Hotaling & Co.

Hotaling & Co. is the San Francisco craft spirits operation that emerged from one of the most editorially significant brand restructurings in modern American craft distilling — the 2018 rebrand of Anchor Distilling Company into Hotaling & Co. when the parent company separated its spirits operation from the broader Anchor Brewing Company. The Anchor Distilling Company's original founding dates to 1993 when San Francisco's Anchor Brewing Company (the historic American craft brewery founded in 1896 and revived by Fritz Maytag in 1965) established a distilling operation as an extension of the broader brewing identity — making Anchor Distilling one of the very earliest modern American craft distillery operations, predating most of the modern craft American distilling boom by roughly 15 years.

The Anchor Distilling production legacy is anchored by Old Potrero — the historic San Francisco rye whiskey brand that became one of the founding-era American craft rye whiskey products. Old Potrero (named for the Potrero Hill neighborhood where Anchor's facilities sit) was launched in the early 1990s as the first new commercial American rye whiskey since Prohibition — predating the broader American craft rye revival by over a decade and serving as the editorial reference point for what serious American craft rye production could look like. The Old Potrero line uses 100% malted rye (rather than the more common malted barley + raw rye combination), a production approach that produces a distinctively grain-forward rye character.

The Hotaling & Co. name references the historic Hotaling whiskey warehouse — the SoMa San Francisco brick warehouse that famously survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire intact, immortalized in the popular post-earthquake jingle "If, as some say, God spanked the town for being over frisky, why did He burn the churches down and save Hotaling's whiskey?" The rebrand from Anchor Distilling to Hotaling & Co. in 2018 deliberately invoked that broader San Francisco distilling-and-historical heritage as the new corporate identity.

The current product range covers Old Potrero Straight Rye Whiskey (the flagship — the founding-era American craft rye), Old Potrero Hotaling's Whiskey (the higher-tier annual release), Junípero Gin (one of the first American craft gins, launched in 1996), Hotaling & Co. American Single Malt programs, and a broader distributed portfolio that includes imports of Scotch, Japanese whisky, and other international spirits brands the company represents in the U.S. market. The San Francisco visitor experience runs through the working distillery in Potrero Hill, with tours and tastings that walk through both the heritage Anchor / Old Potrero history and the current production program.