well-made, and unique rye. But timing, strategy, and constrained production have held it back for decades. As the OG craft whiskey approaches its 30th birthday next year, it’s worth asking: Will Old Potrero ever achieve the notoriety that it deserves?

A Whiskey Ahead of Its Time

What grounds Old Potrero’s claim to fame is its origin story, which began long before the stills started running. The whiskey is the brainchild of Fritz Maytag, heir to the eponymous appliance fortune, who rescued Anchor Steam Brewery from the verge of closure in 1965. Maytag’s decision, which required him to leverage much of his inheritance, may have been seen as eccentric in the moment, but a couple of decades proved that he was ahead of his time, anticipating the craft beer movement that sprang up in the 1980s and saw Anchor become a household name.

Maytag showed a similar prescience with Old Potrero, betting that consumers would respond as positively to craft whiskey as they did to craft beer. By the early 1990s, with Anchor Brewing chugging along nicely, he cast his eye toward distilling, putting a great deal of thought into the new project.

“It wasn’t just, ‘Let’s buy a still and start screwing around with it,’” recalls Bruce Joseph, an Anchor brewer whom Maytag tapped as the first distiller. “He really did do a lot of background on things — not just on the technical aspects of distilling. He was really interested in the history of distilling in the colonies.” Maytag went to the Library of Congress to research colonial-era whiskey production, deciding that Anchor would create a malted rye whiskey in the spirit of early American distillers. (The distillery also eventually produced gin, genever, and a spirit distilled from its Christmas ale.)

The first batch of Old Potrero, named for the hill on which Anchor stood, went into barrel in 1994 — well ahead of the craft whiskey boom, which didn’t start until several years into the next century. American whiskey, and especially rye, was in continuous decline from the 1970s well into the 2000s. Just 88,000 cases were sold in 2009. And none of it was malted rye, a style so obscure (and expensive to produce) that even today, only a handful of distilleries make it.

Maytag’s choices were rooted in tradition, but he wasn’t wedded to it. “He was willing to make changes once we got to the point of actually making a product, and let the actual quality guide it more than just the history,” Joseph says, describing a process of trial-and-error and evolution that continues to this day.

Old Potrero’s cask program, which included new charred oak, new toasted oak, and once-used whiskey barrels, was tweaked quite a bit as the whiskey matured. (Joseph says that an early decision to stop filling used barrels ended up being a source of regret, as the whiskey matured beautifully, but only after many years.) The 100-percent malted rye mashbill, however, which yielded a whiskey that was uniquely rich and flavorful, like many craft beers, never changed.

“I think there was so much effort put into not running out of stock that maybe we overcompensated and at some point, people moved on to newer stuff.”

“Once we started mashing and distilling, and once we got something out of the still that was kind of okay, we really did just fall in love with that flavor of 100-percent malted rye,” Joseph says. “It had a totally unique flavor and depth and complexity and roundness and we were just excited by it. We thought it was something unique, and not just for uniqueness’s sake. It was of a certain quality that could hold its own.”

Big Goals, Tiny Production

Joseph says that Maytag aimed to put the whiskey on the same level as wine, which he was also making at the time at York Creek, using wine-grade barrels and bottling each batch with a vintage mindset, allowing differences to shine through rather than aiming for a uniform profile every time. He also wanted to see Old Potrero elevated to the status of fine wine in the on-premise. From the moment of the whiskey’s first release, at 13 months old, Maytag took deliberate steps to ensure it was placed in fine dining accounts, getting buy-in from chefs and restaurateurs who embraced it as part of the Bay Area’s blossoming locavore movement. Old Potrero also received early recognition from Michael Jackson, a prominent beer and whiskey critic.

The whiskey sold out quickly, both because of its popularity and because there just wasn’t a lot of it — 1,448 bottles in the first release. Joseph recalls cautious allocation in those early years. “Fritz was very conscious that we had this limited supply of product, so he was very careful about how it would be placed,” he says.

The problem compounded as the years went on, even as craft whiskey began to blossom. Size constraints played a part. Anchor’s distillery was tiny, initially running with a single 250-liter still. Even as it added more, larger stills, it remained constrained by its home in the basement of the Potrero Hill brewery. Annual production by the end of the 1990s was about 75 barrels, a number that doubled by 2004 — respectable, but still barely enough to support much expansion beyond the home market. Meanwhile, starting in the late aughts, craft distilleries around the country began springing up to meet the demand of consumers eager for authentic artisan whiskey.

