SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years | Hacker News Reader

SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

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246 pointsc5karl338 comments

It’s important to note that Anchor as a division is being shut down as a cost-saving measure by its owner Sapporo, a transnational, publicly-traded corporation.

Sapporo says they have tried to find a buyer for Anchor, but to no avail. Meanwhile Sapporo recently purchased Stone Brewing in San Diego and are beginning Sapporo production there while still making Stone beers. If Sapporo hadn’t also bought Stone, presumably their plan was to brew Sapporo at Anchor in a similar way. In that scenario, they probably would have continued producing Anchor beers in some quantity too.

I think that is an important point but, with that said, I'd suggest that perhaps the reason Anchor were struggling is they didn't really innovate. Rather they rested on the laurels of that 127 year heritage.

Certainly a very personal opinion but the first time I tried Anchor beers sometime in the noughties I was underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong: they're certainly better than Bud, Coors, etc., but as a Brit coming from somewhere with a by then thriving real ale scene, Anchor's beers just weren't that great. More than that, they weren't up to the standards of many other US-brewed craft beers I'd tried, many of which are at least as good as anything the UK or mainland Europe has to offer[0].

The microbrewing scene in the US has really taken off over the past 20 years so, to me, it felt like Anchor just got left behind by it. And maybe Stone Brewing have a bit more to offer[1] and it was easier for Sapporo to buy them and roll with it than to try and revitalise a brand seen as ailing? I'm not saying I like it but I can certainly imagine that perspective within the company.

[0] By the mid-2010s there did seem to be a tendency to overegg IPAs by making many of them ludicrously strong, and just trying to cram in too much flavour, not to mention the consistency of many was borderline gloopy (more like drinking blood than beer) - mercifully I think this trend may be reversing.

[1] Pure speculation: I don't remember ever trying any of Stone's beers so have no comment to make on their quality or otherwise.

I'm a little surprised Anchor didn't do better. I personally got worn out by all the craziness and experimentation in the craft brewing scene. Really unique IPAs or sour beers were fun for a while, but after a while, I realized I just wanted something reasonably good and predictably normal, i.e. a Normal Good Beer. It seemed like Anchor was delivering on this, but maybe there were enough other options that they just didn't distinguish themselves well enough. Too bad, considering they're a local beer with a lot of history and had a successful unionization effort.

This seems to be a conclusion in the beverage world as well, the craft beer wave has broken and people are just trying to drink something that tastes like what it says on the label.

I home brew beer and the instinct is to make something crazy, but I get sick of my own experiments and double sick of paying 18$ for a 4 pack of someone else’s experiments. I could never stand being told that hop burn was a sign of craft beer, it’s a sign of a shit process and you should never have those flavors in your beer.

I’ve actually been shocked to discover hard kombucha with some fruit juice is great. I still drink my beer, but this stuff is light, refreshing, and it’s 7% so it gets the job done.

Anchor’s taste changed to me sometime after the acquisition, I liked it in years past and there was something off to me now.

Homebrewer here too. I agree. I like some experimentation but also like some "normal" stuff. I also don't like the really expensive odd stuff in the store. I've also begun to dislike the really plain stuff in the store.

Even if my beer is a little different every batch, I think I prefer it. It's fun to grow your own hops and even grow/malt your own grain.

I just bought a random craft beer 4 pack that cost me $17 the other day, reminds me why I don't buy craft beer.

Is it hard to home brew something like a Pilsner? I imagine the hard part is consistency

At small scales, a rule of thumb is that it's harder to brew beers with lighter/subtler flavors. You can hide a lot of minor brewing mistakes behind an IPA or a heavy stout. Not so much with something like a pilsner.

To add on, in addition to needing more consistency and skill to brew something light in flavor, it also more difficult to brew a lager (which a Pilsner is) than an ale -- the yeast involved are different, and the fermentation process is generally longer (more opportunity for stuff to go wrong) and more temperature sensitive (more opportunity for stuff to go wrong.)

It’s not hard to brew a Pilsner, and brewing your own beer is rewarding, but the light German styles are the hardest to really improve on. If you just put some quality ingredients and decent temp control fermentation at a Pilsner, you’re going to get a super great beer judged against some regular commercial offerings, and a good beer in general. To get better that that, look into LoDo brewing if you want to go down the rabbit hole.

If you like to strive for perfection, the german styles will scratch that itch for you.

Edit: I will add that brewing Pilsner or Helles will literally never impress your friends. You’ll get a shrug and a “oh that’s good” out of them when you’ve put your heart and soul into driving out one little off flavor from your ferment that no one else can taste but you. IPA is basically the polar opposite.

Some of the highest-status beers during Peak Beer were well-executed straightforward beers; Pliny comes to mind. As does Zombie Dust.

I think the whole world is off axis if Pliny is a straight forward beer. Maybe we were all better off when Russian River was sending it out for us to buy in lots of 2 bottles to a local store that you had to call every day and check to see if they got any.

Pliny adapted to shifting tastes too, they reduced the grassiness and switched to bittering hop extracts to get a more mass appeal flavor and reduce waste with flower hops that would also soak up more wort. If you aren't constantly adjusting in beer you'll go the way of Anchor.

> Too bad, considering they're a local beer with a lot of history and had a successful unionization effort.

127 year old company, unionizes in 2019, shuts down in 2023, I wouldn't really call that successful.

Well it could be management didn't meet labor's demand and labor got the brewery closed. So in that sense it could be success.

20th century labor movement: We want improved working conditions and more jobs to exist, let’s bargain in pursuit of that goal

21st century labor movement: we’d consider it a success to destroy all of the jobs altogether rather than accept less than 100% of our demands (which may or may not be economically feasible).

It sure incentivizes eliminating human labor as fast as possible.

That's not exactly being generous to the unions. The corporations fight unionization at every turn, so the unions need to play aggressive to get the kinds of wins that keep them being supported. At the same time, the corporations have taken the position that unionization is such an existential threat that they'll happily close a profitable location if it unionizes, in order to make an example of them, raising the stakes for unionization even higher. Meanwhile, the government will happily back the bigwigs at every turn.

The result is that good faith negotiations between capital and labor are now impossible. If the government would do its job, and seriously punish companies and investors (think less "angry email" and more "Old Yeller") who engage in illegal union busting, then unionization wouldn't be a massive risk for the employees, and more modest demands could be seen as acceptable.

Unions in the US are on the ropes. Union membership is down, and companies have loads of resources and help to stymie unionization efforts. Frankly, unionizing at all is a successful unionization effort at the moment, since it shows other people it can be done. Can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

It’s on the ropes in corporate America - but not in the public sector.

I know this is just one example, but public school teacher unions don't seem to be doing so great, seeing how teaching is still the example always brought up as the most tragically underpaid profession.

Sure, a union isn't a magic bullet that fixes all problems, but I know school teachers in some very different districts in the US, and their pay is universally awful for the amount of time they put in, and some of them even end up having to buy their own school supplies, out of pocket, because their classroom is way underfunded. I guess we could argue that, without the unions, things would be even worse, but I still think teachers unions have mostly failed their members.

On the flip side, police officer unions seem to be doing pretty great, negotiating reasonably high pay, and helping to shield their members from accountability for wrongdoing.

Labor movements don't like public sector unions. When unions are talked about, it's almost entirely assuming private sector unions.

But who says that’s related?

The recipe changed after the acquisition by Sapporo. Fans of the original Anchor Steam didn't like the new taste and stopped buying. So it faded into the background with the other ~3-5 domestics being served at a given bar.

Lots of people talking out their ass here, clearly none of them spend any time in SF dives talking to other patrons.

Do you have proof that they changed the recipe/process. My wife and I have long suspected this, but I believe officially they denied any change.

The rebrand was an absolute disaster of marketing. You have a 125 year old brewery with an old-fashioned looking logo, and you throw that all out for a more modern design that looks like every other beer on the shelf that got their designer off of fiver.

Shades of New Coke.

> had a successful unionization effort

Just forming a union should not be a measure of success. If it ultimately led to shutdown of the division because it was unprofitable, I would argue it was a pretty unsuccessful effort.

I haven’t seen anyone suggest unionization has had anything to do with it, in fact I’m going to groundlessly state that it probably is the only reason they lasted this long.

They only unionized four years ago. The union probably wasn't a reason why they lasted.

I was just pointing out the obvious anti-union bias of just mentioning they were unionized as if it had something to do with them failing. Sounds like they got bought by a conglomerate who closed them down. Normal capitalistic practice unrelated to the existence or lack of existence of a union.

It should be. See my other comment.

I don't have the numbers... but I'm going to assume that regular beer drinkers drink the popular light beers or already have a craft beer they like and spend less money trying new products. It took contentious political media to get die-hards to stop drinking their favorite light beer. That's how ingrained these brands are. It's harder to sell a new Amber Ale than a Juicy Mango/Dragonfruit IPA. These 2 beers serve different personas and the beer industry is focusing on growth over providing new products to their base.

I think this is right. When I was in my 20s I was really into beer. Now I'm older and I split my time between the usual light beer culprits when I'm drinking out and enjoying a few craft favorites when I'm drinking in and gaming/doing hobbies. Also when a four pack of 16oz cans is approaching $20 (or exceeding that) I'm less likely to be exploratory because who the he'll wants a fridge of rejects they don't like.

I (rarely) homebrew, for fun, but when it comes to beers in the fridge I have so many great local options to choose from (here on the south shore of MA, near Cape Cod), it's ridiculous: Second Wind, Stellwagen, Mayflower, Timberyard.... typically canned just a week or two before purchase. A few times a year I'll make a trip to Treehouse (worth it), otherwise the local package stores are well-stocked. I do remember enjoying Anchor Steam and IPAs back in the day (as a big upgrade from shitty mass-produced lagers), but my palate evolved and my preference for the best and freshest brew simply rules out generic bottles from the opposite coast.

