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 distin…