"We are all friends in fermentation."

Fritz Maytag is quoted, wonderfully, over at BeerBasics.com.

Beer author Peter LaFrance was attending a beer tasting, in 1991, at Windows on the World, its first ever. He recounts:

There were only five or six brewers in attendance and about three times as many journalists.

One of the brewers there was Fritz Maytag, owner of Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco, CA. The topic of conversation came around to their "Our Special Ale" brewed once a year just in time for Thanksgiving.

I asked Fritz Maytag if that years beer was going to be more of a Burgundy or a Bordeaux. He began to answer me when one of the journalists listening to us said "We are here to discuss beer not wine aren't we?"... Fritz Maytag took a moment, and answered, "We're all friends in fermentation."

BEER BASICS.COM
Peter LaFrance
Vol.011 No.001
31 January 2010

Mr. Maytag's axiom could be a reminder to all of us in the alcoholic beverage business —be we makers, wholesalers, retailers, bartenders, writers, drinkers. We are in the business of fun.

Ten years later after that event, Windows on the World would be destroyed during the attack on the World Trade Center towers.

• I believe that Maytag says this again (originally?) on Michael Jackson's The Beer Hunter video series in 1991 (highly recommended, if you can find a copy), during a scene in which Maytag and the Anchor staff are on a bus driving north to a malt harvest. 
• Another quotable quote from Maytag, in the comments section below.