My understanding is that this is kind of the pattern of the beer downturn. The huge operations are doing okay, shifting around amongst their sub-brands, introducing seltzers, etc. And the hyper-local stuff is still doing well it seems. But the "pretty big" craft brewers that went nationwide, they're facing the brunt.

Those light beers are also low ABV, which is ideal for warm summer days where to just want something refreshing without getting plastered. A simple tasting 4% beer works great for that. A complex, bitter 12% double IPA? Not so much.

I’d much rather drink an amber ale on a nice warm day than yet another IPA.

Just a point to the marketing and shifting norms... I would call a 4-5% beer normal, not low, ABV.

5% used to be considered high or an ‘export’ lager when I was a lad. We called Stella Artois at a massive 5.2% “wife beater”.

Typical session lagers like Heineken were around 3.5%.

To take that one step further I think most new drinkers find seltzers more refreshing in the heat than low abv light beers.

Worth noting that most 'hard seltzers' like whiteclaw are still brewed sort of like beers for tax reasons. Since brewed drinks have less excise on them than premixed drinks.

Bud Light was the most popular beer in the USA until very recently Modelo Especial just passed it. Both of those are very straight forward beers.

I still only love sours; I'm a little gay cocktail freak usually, but sour beers have always seemed kind of special to me - I love the flavour and the history of using wild yeast (I think there was a river somewhere with the right type of yeast where they just used to leave fruit next to the river for the yeast to collect).

But unfortunately there doesn't seem to be as many sours around in the UK now, when I was still in NZ we have tonnes, but now all I find in the UK is IPAs and "DIPA"s etc. So boring.

Ah there we are: https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/lambic-... tbf idt they leave the wort by the riverside anymore per se, the yeast seems to just be in the air all around that area. Super cool, though.

Belgium is definitely worth a visit if you like interesting beers, there are countless places, but I'd have to recommend Delirium Café (a honestly confusing maze of various beer halls) but for good weather "Little Delirium" is great too, smaller location but with nice outdoor seating.

This news has nothing to do with lack of innovation. The entire beer market is currently contracting.

Also, not everything needs to innovate. Every field needs a canon of notable creations that have stood the test of centuries or millennia and beer brewing is no exception.

I'd like to see what '23 the numbers look like before declaring it a contracting market. Sales by volume for the entire category are indeed down, but somewhere between 2-3%, and that is still likely attributable to the crash starting in 2020, when it was actually illegal to serve or even order beer in many places. (To this day, there are still aggressive measures taken against breweries, brewpubs, and taprooms, like this extrajudicial order that is crushing the business in New Jersey: https://www.nj.gov/oag/abc/downloads/LimitedBrewerySpecialCo....)

Still, imports are up, and regionals and crafts are up as a percentage of total beer. The small operations that weren't entirely destroyed are still in the process of coming back online. I'm not convince the empirical decline is the market at work and not external forces.

If you are interested in the numbers, give Bart Watson a follow: https://twitter.com/BrewersStats

He's an economist that covers this for the Brewers Association. Based on the data, it's not looking good. Some of it is released in public reports and presos, others are member-only resources.

Here's a report from the TTB that shows the contraction:

https://www.ttb.gov/images/statistics/ttb-beer-2023-statisti...

Also, there are several industry talks that dive into the why...one factor seems to be that Gen Z just isn't drinking.

Oh my gosh. Section 1 of that about tours. What a ridiculous ordinance. I assume all this is in there to protect some other class of business that lobbied for it, right? Like bars trying to prevent breweries from competing?

There's multiple kinds of liquor licenses.

You can be a bar or restaurant that serves alcohol (retail consumption license).

You can also be a brewpub (restricted brewery license), which comes with production limits and requires the above.

You can be a brewery, which mostly makes and sells beer to retailers and distributors to consume elsewhere, but might have some tasting events (limited brewery license).

New Jersey strictly limits the number of liquor licenses of different types. Limited brewery licenses don't count against these limits: it's expected they're mostly selling their goods to other licensees.

It might be protectionism, but more likely it's just an effort to regulate alcohol that doesn't take into account the changes in the craft beer scene in the last couple of decades.

> more likely it's just an effort to regulate alcohol that doesn't take into account the changes in the craft beer scene in the last couple of decades.

This isn't a law. It's an order that was issued just 3 years ago.

A bill to undo it--which should not even be necessary given it's not legislation--was passed unanimously by both houses of the state legislature. The governor is sitting on it and hasn't commented.

> > effort to regulate alcohol

> This isn't a law.

Yes, this was why the word "regulate" was used.

> which should not even be necessary given it's not legislation

Lawmakers empower regulators to make ordinary rules without specifying every detail in laws. Sometimes lawmakers don't like what regulators do, though, and choose to exercise more direct oversight.

Yeah. They nailed it, too:

"licensee may offer for sale or make gratuitous offer of de minimis types of food such as water" (2)

...but...

"licensee shall not brew and sell coffee" (7)

That is full de minimis lol.

I don't know. It seems a mix of traditional and innovation does well. Yuengling seems to be a good example of a small brand becoming regional and now almost national. They have their traditional brews and have added a few new ones.

Grew up in PA and love seeing Yingers blow up, but I bet their success is largely due to the same reason we loved them back in the early 2000s: they brew a tasty no-frills lager at a good price.

Seems a lot of the brewing industry chased fads for 20 years.

I like Yingling Porter. I'm annoyed they aren't in NYC while brewed so nearby.

Anchor actually did have a bunch of more modern beers after the Sapporo acquisition, but they were only available at the taproom. They only had retail distribution for the old reliable flagships (and then had a rebranding that was not well received).

Yeah, that was the weird thing. I visited their tap room a few times here and there (I live fairly close), and some of their selections were truly different and interesting and good. But you couldn't get them anywhere else. Meanwhile, I hardly ever go for an Anchor beer when in a bar, as there are always more interesting choices. I wouldn't call myself a beer connoisseur, even. Seemed like shooting themselves in the foot.

> [1] Pure speculation: I don't remember ever trying any of Stone's beers so have no comment to make on their quality or otherwise.

Most of the Stone beers I've tried have ranged between "meh" and "pour out the can". Buenaveza (salt and lime cerveza) is the only one I've really enjoyed from them, and I've given them a number of tries. Buenaveza is a perfectly fine lawnmowing beer or party beer though and I do get it occasionally, but there's also several other cervezas here that are super good and super cheap too (Cerveza Delray is great).

They seem reasonably popular so it's entirely possible it's just me, I'm a picky drinker and I know what I like and don't like. But that said, it doesn't seem like "brewed by stone" is some massive mark of quality for sapporo, at least to me. Maybe they're good relative to the alternatives who could produce beer at macro scale.

(is there a term for the Goose Island-style operations that are owned by macrobrews and produce relatively large quantities? Some of those operations really straddle the line between macro and micro.)

Anyway though, there are definitely companies where I agree with the head brewer's taste and ones where I don't.

Sapporo's "innovations" for the Anchor brand were to pick a fight with labor, tinker with the recipe of their most historic beer, and green-light of the most infamously eye-searing rebrands in recent memory.

Their Porter is fantastic and on par with Fuller's.

I love porters but they're getting hard to find. Every supermarket is wall-to-wall IPAs. I assume they know what sells, so apparently that's what the market wants right now. You can't make a living brewing porters.

I would be a lot more disappointed with this turn of events if I had access to their porter. But the ubiquitous steam beer was never one of my favorites.

At least the super markets aren't wall-to-wall hazy like the draft houses haha. I can't wait for more West Coast and Pacific IPAs to get back on tap.

Totally agree. The craft beer industry needs to stop with all this IPA nonsense. It’s absurd how hard it is to find anything but yet another weird IPA.

If the craft beer industry is shrinking, this is one large component. Stop with the nonstop IPA’s. There is way more beers than just IPA’s.

I work at a craft beer bar, in general folks want live fresh beer...I pour 1 stout for every 50 Ipas I pour. We have the option but folks love their pale ales and ipas. Anchor would just go bad on our rotation...a freshly brewed pilsner, i'll sell a bunch. A blaise steam beer that isn't "fresh" isn't winning any body over. That said I'm a big fan of anchor porter, the general public is not.

I do wonder how much of this phenomenon is just self-reinforcing. Sell a large variety of IPAs, and only a small number of other choices, and sure, people will tend to gravitate toward IPAs. Add on top of that heavy marketing of IPAs over other options, and people will gravitate toward them.

pale ales are frankly a lot more palatable than IPAs imo. When I looked back at the IPAs I liked, I realized most of them weren't actually IPAs, they were just pale.

but yeah I'm tired of being assblasted by overhopped west-coast IPAs. The ones I've liked, it turns out to be east coast. Even then, I'm tired of being hit over the head with hazy, juicy, mosaic, fruity, citra, etc. Very very rarely do I see these hops used effectively - Oddside Citra Pale Ale is an example of an exception.

Not sure why you were downvoted. What you say is true!

I’m a bit biased, but I’d like to see a few more Porters and Stouts.

Stouts are so good but even in a store with a large beer selection they are hard to find.

And things are better now! I feel like 10-15 years ago it truly was wall-to-wall IPAs, and if you wanted something else, you had maybe one or two choices. Now at least it seems like the IPA craze has died down a bit, though they're still well over-represented.

