Maytag. What do you think of when you see that name? Most likely, you’d be thinking “appliances”, and you’d be right. It is, however, also the name of a famous American Bleu Cheese, which gets its name from the famous Maytag family that started the Maytag appliance company. Their Maytag bleu cheese is probably the most abundant variety we have in the U.S., and was featured in a piece this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, in a piece entitled Little Big Cheese: Maytag’s Growing Niche Market. It quickly answered my question “Is Maytag bleu cheese in any way related to the Maytag company?”. So there is the first part of this little yarn.

The second part of the story comes in when Hunter mentioned that today’s Achewood strip had a bit of a continuity error citing a “public drunkeness” arrest outside of a saloon on September 8, 1932, more than a year before Prohibition would end in the United States. How observant! Whilst doing a little Googling about Prohibition, I found mention of Fritz Maytag in this Wikipedia article on Prohibition. That mentioning stated that he helped to restart the microbrewery/homebrewery movement that had essentially been suffocated by Prohibition by buying a controlling interest in the failing Anchor Brewing company in 1965 (read a good article on this here), saving it from being quite possibly the last speciality brewer in the United States to close. Now, Anchor Steam (and it’s brethren) can be enjoyed in 48 states, along side other notable “specialty” beers as Red Hook, Pete’s Wicked, and Sam Adams. Yay for Fritz Maytag!

Combine this with my recent infatuation with home-brewing, my love of the cartoon cats in Achewood, and my love of cheese, and you’ve got yourself a bona-fide co-inky-dink.