Making the type of beer you want to make, at the scale you want to make it, in the place where you want to live—this is one of the most challenging things to accomplish in the craft-beer business. But after 13 years in the trenches working for another local brewery, Gabe Fletcher got the itch and was determined to make it work, one way or another.
The concept behind Anchorage Brewing was novel at the time—inspired by Jolly Pumpkin and Cantillon, he’d focus on 100 percent Brettanomyces beers. These sour, barrel-aged, mixed-fermentation, and farmhouse beers were still novel in American breweries in 2010, but Fletcher’s heart was there, and he could see a potentially larger market for these relatively unknown styles.
“All I was going to do was make sour beer and barrel-aged beer, and do the things that I love to do, instead of pumping out amber ale and blonde ale and all this other crap, and only putting out a specialty beer once a quarter,” says Fletcher. “I wanted to do those things because I just got bored making production beer all the time.”