I personally don't like IPAs at all, and it's really frustrating. Most of the time I end up going for a cocktail or wine since the beer selection at most bars is still pretty IPA-heavy. I do enjoy that a lot of more beer-focused places stock sours and stouts, both of which I love, but I feel like most bars don't sell them, or much of them.

I really love IPAs myself, but I'm very tired of hazy styles (hazy, NEIPA, etc). My favorite hop varieties are from NZ and I can tell you they have been doing some excellent stuff with IPAs there for over a decade. West Coast and NZ collabs are also awesome.

My beer journey started in the 90s and Anchor had good distribution when such things were difficult for smaller brands, but even back then it was always the last beer in the cooler at a party. I'm surprised they lasted this long.

> the last beer in the cooler at a party.

I'm a bit surprised by this. I think a lot of my disappointment with Anchor stems from the fact that people raved about, and feted them, whereas to me they were always at about the level of a fairly mediocre British ale (sorry). But then, on the other hand, if what you're used to is Bud, Coors, etc.[0], then they're absolutely going to be a breath of fresh air, so it sort of blows me away to hear that it was so unpopular at parties.

I guess it all depends on point of view and I absolutely don't want to come off as gatekeepy about what good beer is because, as I said in my original comment, the last 20 years US brewers have really pulled it out of the bag with a ton of absolutely great beers that can stand amongst the best. I forget exactly when but I guess I had Anchor Steam Beer for the first time somewhere between 2005 and 2009, just as the craft beer movement was starting to build up steam.

Back in 2005 a friend and I took a roadtrip partway across the US, including a stop at Salt Lake City. Irony of ironies, that's where we had the best beers on the trip, in a "private members club" (literally just a bar). I particularly enjoyed a local brew called "Polygamy Porter" - a really lovely beer, and better than anything I've had by Anchor in the years since. No idea if it's still in production, although I hope so.

[0] Of all the mass produced beers in the US I do have quite a big soft spot for Blue Moon, to the point that if a bar offers it, because it's relatively uncommon in the UK, I'll often order it in preference to craftier offerings, particularly if those craftier offerings are mostly IPAs or APAs.

Why does a beer have to innovate?

the same reason as any market needs to innovate : consumer trends and goals shift with the times.

Let's take the most run-of-the-mill common bolt in the world as a product example : the 200 year old company that has changed to sell that run-of-the-mill bolt online w/ fast delivery and with a companion app has innovated without a product change.

innovation doesn't imply a product change, it implies that a company is necessarily flexible to meet the shifting demands of consumers. This can be done in other ways than shoving newer and shinier products out the door.

Not the beer, but the company. Even places like Guiness come out with new stuff like Baltimore Blonde to increase their line up and appeal to a bigger market for better scale.

It doesn’t have to necessarily, however, it does have to in inverse proportion to how much their product appeals to the market presently. If your popularity and sales, for instance, take a 50% hit, you’d better introduce some new product lines. That doesn’t have to mean abandoning your original recipe product.

> but as a Brit coming from somewhere with a by then thriving real ale scene,

Served at room temperature. Yikes.

You can buy more than Ale in the UK.

Out of all countries I've been to, New Zealand has the best craft beer scene though, imo.

Served at cellar temperature, so around 55 F, sometimes cooler.

The local reports were that Anchor had been slowly losing money for years before the Sapporo acquisition. Supposedly Sapporo was intending to use the Anchor facility to brew Sapporo locally and then eventually found out that the site wasn't really suitable or would require too much renovation. Whether this led directly to the Stone deal, I don't know (I doubt it, given relative sizes, but it may have been a contributing factor). In general, even before the Sapporo acquisition, Anchor was slowly getting pushed out of local bars by other, smaller local breweries. Once I started seeing things like Standard Deviant's kolsch or Harmonic's pilsner taking up one of the taps in smaller restaurants that only had 2-4 taps, the writing was probably on the wall.

I suspect one of the local breweries will be happy to acquire Anchor if Sapporo's going to sell it off at fire sale prices (c.f. Cellarmaker/Rare Barrel, Drake's/Bear Republic).

Oddly I only have ever seen Anchor in bottles in the Bay, but it was (and is) still really popular as a beer of choice locally.

I’m guessing it’s not the local market that’s the issue

Aldi carries them, I'd always seen them but assumed it was an Aldi knockoff brand lol.

Also worth noting that Sapporo went through with a rather disastrous rebrand that both made it less unique and harder to find on shelves.

https://sfist.com/2021/01/28/anchor-brewing-dragged-on-twitt...

The rebranding really was disastrous. Echoing other comments, as someone who bought 6 packs largely for nostalgia or to reconnect with SF from the east coast the new packaging ruined that.

Genuine question. Why is this important to note?

I don't live anywhere near this place so I may be wrong but because the article makes it sound like some small company is closing when in reality is it a division of a company that is closing. So to me it doesn't matter any more than when Coke stopped making Tab.

It matters because Anchor has been an iconic independent brand for over 125 years, and was only more recently bought by a giant multinational brand. I'm not surprised a local news outlet mainly identifies Anchor by their longevity and nostalgia value, and doesn't put much emphasis on the (IMO sad) fact that they haven't been independent since 2010.

I personally didn't care for the limited beer choices they made available to bars, but some of the things available in their tap room in SF were really good. It's a shame to see them go, though I think more in the "sign of the times" way than the idea that I'll actually miss their beer.

That was impression I got from the article as well.

For me it's the end of an era. I started drinking Anchor in the 1980s on frequent trips to Silicon Valley. This was long before microbreweries existed or were even legal in most places, with two exceptions that I'm aware of: Anchor in San Francisco and Shiner in Texas. One's choices of beer in the US included the ones made by the giant breweries and ... almost nothing else except Anchor and Shiner, which were both much better than Bud or Coors or Miller.

But today Anchor and Shiner are objectively not that great compared to modern craft-brewed beers. I still drink them mostly because of nostalgia.

Portland had Henry Weinhard's at the time, and I believe toward the late'80s at least that Sam Adams existed, and was actually a real craft microbrewery still at that time. And we could also add Rolling Rock and Yuengling in Pennsylvania to that as well. both also still around though against the standards of today or even a decade ago are barely distinguishable from mass market domestics. also some candidates that I think those familiar will question my taste as craft microbreweries, but they were alternatives, like Rainier up in Vancouver Wa.

Henry Weinhards! I miss the days when supermarkets in CA carried them in affordable 12-packs.

But I also miss when there was shelf space for a range of import beers, instead of 30 feet of IPAs with different circus colored labels...

I remember drinking Sierra Nevada at college in Chico in the 80s. they were still in a garage in town.

Boston had a few craft beers in the mid 80s - Sam Adams started in 1984 and Harpoon in 1986.

Because half the people here think this has to do with the local economy and politics of SF, when in reality it's the economic situation of the craft beer market & world economy at-large.

Or maybe because a lot of people in this scene have ties to SF so they post it in the way that you tell friends of happenings.

It's not the case that a family-owned self-contained company had to cease trading -- someone higher up in the ownership of the business decided to pull the plug. Although the inputs and outputs might arguably be the same, these are two quite different scenarios and decision-making processes.

I thought this was useful context that changed my interpretation of what was going on.

The decision to close is likely influenced by their ownership, while if it were still independent they may try to find a way to make it work on a smaller level.

Can Anchor be considered a craft brewer if its owned by Saporro?

What about the fact that I can get Stone at my corner liquor store in Rhode Island? You know, the one that doesn't have a great selection.

I remember seeing Lagunitas all over Sweden.

Makes sense.

Heineken, the world's #2 beer producer, bought them for ~$1B (half in 2015, rest in 2017).

Only if you are using to the definition of craft promoted by the Brewers Association. There are many other uses of the term "Craft Beer" that use other definitions often based on the style of beer, and having nothing to do with ownership.

https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/craft...

By this definition, it is not "craft" anymore.

It would seem that Sapporo did not do enough diligence when they bought Anchor. Anchor's facilities are far too small, their infrastructure and their team not setup to brew at that sort of scale. Stone is a much better fit for what they seem to be trying to do.

I mean they had an entirely unique process. That was their whole shtick.

They had a big multistory warehouse type brewery with fields of open air swimming pools fermenting. That's what made it steam beer. Their setup isn't like any other brewery at all. No vats for brewing!

Anchor Steam brewery is as similar as a concrete plant to other breweries.

So if Sapporo bought this for $143million thinking they could make other style of beer there and didn't even do a brewery tour omfg.

See also my comment about what Anchor employees are saying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36696764

My understanding was that the Sapporo transaction was a fire sale; is that wrong? If it isn't, it doesn't much matter what Sapporo did; Anchor was a dead brewery walking anyways.

That's the sentiment in the industry. Here's some numbers from when the sale happened.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/japans-sapporo-buys-craft-...

Fun fact is that anchor had a custom brewing setup unlike any other. Custom made pots, open air swimming pools to brew (that's what makes it steam beer) and a different process to every other brewery. It was fun to tour their brewery since it's so wildly different.

If Sapporo bought this brewery assuming they could make Sapporo premium there that's fucking hilarious. All it would have taken was a tour to understand that's not possible. Anchor Steam brewery is as different to any other brewery as a concrete plant is to any other brewery.

I didn't like their beers myself but did appreciate their unique process.

Well Stone is now off the buy list.

Thankfully San Diego and the whole region south of camp pendleton has about a hundred other excellent craft brews to choose from, including the beer that inspired Stone and out-stoned Stone even after Stone tried to copy it, Green Flash. Sadly it's nearly impossible to find these days, largely thanks to Stone.

Green Flash used to be amazing. Not any more.

https://www.brewbound.com/news/tilray-acquired-green-flash-a...