“I think there was so much effort put into not running out of stock that maybe we overcompensated and at some point, people moved on to newer stuff,” Joseph says. “Once we got to the point where we weren’t the new thing on the block, people might’ve moved on and forgotten about Old Potrero. Maybe if we had scaled up production earlier, the growth and the transition would have been more seamless.”

A Style Set Apart

As the rye renaissance took off in earnest, Old Potrero got left behind. The rise of MGP-sourced rye starting around 2010 helped shape a new generation of consumers’ palates. Malted rye, with its chewy texture and rich grainy flavors, bears little resemblance to the peppery, sharp character of MGP’s 95 percent rye recipe, which dominates the style today. But Madden says that can be to Old Potrero’s advantage: the whiskey’s uniqueness, especially compared to non-malted ryes, is its strength.

“The honest truth is, unless it’s something that has the zeitgeist like Pappy or something which is rare, that you can show off, people do not want to expend effort getting it. And it’s nothing to do with Old Potrero.”

“The malted rye is so strong that people do not expect to get the kind of flavors that are coming out of it compared to what it smells like,” he says. “I think people are pleasantly surprised. Once they drink it, I get a lot of, ‘Wow, this is great.’”

At retail, Old Potrero struggles with consumer recognition, even in its hometown. San Francisco whiskey mecca The Whisky Shop offers several Old Potrero expressions, but buyer Brendan Noble says that the brand is rarely requested by walk-in customers.

“The ryes that have pushed the [rye] resurgence are things like Angel’s Envy with the sweeter finish,” he explains. “I feel like Old Potrero is definitely well-positioned to take advantage of that with its wine-finished series. But it just doesn’t seem like people have heard of it, outside of coming here and it being recommended.”

But Noble notes that demand for Old Potrero is much higher online, with The Whisky Shop shipping bottles all over the country — indicating a mismatch between distribution availability and consumer demand. Kurt Maitland, a whiskey historian and co-host of the podcast “Decades Distilled: A History of Whisky,” agrees that part of the issue is that Old Potrero isn’t always easy to find. As one rye in a sea of options, consumers won’t necessarily go out of their way for it.

“In 1993 when we started distilling, the American whiskey industry was stagnant. I think Old Potrero had some part in the increased interest in whiskey.”

“It’s a good whiskey — it’s been a good whiskey the entire time, but you have to seek it out,” Maitland says. “The honest truth is, unless it’s something that has the zeitgeist like Pappy or something which is rare, that you can show off, people do not want to expend effort getting it. And it’s nothing to do with Old Potrero. The average person wants to go into a store, find it on a shelf, and pick it up.”

The Next Chapter

Now almost 30 years into its life, Old Potrero may finally be turning a corner on the issues that have held it back. Maytag sold Anchor Brewing and Distilling in 2014 and a few years later, the company split, its beer side going to Sapporo and the spirits ending up in the portfolio of Hotaling & Co. Under the new ownership, Old Potrero has been able to tap into considerable marketing and distribution resources.

Most promising of all, the distillery moved into a new home in 2020, located on Pier 50, where it has a 2,900-gallon pot still that can produce more whiskey than ever before. Last year, Old Potrero filled about 400 barrels — still a modest volume, but now the distillery has capacity to increase it significantly as demand grows.

Joseph recently retired, taking on the mantle of master distiller emeritus. He says he would love to see more recognition for Old Potrero, as both a quality rye whiskey and a trailblazer. Although ahead of its time, the brand set high standards for the craft movement that followed — and for American whiskey as a whole.

“In 1993 when we started distilling, the American whiskey industry was stagnant,” Joseph says. “I think Old Potrero had some part in the increased interest in whiskey.” And it influenced the industry in other, more subtle ways, he adds.

“Fritz using higher-quality oak — air-dried wood and hand-toasted and charred barrels — that was pretty much unheard of in the industry when we started. Now you see big distillers talking about certain releases done in higher-grade oak. That innovation that Fritz brought to it, trying to do some things in a different way — that was something that benefited the industry.”

This story is a part of VP Pro, our free platform and newsletter for drinks industry professionals, covering wine, beer, liquor, and beyond. Sign up for VP Pro now!