Imagine a brewery here. Part 4: Temescal

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the adventures/frustrations of tracking down old East Bay breweries is trying to nail down the exact locations. Phone books and other documents of the pre-Prohibition era often gave only intersections (or less). Sometimes we could narrow it down to a corner and sometimes we took our best guess. Once, we guessed, then stumbled on some hard proof!

Kramm’s Anchor Brewery: Shattuck & 49th/50th

I’d read that Anchor Brewery (no relation to the one we know today in SF) had been at the corner of 49th & Telegraph in Temescal.

Photo credit: Eric Pietras

Lacking any additional info, we guessed it was where the post office is now.

Photo credit: Eric Pietras

Eric took some pictures, then got a spidey sense about heading a little bit north and found this!

Photo credit: Eric Pietras

THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING! It turns out the brewery was actually located where this row of ticky-tacky dwellings is now.

Photo credit: Eric Pietras

That plaque is the only historical marker we found while searching for the area’s bygone breweries. Who do we petition to get a plaque in every one of these locations? So many projects, so little time…

Anyway, “Anchor Brewery” is difficult to google for all the obvious reasons — to make it more confusing, most of the breweries of that time made steam beer™. (Here’s a groovy blog post on that subject). But we do know a thing or two about “Kramm’s Anchor,” partially because the Kramm family was a hot-ass mess.

First, the beer community in the early 1900s was a small world, as it arguably is today. George Roehm worked at Anchor before founding Independent Brewing Company. Beer baron Joseph Raspiller invested in six breweries and Anchor was one of them. Finally, Anchor was one of the four breweries to merge and become Golden West.

As for the family drama, let’s start with Charles Kramm Sr., an immigrant from Hannover, Germany. He owned the Oakland Brewery with his next door neighbor Joseph Dieves. (More on Oakland Brewery later). Most reports place the founding of Kramm’s Anchor at 1894, but Charles Sr. died in 1892, of bowel cancer, at 56 years old, so I’m thinking the brewery must have come before that. He left a wife, Augusta, and four sons.

Charles Sr.’s widow Augusta was the turn-of-the-century Oakland equivalent of tabloid fodder. She remarried a mining industry guy, Anthony Simons. Her sons liked to say he married their mom for her brewery fortune, and son Henry got arrested in 1897 for socking his stepfather. (The straw that broke the camel’s back? “Henry and his brother Charles called at the Simons house and asked to see their mother. Simons told them that the ‘person’ for whom they were looking was away. To hear his mother spoken of as the ‘person’ angered Henry” and POW. Settle down, son…) After that, stepdad Simons went off to Alaska for 8 months to try and make some more money, and when he got home Augusta slammed the door in his face and told him off.

So, in 1899, Anthony Simons filed a “sensational divorce suit” against the brewery widow, charging her with cruelty and desertion. It might not have helped that she commissioned and installed a bronze bust of the late brewer Charles Sr. in her house the same month she got remarried. (Creepy…) Simons also accused the sons, then between 16 and 22, of being “physical giants” who conspired against him.  “The trial of the suit promises to create a stir in the German colony,” said the San Francisco Call.

Charles Sr.’s  “giant” sons stayed involved with brewing. His son Joseph Kramm brewed at Anchor until 1902 then bought the plant and helped run it until 1910, when he co-founded the Golden West mini-empire. Charles Kramm Sr’s son and Oakland city councilman Charles Kramm Jr. also got involved. All four brothers co-owned the brewery and it seemed like Charles Jr. and Joseph had the most involvement, at least until Charles Jr. died of tuberculosis.

Councilman/brewery owner Charles Kramm Jr. Photo credit: Oakland Wiki

Oakland Wiki says “After [Charles Jr’s] death, his widow and executor of his will sold Anchor Brewery to Augusta Simons [Charles Jr’s mom, Charles Sr.’s widow] for about $18,000. It appears he had already mortgaged the business to her and that the business was insolvent. No one else would buy it.” This was 1900-1901.

The brewery somehow lasted another 10 years as an independent entity before getting folded into Golden West. It would appear Augusta sold/gave the brewery back to son Joseph Kramm at some point, probably 1902. It was all over by 1911, so the photo at the site labeled “1918” is, in the end, a little less exciting than it could be.

Augusta married a third time, getting hitched to her first husband’s former bookkeeper at the brewery. Some people never learn.

Share this article