Don't see how shutting down an unsuccessful operation makes Sapporo an unethical actor.

Regarding Stone however, there's this, predating its acquisition by Sapporo:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/08/21/national-brewer-goes/

They shouldn't be. Yes, they aren't as "amazing" as they used to be, but their staple IPA's are just as good as they've always been. I'm drinking one of their Delicious IPA's right now, and I'm enjoying it just as much as I did when they first released it. The new citrus variation on Delicious is one of my favorites.

Is Sapporo a bad company?

> presumably their plan was to brew Sapporo at Anchor in a similar way

Think again. Anchor was unionized. Stone is not.

I think we can start dropping useless affectations like "it's important to note" now that ChatGPT has utterly co-opted them and revealed how meaningless they are. You could have simply stated that Anchor division is being dropped. I'm already reading your comment. You don't have to sell me on why you're noting it.

Are you kidding ? You want us to bend our language usage for ChatGPT ?

Can you just let humans write without LLMs controlling the development of our language ?

We have managed to have language without your ChatGPT.

Personally I think it’s important to note the community standards here when replying to comments. It’s better to thoughtfully discuss something than to criticize the writing style of someone else in my opinion.

That style of comment does bother me though. It implies some kind of authority or consensus. "It is important to note" should just be read as "I (and people as enlightened/ informed as myself) think".

Just tell me your opinion, and I'll evaluate it based on it's content. You telling me that it's Important only puts me on alert for some kind of bias.

EDIT: to clarify, if I'm doing my job correctly as a critical reader, I can't trust a commenter to be speaking for anyone but themselves. Phrasing like "it's important to note" serves to divert from that, because it implies that it's not the commenter's opinion, they're just spreading the gospel.

Their assertion may be correct, but I'm doing it wrong if I take their word on it just because "it's important to note." Which is why I would prefer they leave it out, because I still need to do the work whether they tell me to or not, and telling me not to makes me suspicious.

I like the affectations. It shows other users that noting something of relevance is good user behavior. "Is your comment actually worth noting??" is a good consideration to keep HN high quality. Some users will misuse it but that's very transparent so I believe it's worth mentioning when you believe something is worth mentioning (haha)

perhaps it is affections which give language its character

it's worth noting that the simplification of language was ostensibly the goal of newspeak in the book, 1984

Lazy hack English professors teaching 1A and 1B gen eds to students by prescribing robotic formulas that include appositives and qualifiers like this, in my opinion completely deserve what they are getting when the same students are now feeding them robotically written essay assignments that follow these rules slavishly.

We can start dropping useless affectations like "I think" now that ChatGPT has utterly co-opted them and revealed how meaningless they are. You could have simply stated that reading hurts you. I'm already reading your comment, you don't need to tell me that you think the things you write.

If enough of us stop adding useless affections to our comments, ChatGPT will learn to do so too. Better comments = better bots!

Did you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A... ?

The pandemic has triggered / accelarated a lot of trends

One trend I wonder about is cutting back on drinking. From a health perspective, I see more and more health officials loudly saying no healthy amount of alcohol[1]. It's simply poison.

Not that I'm aggressively for any kind of prohibition, and don't very rarely drink, but I wonder if we'll see increased awareness and more people just deciding not to drink as much anymore.

With this awareness, and the "modest amount of alcohol are actually healthy" claims debunked[2], maybe the hipster / wealthy / yuppy crowd will turn more and more away from the many many microbreweries / wineries that have cropped up in the last few decades.

1 - https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...

Huberman has a great episode too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS1pkKpILY

2 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/03/31/moderate-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsIdaQhDjwo

The trend isn't away from drinking, it's away from beer. Seltzers and other malt-based drinks have had huge growth in the past few years, mostly at the expense of beer sales, and liquor sales are up as well.

Slate's been doing a great series over the past week about these trends if you're interested: https://slate.com/tag/beer-package.

I wonder how much of this is the beer industry eating its own seedcorn by focusing more and more on super bitter IPAs that beer snobs love at the expense of more middle of the road palatable beers. The long term consequence of that plus beer snobbery looking down on light beers is that younger drinkers with sweeter palates just don't drink beer at all because the beer that is socially acceptable is too bitter for them and the beers they'd like get mocked.

So instead, they just drink White Claw.

I really despise this about the American beer industry. Your typical tap list these days is 8 IPAs, 1-2 dIPAs, 4 sours, something that contains coffee, some other weird shit (cucumber göse e.g.), and like one normal everyday lager or pilsener that isn't making some sort of personality statement and pairs well with food. Worse, this appears to be catching on among trendier bars in Europe, even in places like Munich and Vienna that have had spectacular beer for centuries and should know better.

They're there because they sell, and they sell because people like them. IMO one pilsner or lager is enough; what's the point of having a whole bar full of different beers that all pretty much taste the same? They certainly don't justify the premium pricing that these bars often charge.

Germans think their own beer is the best in the world. To the rest of us, it is reliable but boring. It's not just an American thing, Scandinavia and the UK also have a much greater variety of styles and tastes. I think all that's happening in Munich and Vienna is people are getting more exposure to this variety and are realising they like it.

As an American, I find German lagers to be just as varied and interesting as American IPAs. I didn't realize this until I moved near a pub with multiple rotating taps of German lagers.

Later, I went to Oktoberfest, and tried multiple fresh lagers a day for four days, which only convinced me further.

I am convinced, in general, that we don't notice subtle variations within styles of (beer, wine, music, etc) until we are repeatedly presented with multiple options within thay style. Of course it'll seem like all lagers taste the same if you only have one good lager to try at a time.

I think the trend is starting to turn.

I visit the Great American Beer Festival nearly every year, and there was definitely a period where everyone was all-in on relatively extreme beers: ipas, sours, bourbon-barrel aged stouts. Last year, I saw a refreshing trend towards pilsners, lighter lagers, and ambers. I feel like GABF is a bit of a bellweather for these things - west coast craft beer bars will probably take a few years to catch up, but I think we're headed in the right direction.

We need more Porters and Stouts! You’re lucky if you can even order a can of Guinness most places.

San Francisco is in desperate need of this. The only dark beer I typically see at restaurants here is Old Rasputin.

> Your typical tap list these days is 8 IPAs, 1-2 dIPAs, 4 sours, something that contains coffee, some other weird shit...

Yup. I live close to a bunch of breweries in Seattle. The taplists of the two nearest are:

Stoup:

    // IPAs:
    Mosaic Pale Ale
    Citra IPA
    Chur to Twelve IPA
    Rainbow Bubbles IPA
    Nothing Crazy IPA
    Simcoe Studies IPA
    Stoup Dog IPA
    Sir Dank A Lot IPA
    Space Garden IPA
    Paraderade IPA
    Easy A IPA

    // Everything else:
    German Style Pilsner
    NW Red
    Imperial Porter
    Cervecita Mexican Lager
    Bavarian Hefeweizen
    What a Tart Raspberry Sour

Bale Breaker:

    // IPAs:
    Field 41 Pale Ale
    Topcutter IPA
    Bottomcutter IIPA
    Daybreak Pale Ale
    Hazy L IPA
    Frenz IPA: Sierra Nevada
    Long White Clouds IPA
    Evenfall Hazy IPA
    Bubba's Brew IPA
    Bale Breaker Why the Ek-Not IPA
    Bale Breaker Tropical Penguin

    // Everything else:
    Bale Breaker Pilsner PNW Pilsner
    Dormancy Stout - Coffee
    Raging Ditch Dry-Hopped Blonde Blonde Ale
    Bale Breaker Pasketti Sauce Pilsner - Italian
    YOXI Lime Agave Ranch Water Hard Seltzer

And note that even the "everything else" category can't escape the "hop the fuck out of everything" trend. Stoup's pilsner is described as "spicy hop aroma and refreshingly dry, hop-forward finish". The Red "provides a distinctly Northwest hop character".

I get it, Cascadia grows a lot of hops. But some of us just want to taste beer and not win some macho contest to see who can choke down the most IBUs per fluid ounce.

The modern ipa trend is not to have a lot of IBUs, i wouldnt be surprised if the 'everything else' beers were higher ibu. Particularly the porters.

The modern ipas will have a ton of hops added on the cold side of the brewing process which adds your aromatics and flavors, but not bitterness.

Pils, Weizen, Helles would else could one need?

Heh, I wish there were four sours at most bars; that's what I usually find most interesting and tasty (I also enjoy porters/stouts, but rarely see much of those these days). Most bars I see don't even have sours, and if they do, it's usually only one or two, at most.

I was never the biggest beer drinker, but the lack of choice (and flood of crappy IPAs over the past couple decades) has only pushed me farther toward cocktails and wine.

You can also get the Makku Makgeolli from supermarkets now and it's quite sweet. And I also saw some other sweeter beers. I'm not a big megahops fan, so being able to have alternatives to IPAs is nice.

That's how they lost me for sure. I can go to a local bar or microbrewery and see a huge beer on tap selection, but they're all bitter artsy stuff. It's nothing like 20 years ago when there was actually a pretty broad range of flavors on the menu. Reminds me of the old Ford quote "you can have any color you like as long as it's black".

I’m an IPA fan and if I wasn’t drinking dirt cheap beer to get wasted in college I’d opt for an IPA.

But sometime in the early to mid 2010s, IPAs became so strong as to become basically undrinkable.

But this trend of IPAs didn’t just turn me off the IPAs. They turned me off beer completely.

Seltzers are also basically no empty calories. I feel like millennials (like me) and gen Z are increasingly aware of this, we don't care about the alcohol, but we do care about drinking liquid sugar or liquid bread.

