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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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