And seltzers are great cause many are naturally sweetened, no artificial sweeteners either, whether they're bad or not is still up for debate I suppose.

I've certainly been moving back towards lighter beers... those IPAs are too strong. You think 5% to 6% isn't a big deal cause it seems so small, but it's a 20% increase in alcohol content. 5% - 7% is a 40% increase! If you're drinking pints, it's like adding half a shot to every beer you drink. It adds up quick.

I'm a little concerned about the phenomenon I've noticed on the shelves lately which is that every brand seems to be first, putting the ABV content in larger and larger font and a more prominent position on the label with each new offering, and that they are now starting to clock in at doppel and trippel and barley wine levels of alcohol on a regular basis. The number of casual drinking beers that have hit 10% or even 11% ABV which used to be an extremely exotic and limited availability product is insane.

the likes of Delirium tremens are now looking tame by comparison to some of these general market beers i.e. voodoo ranger and raging bitch.

I once had a homeless fella ask me to buy him a beer by name: Voodoo Ranger. Which is like 9% alcohol, sold in 16oz cans.

As casual drinkers drink less, maybe we're not the target market …

He must have had you pegged for a sucker. When bums spend their own money they are strictly economical. That means handles of vodka, fortified wine, or (maybe) something like Steel Reserve.

Or he's just a market savvy who understands his demographic. Ask your typical hipster beardo to gift you a handle of vodka and you're probably going to see the backside of an iPhone as he suddenly turns away to answer a very important call.

But ask for a borderline craft brew with ironic graphic design themes on the can and you might get shown some semblance of mutual respect as a fellow man of taste and culture who has thoughtfully given him a guilt-free excuse to go in the store and help himself to some of the same.

He did pretty well. He was our neigbborhood bum, and positioned himself outside the high-end grocer.

He expressed enjoying his lifestyle, and seemed to relish his “role” … almost leaning in to cultural stereotypes and subverting them.

I like having the ABV in big print so I can avoid the super high ones. It's a bonus for me!

Agreed. The older I get, the less I'm interested in drinking alcohol. When I do choose to have a drink, I'm definitely reaching for a Guinness (4.2% ABV).

Yeah, same here. I really only drink beer in the summer. Enjoy a good IPA but alcohol level is too high as well as calories.

Didn't the pandemic accelerate drinking, if anything?

I believe it mostly just accelerated the thinking around drinking and why we do it.

Convincing yourself you don't have an alcohol problem when you are out with friends every night is one thing. Trying to accomplish the same persuasion when you are locked in your apartment with just your cat for months on end is much more challenging.

It would seem to me a person typically has 2 paths they can explore at that point: Go deeper into the rabbit hole, or GTFO.

I think it did both - seems like a barbell distribution. Medium drinkers became heavy drinkers, others drank less - but there was a change in the distribution. Lots more non-alcoholic options popped up as well, both for purchase at home but also a lot more restaurants list NA options for fancy drinks while out to eat.

> a lot more restaurants list NA options for fancy drinks while out to eat.

I've noticed this as well, as a few of my friends don't drink, or drink very little. Even just ~5 years ago, I think it was pretty rare to see a dedicated non-alcoholic section on a cocktail menu, with several interesting, flavorful options. But now it's... well, not quite standard, but pretty common, at least where I live.

I think stopping drinking was a response to exactly that -- it got out of control, then people quit.

At least in NYC that's when we saw the first non-alcoholic "liquor" stores emerge. Because people still want a sophisticated treat to sip to mark the end of the day.

> it got out of control, then people quit

Can confirm, that's how it went for me and at least a few friends who I've talked to about it. I went from rarely drinking to heavily drinking to now drinking even more rarely. I let it get way too out of control (mostly in frequency, nothing life-destroying or dangerous to anything/anyone but my body potentially) and even after admitting it was an issue it took a while before I kicked it. Glad I did. It made me look at drinking in a whole new light, especially about just how pervasive it is in society. The joke I've heard a number of times before along the lines of "It'd never get approved if it was introduced today" feels pretty apt. Even something like marijuana seems many times safer than alcohol.

Good for you on cutting down. Alcohol can slowly increase and turn into a drinking problem. Years ago I started having a beer after work and it turned into two over time then every day. Now I may grab a lower abv beer on the weekend but the entire situation could have turned easily into a long term drinking problem.

Got any example of this new wave of sophisticated non-alcoholic liqour?

You can probably see if any of the stores mentioned here have websites with product listings:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/nyregion/dry-stores-non-a...

Try your local health & wellness shop. (you know: the place you get non-FDA supplements, expensive toothpaste, and anything Himalayan salt)

Mine has had a non-alcoholic wine + spirits section growing steadily over the past 12 months from a couple random bottles, to a full floor-to-ceiling section of 40+ options.

Around here, the rising alt is kratom.

Non-alchoholic=yes. Liquorous=no. Sophisticated? I have no idea.

It's advertised in window displays at mini marts and cigarette/vape shops, so a big no to that last one.

Kratom is believed to activate on opiod receptors.

True, maybe at home, etc. Though I'm thinking more the kind of "going out" drinking at the new hip microbrewery.

Also we have SO MANY breweries/wineries/distilleries options etc... so I think there was already a bubble.

I wonder if it depends on demographic (almost certainly does).

Maybe the “hip” crowd is losing interest in microbreweries and drinking culture, while the “struggling” crowd has increased drinking. And the types of alcohol which appeal to each is different.

Totally hypothetical here, as I have no data behind this at all.

Yes it did. Many are still on pandemic era drinking habits of drinking most week nights.

The pandemic definitely triggered an uptick in "healthier" drinking options, specifically non-alcoholic beers (that are actually good now, hard kombucha and seltzers (that are usually just as alcoholic as beer but have fewer carbs so they are "healthy").

Athletic Brewing Company out of Stamford, CT has grown like gangbusters because of it (and because their beer is legitimately good). Even the big commercial breweries have embraced the trend (Bud Light 0.0 was the only beer you could buy at the World Cup last year, and the only NA you'll find at a lot of bigger restaurants are Heineken 0.0 or Dos Equis 0.0. They are good!).

This has created a lot of problems for taproom-only breweries, as they've had to pivot towards making seltzers (very easy to do for commercial breweries, but some brewers consider it morally wrong), making beers that don't taste like beer (peanut butter chocolate milkshake pastry stouts, anyone?), and/or opening a kitchen/restaurant (completely different business, super thin margins with high operational overhead) to draw patrons in.

As a result, lots of breweries have been merging or shutting down since COVID, and the new ones that have been opening are taproom/restaurants because it's simply not profitable to be a brewery with good beer anymore.

(Interesting fact: There were roughly 2,000 craft breweries nationwide back in the heydays of craft beer in 2010 or so. There are now over 8,000 breweries nationwide! However, the number of craft beer drinkers in the US has been flat since then and actually started falling before COVID started.)

As for me, I initially entered COVID drinking two pints of beer daily; usually heavy IPAs or stouts. Because this agitated my acid reflux to levels I've never experienced, I decided to cut back to a pint or two every other day, with NAs (or nothing) filling the gap.

I've also slowed the rate at which I drink beer so that I drink less (and get less tipsy; truth be told, I love beer but HATE getting drunk).

When I drink, I have a good-sized sip every ten minutes and drink water between sips. As a result, because it takes me 30-60 minutes for me to down a pint this way, I enjoy the beer more while drinking way less per session.

Regardless, Anchor closing is huge and very sad. It looks like Sapporo EEE'd them, which is kind of surprising since they weren't really a threat to their core business.

Bud Light 0.0 was the only beer you could buy at the World Cup because Qatar has super strict alcohol laws.

Because Qatar has super strict alcohol laws and Bud has an exclusive sponsorship deal with the World Cup. So Bud Light 0.0 is the only intersection of those two requirements.

Correct. But it's better than O'Doul's (ABInBev) or nothing!

Lmao, the microplastics and particulates from ever increasing pollution will get us before the alcohol does, imo.

Plus most people I know that drink craft beers have just 1-2 at a time, it's the people that drink piss/regular beers that I see having as many as they can, pint after pint.

I could definitely see this, I also wonder if this is why many breweries are scrambling to make non-alcoholic beers. The non-alcoholic beers have become so good IMO, I usually find myself reaching for one of those on a hot day rather than the real deal.

I hope this trend continues, they really are getting good. From a business perspective too it makes sense. Now people can drink all day long

Yeah, I can't really tell the difference. I liked beer more for the taste than the buzz anyway.

Anecdotally in SF it seems like the only places that haven't been shutting down are bars. I lost many of my favorite restaurants and coffee shops, basically all the bars except one is still open.

But almost no one orders Anchor.

You mean in 2023? So many of my favorite SF dives closed during or as a result of covid: lucky 13, hemlock, whiskey thieves, bachus kirk just to name a few

This doesn't surprise me. As somebody who got deep into craft beer, I have always thought of Anchor Steam as being relatively mediocre. They were likely a breath of fresh air well until the 1980s, but my the early 1990s there was a burgeoning US craft brewing revival that had a solid brewery (and in most cases better than Anchor) in every US state. They also aren't the only old craft brewery in the US, generally.

It's unfortunate, but operating in one of the most expensive places in the US isn't something that's compatible with being mediocre in a highly competitive market.

It's an excellent beer of its type, and IMO of any beer type. It may be subtle, but not everything has to be an big hoppy IPA, or a sweet NEIPA etc.

Do you also think that Pilsner Urquell, Jever, or Budvar are mediocre?

Anchor hasn't made actual steam beer in a very long time. Their brewing operation is effectively similar to most other mid-sized batch lagers, with modifications to bring it in line with their historic flavor profile. Historic steam beers were considered, even at the time, to be low-quality, and the method of making steam beer is primarily a way to make large quantities of beer at a low cost. Modern brewing is much more efficient thanks to technical advances than historical brewing and these types of techniques are mostly unnecessary to achieve the same thing. Anchor does do a high temperature fermentation process, which is part of what made steam beer, steam beer, and this still has direct impacts on its flavor profile. The actual process of making steam beer was only necessary prior to refrigeration, with modern technology you can have a much higher volume and more controlled brewing operation even when using high temperature methods.

The flavor of the beer is heavily influenced by the yeast strain and fermentation temperature, and the primary basis of what steam beer is, fundamentally, is lager that is fermented at relatively high temperature. The yeast strains that stand up these higher temperatures tend to produce lower quantities of the types of esters that produce lasting flavors in beer, and higher temperatures tend to result in a loss of important flavoring compounds which are types of volatile organic chemicals and tend to be temperature sensitive.

There's very specific, replicable, and well-understood reasons why high temperature lagers and steam beers don't taste as good as typical low temperature lagers. I do not think your representation of steam beer is accurate, and I feel I have some authority to that claim. I am a subject matter expert on beer, a certified cicerone, and an extensive home brewer.

I am not trying to diss Anchor, I'm simply stating a mere fact, which is that their beer is mediocre. Not bad, but it is certainly not a world class beer. It may have been in pre 1980s, but the current craft brewing culture has advanced far beyond most beer drinkers expectations. For the record, I am not a huge fan of IPAs, although I will drink them, and I don't think "craft beer" and "IPA" are analogous concepts. Your reply to me reveals your biases, and indicates you didn't critically engage with my prior comment.

They really did use steam beer process fwiw. Big stainless steel swimming pools in open air and unrefrigerated. It wasn't completely outdoors but that's a fair change to the process. I think it's reasonable to consider this as steam beer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_Brewing_Company#/media/...

> high temperature lagers and steam beers don't taste as good as typical low temperature lagers

Given I like Anchor & think almost all other lagers are absolutely vile piss water, I most strongly dispute this statement

Honestly I always saw the California Common/Steam beer style as more marketing than a true style. In my head I grouped them in with amber lagers. I Totally agree that Anchor Steam was mediocre.

I agree that it is an excellent beer for it's type but steam beer as a style is dying and for good reason. Very few like that type.

The steam beer process was literally created as a way to cheaply make a lot of beer.

I like a lot of styles of beer.

I long ago put Anchor in the "meh, don't bother buying again" category.

There's a lot of new stuff to try, more all the time, and the bar for making it into the "buy again" category is damn high these days. Has been for years, really.

I agree. When I went to SF Giants games as a 415 member, you could get Anchor Pilsners for $9. It was a good deal for a baseball game, but they were competing against more interesting local beers or better beers (imo) like Pliny the Elder. Their beer was good, but the hard part is that I would always choose something else to drink.

How many readily available American Porters are better or even comparable to the Anchor Porter? I can only think of 1 (Sierra Nevada) off the top of my head.

It's a sad that you can't just sell a Porter anymore. Have to throw banana and peanut butter in it or make it 15% alcohol to get accepted by the 'craft beer' aficionados.

How about Deschutes’ Black Butte Porter [1]? It started regional but has been expanding distribution in recent years [2].

[1]: https://www.deschutesbrewery.com/news-media/2021-02-08/how-i...

[2]: https://www.deschutesbrewery.com/news-media/2021-03-22/more-...

If it’s not pretty much puréed & juiced hops or a fruit infused saison it seems the “craft” community hates it.

The craft beer community mostly seems to hate beer that is actually beer.

I've felt similarly for a while. It seems like all these smaller brewers start with an IPA, then maybe make something else later. Well, I don't like hoppy beers, and I especially don't like IPAs. I like malty dark beers like dunkels or Irish reds, and those are apparently way down on the "craft beer" clout list.

I hesitate to post this hearsay accusation, but it hasn't been mentioned in this thread and it might be important to discuss.

I talked to Anchor employees after the news about stopping the Christmas Ale and stopping sales outside of California. They told me the writing was on the wall that Anchor would be closed down and sold for scraps. They were adamant that the root issue here is Sapporo mismanagement, not anything about Anchor being an unviable business. Public Taps alone makes good money and I'm pretty sure they have owned their brewing building for a long time. They asked me to boycott Sapporo.

Of course, laid off workers are usually disgruntled at their ex-employers, but nonetheless it's an important angle to consider. The other comment about Sapporo's plans for that San Diego brewery seem to bolster this perspective.

So why do these employees not bid on the business and make it a co-op?

I met a former Anchor brewer who left and moved to at a brewery in Flagstaff AZ two years ago, they seemed pretty unhappy back at Anchor.

I don't mean to invalidate or deny this person's experience, but I think it's unavoidable that any business will have at least a few employees who aren't happy working there, for whatever reason. It doesn't have to mean working conditions are bad or that there's something wrong with the company, and it doesn't have to mean the employee is bad at their job or has unrealistic expectations; sometimes it's just not a good fit.

On the other hand, employees having the opinion that their parent company is mismanaging the business (while still sticking with them) is a little bit more compelling to me as being potentially true.

A month ago the story was limiting national distribution etc....... that escalated quickly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36301974

A shame they weren’t able to adapt to modern beer tastes. As long as I can remember, I've thought of them as the mediocre beer I’ll begrudgingly drink only if all other options are exhausted.

Part of the problem is that the steam beer process they used is a cheap and nasty process by design and they were one of the last holdouts of that style. I did a tour of their brewery where they do the open air fermenting (hence the name, steam came off it). It's a way to save refrigeration costs in brewing and makes for a poor beer.

If they adapted to modern tastes they wouldn't really be steam beer anymore. They'd be another beer brewed the same way as the others. At which point you're calling non steam beer steam beer.

>Last holdouts

They were only a "holdout" insofar as they sued anyone else who used that process. They were kind of a shitty corporate citizen and I'm not sad to see them go.

No they didn't, they own the trademark term "steam beer" and only went after the people using the trademark, not people using the same process using the generic term "California Common."

Anchor steam on tap is very good IMO

In the bottle it seems to lose everything for some reason

I never buy it in the bottle, but I get it on tap

But I’ll admit there are a zillion options that are similar or better now. The market changed a lot

The obvious follow up is I think they must not have kept up with the times

I’d guess bottles are the majority of the business and I think that product is inferior

I don’t know what the other breweries do, maybe it’s just freshness and inventory, or a better or more consistent bottling

—

I should also add that I lived in SF, so it’s definitely possible that most customers out of city think of them as a bad bottled beer brand, whereas I had a different impression

Other breweries do cans. Easier. Cheaper. Tastes better. Keeps the art fresh.

>Other breweries do cans. Easier. Cheaper. Tastes better. Keeps the art fresh.

Canning has significant upfront costs that mean that for small operations it's not easier or cheaper. At the scale of Anchor, it's viable, but does require a significant investment in retooling.

I thought anchor steam is pretty good. What beer do you like?

I guess Sierra Nevada was a big influence early on, and since then I’ve come to appreciate a large variety, from more hoppy offerings from the likes of Russian River, Lagunitas, Stone and recently Almanac, to lagers from Pacifico and Dos Equis, several prominent Belgian brands, and some local sours. I enjoy a wide variety, but always thought of Anchor Steam as bland, malty, and mediocre, on the same low level as Fat Tire, to name a comparable brand.

That said, I’ve only had it bottled, never on tap.

>always thought of Anchor Steam as bland, malty, and mediocre, on the same low level as Fat Tire, to name a comparable brand.

So was it bland or malty? Those seem mutually exclusive to me.

I'm generally a fan of steam beers/california commons because of the very dark malt forward flavor. It was one of my favorite beer styles to brew and drink.

Do you like Munich dunkels?

Bland in a flavor complexity sense, and malty as in too sweet. I guess a better way to say it is too sweet for its sourness/bitterness.

>the mediocre beer I’ll begrudgingly drink

>I guess Sierra Nevada

This is pretty gutting as someone who lived in SF for a few years and drank quite a lot of Anchor Steam beer during that time. It's a shame to see such an iconic brewery closing down. I did a tour last year and loved the history and seeing the old copper brewing tanks that they still used. Shame they couldn't keep up with the modern tastes and amount of microbreweries popping up. RIP

> Anchor was established in San Francisco in 1896 and was the country's first craft brewery.

So what definitions are being used here to claim this? Yuengling is quite a bit older, for example.

Yeah the article is a little muddled; it’s better to understand Anchor as the oldest existing brewery that makes what we think of as craft beer.

When it started there were many small, local brewers making a variety of beers. Prohibition and changing tastes killed off most of the breweries — it helped to be above a certain size so you could profitable brew, say, malted syrups during prohibition. Those that remained after prohibition ended quickly consolidated — that’s how we got the oligopoly off Bud, Miller, and Coors.

Consolidation continues for decades afterwards of course; the brands that got rolled up into the conglomerates included a number of light lager breweries. What distinguishes Anchor from Yuengling and others is Anchor made something other than a light lager — they made steam beer, a warm-fermented lager that has some ale characteristics.

I would categorize it as “proto-craft,” since the real craft movement started in the 80s with Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams; Anchor was an inspiration, a holdover, and an anomaly.

(Most of my sources for this post are Celebrator beer magazine and a series of books I’ve read, but I don’t have them at my fingertips so I may have some specifics slightly wrong here, caveat emptor for reading random internet comments.)

Yuengling's flaghsip is an Amber Lager, not a light lager in the same vein as bud/miller/coors. Also, they didn't introduce their amber until the 80s. Prior to that their main beer was their porter.

I don't think there is a coherent definition of craft breweries that includes Anchor but not Yuengling

Yuengling is "Craft" per the BA and older then Anchor. Author is wrong.

Makes sense, thanks.

Its just plain incorrect. As you note, Yuengling is older (1829) and is considered a craft brewery by the Brewers Association. Given that this is just a local news website, I just assume they're not exactly doing a ton of work verifying the press release

The definition of a craft brewery from the brewer's association is more practically stated as "The same size or smaller than Sam Adams".

Yuengling is not considered craft beer by a lot of people because it’s made mainly from adjuncts, in their case corn. It’s only recent that the Brewer’s Association changed the definition to include them, but most people in the industry disagree with it. Yuengling is just a cheaply made lager that’s really no better than Budweiser.

But, that term doesn’t have an official definition so they still can claim the title.

> Yuengling is just a cheaply made lager that’s really no better than Budweiser.

Now, maybe in terms of production methods, but I've consumed plenty of Bud and absolutely gallons of Yuengling, and Yuengling stands apart. It's not fancy, but it's good.

College parties in Rochester would usually include Labatt, Molson, Yuengling, and Genesee. Only the Yuengling was worthy as a drinking beer; Labatt and Molson were just for shotgunning & pong, and Genesee was for joking about what it did to your bowels.

Eh. A lot of people have very distinct expressed preferences for one mass market lager over another ("I only drink Coors!")and then in blind taste tests completely fail to pick them apart at any better a rate than chance. I'm always skeptical when people tell me one adjunct beer is better than another.

I'm not saying you're for sure wrong, certainly some beers are distinguihsable from some other beers, but you might consider having someone do a blind taste test with you some day just for fun. I've made a number of friends angry when they tell me they like one particular vodka and I do a few triangle tests and show them that they can't actually tell one from another.

Yuengling sure tastes better than most "craft" beers to me.

They had to be famously saved by a rich guy as a vanity project earlier in their life.

Perhaps it’s time to admit it’s just not a viable product, especially now that the US beer scene is so expansive.

Famously saved in a way that kicked off the American craft brewing movement. Fritz Maytag brought a modern microbiological perspective to American brewing, reintroduced dormant American styles, validated that there was a market for such beers, and deliberately helped other breweries brew great beer rather than expanding faster than he felt comfortable to meet demand. It was a viable business when Maytag decided to retire in 2010.

And I think the economy has a great effect. Craft beer is expensive, and when everything else has doubled in price, it becomes a luxury. Between that and competing for shelf space when the oligopoly has crammed the shelves with faux "craft" beers, I'm expecting a shakeout in the craft brew business - a local brewery closed up at the end of May with about a week of warning and no reason why, even though the taproom always had customers.

Some* craft beer is expensive. My extremely non-scientific survey found that Anchor Steam is roughly the same price as Shiner, or Boulevard Wheat, and only a couple dollars more than a six pack of Budweiser. It's no Founder's KBS prices, but that beer fills a different niche anyways.

The craft brewers that are all making the same N-times-hopped IPAs might die off, and for the better.

>the taproom always had customers.

I know the owners of a local craft brewery. When they opened 7 years ago it was ONLY the taproom. Nowadays their money is almost entirely in distribution, taproom is only like 5% of their sales.

I'll be surprised if none of the bigger beer companies ends up buying it for the brand and history alone. But maybe it doesn't have as much name recognition as I thought.

Anchor Steam had its place, 20+ years ago. It had a long-standing tradition of being a beer that stood the test of time, head and shoulders above the usuals of the time.

The problem is they failed to continue to keep up with the times as the proliferation of truly fantastic beers hit and later dominated the scene. Take a look through their flagships; they look more like what any new and likely-soon-to-close brewery will start with (a hazy, a west coast, a porter, a lager, and an ale) rather than a brewery steeped in 100+ years of history and brewing mastery.

Anchor Steam may have had the brand recognition necessary to survive in an overcrowded market say 10 years ago, but now people are flocking to the breweries themselves and are not as tied down into a single brand as they used to be.

It's sad but in the same way that any long-standing brand that couldn't keep up with the Joneses and went out of business is sad. Not really in any other way.

They are already owned by a big company - Sapporo.

I've heard that Sapporo has been trying to sell it for couple years now. Nobody's buying.

Simply put, par for the course when it comes to what little of San Francisco's soul is actually left. Slowly dismantling the weird to make way for the boring.

Saporro has mismanaged this from the very start, they had no plan when they bought the company and will almost certainly turn to victim blaming and crying foul amidst their successful unionization effort in 2019.

The idea that in the absence of Anchor we will be at a loss for "soul" breweries is somewhat hilarious. Over my 40+ years of life the number of breweries in America has exploded 100-fold. In San Francisco and the immediate area craft breweries are almost a menace. There must be 5000 of them in California. If you insist that your beer be sourced from your immediate political jurisdiction, you could get beer from Fort Point Beer Co, a large and successful independent with statewide distribution.

I'm talking about the city, not the brewing scene. The brewery is a staple of the city and it is a shame to see it shutter in such a fashion. Looking at the rest of the scene and not what the brewery represents is intentionally missing the point of what I was trying to say. The city is being dismantled, bit by bit, being replaced with facsimiles of what people think San Francisco is supposed to be instead of letting the city be.

You're using the brewing scene as a proxy for the city, so it's completely fair to dispute your claim about the brewing scene, and extrapolate that to the rest of the city.

SF has been having problems -- big problems -- sure, but there's still a lot of good here.

I'm bummed Anchor is disappearing, but not because I particularly liked their beer. Maybe iconic brands shouldn't stick around if they don't really bring all that much interesting to the table anymore.

As a long-time resident I think that most of the city needs to be scraped flat and redone, so this does not particularly bother me. Nostalgia does not befit any place.

Anchor is being dismantled by a corporate entity ten thousand miles away in Japan and arguably its dismantlement was foretold, and inevitable, when it was acquired. The time to grieve over it was when they sold it.

There's a decent argument to be made that there's a qualitative difference between a 100+-year-old institution and a mid-2010s local brewery of which there are, as you point out, untold similar ones all over the country.

Of course Anchor didn't exactly maintain its own "soul" on the way down to this end, selling to larger owners and eventually foreign ownership, and more recently abandoning their old logos and packaging. So it's not totally playing fair hearkening back to their proud history and all that.

I think it's sad that such an iconic brand is shutting down, but Anchor's "weird" actually made their beer a fairly boring product. There are much more interesting options all over the place, though, like everywhere else in the US, there are still too many IPAs, to my endless disappointment.

Meanwhile, I have two great small breweries within an easy walking distance of my home in the Dogpatch (not far from where Anchor is/was): Harmonic Brewing and Olfactory Brewing (the latter of which just opened a few months ago).

It's always a shame when an iconic, century-old brand disappears, but it's not like Anchor's beer was all that unique or interesting.

I've only been to Olfactory a couple times but as far as I'm concerned it's a massive improvement over Triple Voodoo. I do like Harmonic as well, it's just even farther out of my way than Olfactory. Basically the only time I ever went to Anchor was when I was walking home from Dogpatch and didn't feel like stopping by one of those other places first.

Entirely unrelated but I turned off support for DRM'd videos in firefox yesterday and this crappy news website now just has a firefox banner for "You must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page" instead of having some video player desperately chasing me around the page trying to get me to play it.

Photo of Steve Jobs with an Anchor Stream c1984 https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/steve-jobs-dr...

I wonder what will happen to the term "Steam Beer" now.

If I remember correctly, after the end of prohibition Anchor claimed ownership of the term "steam beer" even though it is a name of a style of beer and forced any other brewery to use the names "Steam Ale" or "California Common".

With Anchor being shuttered it would be great for Sapporo to release ownership of the style name so the BJCP can update the category back to the historically accurate title.

Sad news. I drank a ton of it back in the 90s (back then at many bars in CA, it was either that or Sierra, or else megabrew swill). But I generally liked both of them and still do. I did a tour of the brewery then and it was a fun time, and "sampled" plenty of good beer there too. At one point the tour guide asked a brewer what he was making and he said "Sierra Nevada Pale Ale" and everyone chuckled, as there was a rivalry at that time.

Steam is a lager beer which at least in the craft segment seems to have lost out to highly hopped IPAs (which are also often very high ABV) in the US. Anchor did have liberty IPA which was pretty good but perhaps not really exceptional; hard to stand out when everyone is doing the same thing. I still think Steam is pretty unique flavorwise, you can really taste the Cascade hops they use whereas other brewers often tend to drown them out. Never really found another lager like it.

They also made the "small beer", which was nice low alcohol beer (~3%) derived from the brewing of the (much stronger) old foghorn. I haven't seen it in stores for a long time though as I now live on east coast and its harder to get anchor here.

I kinda saw this coming after their ghastly label redesign with the sharp yellow and blue, it made it look like a completely different product on the shelf, and anyone who was inspired to try it due to the new label was most likely underwhelmed.

I'm not a beer guy, but as I understand it many craft beers are actually made through contract brewers. That suggests that beer can be, well, "reduced" to a recipe that can be replicated. I've heard that Samuel Adams uses contract breweries, and, in fact, a fellow who used to work with us had his own private label that he went and got a bunch of cases brewed, made up a label, found a bottler, and sold locally.

Now, I know water quality is an important factor, but even then I've heard of pizza restaurants that have analyzed New York water (apparently an important aspect of New York Pizza) to the point of having it replicated (adding back proper mineral amounts, etc.).

So, I don't know how much of Anchor Steam is purely based on location.

If, however, it can be "just a recipe" suggests that it can be returned at any time if the corporate parent deigns it worthy to bring it back.

> I'm not a beer guy, but as I understand it many craft beers are actually made through contract brewers.

Same thing with spirits like whiskey. There's massive distillery named MGP that makes a ton of whiskey but they don't market or sell any direct. They sell to companies that want to sell a whiskey brand. They're known as a "production contractor". This way you can bring a product to market but you don't have to vertically integrate the production of it.

Honest question: how did this SF brewing company survive prohibition? If it really is 127 years old, it must have existed during prohibition. How was it not shut down then? I'm curious.

Slightly less than 10% of US breweries surcived the 13 years of prohibition, mostly through a) being large companies that owned a lot of assets and real estate, and b) successfully pivoting into anything from ceramics production to non-alcoholic foods like ice cream/tea/coffee/juices to the sale of yeast and malt syrup that people could use to homebrew beer.

And prohibition had been a long time coming, some companies like Anheuser-Busch had been preparing for several decades.

According to their website: "Prohibition effectively shut Anchor down in 1920. There may have been a few “activities” during Prohibition and the era of bootlegging, but there is no record of Anchor Brewery doing anything—legal or illegal—during this time. After Prohibition ended in April 1933, owner Joe Kraus began brewing Anchor Steam Beer after a thirteen year hiatus. As luck would have it, the Brewery went up in smoke the following February. He re-opened Anchor in an old brick building with a new partner, Joe Allen, just a few blocks from where the historic Brewery is today."

https://www.anchorbrewing.com/about-us/the-anchor-story/

A lot of American brewers survived by switching to non-alcoholic beverages or selling the raw ingredients for home brewing and winemaking operations under the guise of 'baking ingredients' or the like. Some sold practically non-alcoholic 'near beer'/kvass-type malt drinks, but it wasn't especially popular.

The grape growers dehydrated grape juice and sold it in bricks as "instant juice", with instructions: "After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine."

https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bric...

Some p[eople I knew purchased a really huge victorian in the Castro some years ago - and in the bottom floor was an original speak-easy with full bar and pool table and booths etc...

I would assume that there were many of these speak-easys in SF during prohibition...

Sadly they immediately remodeled and took the speak-easy out.

> Sadly they immediately remodeled and took the speak-easy out.

Well sure, gotta get that basement unit... bar & pool table out, vinyl flooring & Ikea in!

Yes, that's a good thing. Constantly navel gazing at the past is a bad thing.

https://apnews.com/article/us-army-ukraine-russia-ammunition...

Enough of this nonsense. Those who remember history are doomed to relive it. We're going to build the future, man, and it's going to be better, and we'll remember our past in our museums. The world matters. The present matters.

> The obstacles the U.S. faces in ramping up production can be seen at the Scranton plant.

> The factory — built for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad just after 1900, when the city was a rising coal and railroad powerhouse — has produced large-caliber ammunition for the military going back to the Korean War.

> But the buildings are on the National Historic Registry of Historic Places, limiting how the Army can alter the structures.

I went down this rabbit hole on National Beer [1] day this year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Beer_Day_(United_Stat...

Some breweries pivoted to selling near-beer and other NA beverages or foods during Prohibition, or just closed for those years and restarted afterwards.

Yuengling famously sold ice cream during Prohibition, and apparently still makes it in small batches.

They started selling at scale 1 or 2 days after prohibition ended. This is logistically impossible if they were truly shut down during the entirety of prohibition.

I got to do a tour of the place, it was really fun. It's located near Potrero Hill. I can't say anything about their cost structure but having a location that's in SF probably has some disadvantages. But, there are a lot of other craft brewers in the bay area that are quite good. Drake's, Faction come to mind. You don't have to go much further afield to find Bear Republic, Russian River Brew Co. I would not consider Lagunitas craft, maybe someone else with more beer lore could weigh in.

The only rigorous definition of "craft" is the one the brewer's association maintains, and they tweak it frequently to keep Sam Adams in. Lagunitas was a craft brewer by that definition until they sold to Heineken. There was a period of a few years where a number of old-guard regional craft brewers sold to international conglomerates.

For my money while the brewery may not be craft anymore, the beer still is. Or, if someone calls Lagunitas IPA a craft beer I'm not going to correct them - I might if it was blue moon or leininkugels, say.

There’s 50+ smaller breweries sprinkled across the North Bay within 1.5hrs of SF. Civilization, Fog Belt, Cooperage, Iron Ox, Henhouse, Barrel Brothers, Moonlight, Shadyoak… just to name a few.

The comically small town of Winters has two - Berryessa Brewing and Hoobies. Both great. Closer to Dixon/Davis, Ruhstaller is a blast - especially on weekends.

Time to go out for a beer tour!!

Sort of went the way of Pete's Wicked Ale. Interestingly, Anchor was really bad beer before Maytag bought the company, updated the equipment, and started using quality ingredients. You have to give him credit for taking it from 0 to being influential in developing the American craft beer market and making Anchor something you could reliably find nationwide.

I guess time sort of passed it by. So many more interesting brews are around today. But saying that, I always sort of enjoyed an Anchor. Sad to see it go.

I loved this beer when I was in my twenties. My college-age daughter and her friends, however, don't even drink beer. They drink this fruit-flavored hard seltzers.

Really surprising to me how long it took for the seltzers and cocktail in a can stuff to take off. Especially among college age people my informal survey has around 70% of people preferring their flavor yet until like 5 years ago the only fruity beverage widely available was mikes hard lemonade. And not only do most young people prefer the taste, seltzers are much cheaper to make than beer and require much less expertise. I guess it was just a tradition is hard to break thing.

IIRC it had a lot to do with figuring out a manufacturing process that involved brewing to be taxed as a malt beverage, instead of a hard liquor.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/how-tax-policy-gave-...

Mike's Hard Lemonade fills basically the same ecological niche that cider does in the UK, and does it really well because American-style lemonade is great.

Canned cocktails are generally pretty bad, and hard seltzers are fine but does anyone really enjoy the flavor? I feel like they're just a convenient low-calorie way to get drunk.

> I feel like they're just a convenient low-calorie way to get drunk.

Well yea, but for a lot of people that's what beer is too, and when given the choice between light beer and seltzer they prefer the seltzer.

Canned cocktails like cutwater have gotten incredibly popular in the last year or so here. I suspect because they're 15% alcohol and the same size as a beer so many people can just drink one and be good for the night.

I don't think beer could be called low calorie. There's probably no higher calorie way to get drunk.

Maybe this has to do with bars wanting to sell cocktails to these consumers and they thought popularizing seltzers would lose them money? I'm not in the industry so I'm not sure how close of ties the Bar Industry has with Alcohol Companies but I'm sure there is a lot of lobbying back and forth.

Ironically, back in the 90s Anchor Steam was just about the only good craft beer I could get in Japan.

Many this really sucks. Many a cold summer day did I spend sipping a pint of Anchor at Kennedy's on Columbus, at the Albatross in Berkeley, and at various other water holes around the city and in the East Bay. Feels like my 20s just died.

Are there any others breweries that make a “steam” style beer that you’d recommend as a replacement?

I’ve always enjoyed Anchor Steam but never really found a suitable alternative.

This beer always reminds me of NOFX - Scavenger Type

I miss the days when you could get a pint for 13 quarters.

And as someone who left SF almost a decade ago, I just checked and was very surprised to see that Bottom of the Hill is still open.

I went on a tour of their facility about a year ago. Really beautiful place with lots of history. I'll be sad to see it go.

As with most brewery tours, we got to try some of their beers afterwards. One of the ones I tasted was the best sour I've ever had in my life. I asked where I could buy it and they said they were never going to sell the stuff.

Interesting discussion here, I enjoyed reading it. I was sad to learn of Anchor’s demise today. It’s rare a thread appears on HN that’s relevant to my work! If anyone is curious about the current state of the beer market from someone who earns a living at it I may be able to provide some insight.

From SFChronicle:

> In 2019, dissatisfied workers successfully formed a union for the first time in Anchor’s history

Anchor and Fritz Maytag were a real inspirations to a lot of early craft to microbrewery people. I've known a number of people who can say that the revitiliztion of Anchor was one of the reasons they started breweries..and their influence has influenced others.

I will miss that Xmas ale that comes in a magnum. Great to bring to a holiday party.

https://defector.com/anchor-brewing-was-san-francisco is another look at the situation.

I hadn't really kept up with that side, but Anchor had a distilling operation as well, with a rye whiskey that was unusually 100% malted rye (Old Potrero).

From what I can see, that's now owned by Hotaling, and not affected.

I believe the distilling operation was separated from the brewing operation when Sapporo acquired it (I think maybe they had to remove the still through the roof with a crane?). I used to drink some with a guy who worked on the distilling side and tried a few of the Old Potrero variants, but none of them were really to my taste. Certainly unusual and worth trying, though.

I’ll miss you anchor porter…

100%, that beer was great!

i am kind of late to discussion, but. i just walked through beer isle in safeway and in this hellscape of beer flavored carbonated water and triple hazy sour watermelon ipas ,anchor beers (lager, pilsner, beer) are the only one that are drinkable by those who don't love local craft madness.

they will be missed

Props for being the original craft beer, but I never liked it.

It's not the craft beer even though the article states such

Won’t miss Steam, but Anchor Porter is quite good.

Liberty ale was my first IPA and still holds a dear place in my heart. At least Sierra Nevada seems to be thriving still

127 years? Is it an overflow problem?

If their flagship had actually been a steam beer, I'd be sad, but as it was just a decent lager there are a billion replacements.

Why aren’t we celebrating the market efficiency?

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