Last call: Anchor Brewing bids adieu, and another piece of SF dies

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Anchor Brewing, the 127-year-old San Francisco institution, had the temerity today to announce its abrupt demise — at an hour when palliative use of its products would be socially unacceptable. 

It did so via statements fed to the press by spokesman Sam Singer, the “Master of Disaster,” the man to call if your zoo loses a tiger that rampages through the premises and savages a child; your fast food chain serves up e. coli burgers or your refinery blankets the surrounding town with a layer of toxic soot. 

Or, clearly, if you’re abruptly pulling the plug on a brewery that grew alongside this city — and now, apparently, has been outgrown by this city. The few remaining workers reporting to work at a site ever more resembling a ghost ship were summoned to an all-hands meeting this morning and informed that their services were no longer required. Anchor is scuttling the ship; San Francisco, in more ways than one, has dropped Anchor. 

It was, for those following the health of this brewery from within and without, a Kurt Cobain moment: You were shocked. You were not surprised. Only last month, the company announced the abrupt curtailment of the unique Christmas beer produced annually since 1975. Anchor also in June announced it would cease marketing and distribution in the other 49 states. 

The decision to cancel Christmas was jarring; the high cost of devising the unique yearly recipe and purchasing its ingredients was cited as a rationale, but news reports today noted that a small quantity has already been produced — meaning those so-called costly ingredients were already paid for. That beer, along with everything else at the Mariposa Street brewery, now stands to be liquidated. 

As for the decision to retreat from the rest of the nation, that can only now be seen as the business equivalent of applying a tourniquet to stanch a hemorrhaging wound. It didn’t. 

“I was hoping it would be any news but this,” said former Anchor brewer Garrett Kelly, who now brews beer in Atlanta for New Realm. Like many former Anchor workers who left their hearts at Mariposa and De Haro, he’d been lulled into a false sense of hope by recent reports that, today, it would be announced that a local craft brewer would be obtaining Anchor. 

Instead, Sapporo, which picked up Anchor for pennies on the dollar in 2017, has entered into a bankruptcy-like situation in which a third-party assignee will oversee the dissolution of the brewery’s vats and machinery and doorknobs and leftover coasters. 

Some manner of 11th-hour savior could still ride in — and it wouldn’t be the first time; washer-dryer scion Fritz Maytag famously bought the outfit in 1965 when it was teetering on the edge of oblivion, and proceeded to bleed losses for a decade. 

But Fritz Maytags are few and far between. Kelly and his former colleagues on anguished text chains are hoping against hope for a similar resurrection. 

But hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. 

The ultimate demise of Anchor Brewing, like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, came gradually, then suddenly. Certainly Maytag’s 2010 decision to sell the brewery to a group of local money guys could mark the beginning of the descent that led to today’s smoking crater. 

The 2017 sale to international fizzy yellow beer conglomerate Sapporo — at the alarmingly low price of $85 million — also looms large.

“They saw it for its geographic location. Its production capacity,” said Kelly. “It’s difficult, in the process of large acquisitions and mergers, to see beyond the data on your spreadsheets.”

And the data Sapporo saw was not good. These are the times that try brewers’ souls: Young people are buying ready-to-drink cocktails and hard seltzer and legal cannabis, and Anchor suffered, along with the rest of the industry. Sapporo’s specific plans to brew Sapporo Premium also turned out to be incompatible with its new acquisition. Anchor’s 1705 Mariposa St. brewery was erected in 1950; former brewer Kelly notes that its old-school, West German-built components were a poor fit for the additions of corn syrup and other steps required to brew Sapporo Premium. 

So, last year, Sapporo kicked down $165 million for San Diego’s Stone Brewing and is cranking out Sapporo Premium there. Singer has said that the acquisition of Stone played no part in the shuttering of Anchor. Well, okay then.

It now seems safe to say that a number of poor decisions were made, both by Sapporo and by Anchor’s prior ownership. The decision to chase market share — to, at one point, brew the ridiculous total of half-a-dozen different IPAs — was, in the end, self destructive; it was a “How do you do, fellow kids?” moment. Anchor did not make enough headway with a new generation of beer drinkers, and, in the process, diluted and denigrated its established brand. 

This misguided attempt to rebrand reached its apogee in 2021 with a disastrous remaking of the beer’s venerable livery. Gone were the hand-painted labels generations of San Franciscans grew up with, in favor of a new color scheme of highlighter yellows and Jolly Rancher sour apple greens meant to “pop” on a supermarket shelf. 

That was embarrassing; it felt like Sean Connery putting on a tutu and appearing in a buddy movie with 12-year-old ballet students. It was, again, a move that did little to make headway in an ever-competitive new market, while diluting and denigrating the established brand. A facile attempt to chase trends, instead of playing to Anchor’s strengths, turned out to be the worst possible move. And it also turned out to be a death knell for a beer that was increasingly moving out of supermarkets. 

“They told us during covid they were revamping their draft beer line, and they put a lot of their eggs into that,” said former Anchor brewer Jon Ezell. “And when the restaurants closed, that was a huge blow.” 

Gradually, then suddenly. Not with a bang, but a whimper. 

So, these were misguided moves. But the rationale behind them isn’t difficult to parse. Anchor, for good or ill, had picked up the reputation as a “Dad Beer.” Tastes changed, and Anchor’s attempts to do so failed. The brewery in 1976 blew beer mavens’ minds with Anchor Liberty, the first modern India Pale Ale. By 2019, Anchor workers were telling me that boxes upon boxes of Liberty were gathering dust in the brewery’s cellar. It wasn’t moving. By that time, Liberty was so quaint it was hardly considered an IPA at all when compared to the insanely hoppy Toxic Masculinity Ales it bequeathed. 

Anchor arguably birthed the nation’s craft-beer movement, but was, in the end, drowned by the torrent of hoppy ales it inspired. In a reverse of the Greek myth of Cronus, it was Anchor that was devoured by its own children.

“If you’re looking for a villain, it would be the hazy IPA that squeezed out classics like Anchor Steam,” said Ezell with a wan chuckle. “And don’t forget Liberty. You can’t find that anywhere. I loved that beer. It’s a beautiful beer. It set the stage for the modern IPA, and now it’s just a footnote.” 

Sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a beer is just a beer. But this hardly feels like that time. Anchor is a beer that, for San Franciscans of a certain age, is synonymous with this city; locals old enough to describe a mild inebriate as having “half a heat on” might also use “steam” as a euphemism for beer itself. 

The death of a beloved local institution — set upon by a massive out-of-town corporate entity, alienated from its longtime base, and abandoned like a dried husk when no longer cost beneficial — also hits harder. There are deeper meanings here. 

The steam-brewing process is essentially unique to this city. It instills something of a terroir in Anchor Steam; brewers in 2019 told me that even crafting Anchor Steam in the shadow of the Giants’ ballpark, rather than five minutes away at Mariposa and De Haro streets, would induce detectable changes. 

In that way, Anchor wasn’t just made in San Francisco. It was made by San Francisco. There was, among its aficionados, a sense of ownership ultimately ill-placed in a corporate asset to be bought, sold, liquidated. 

“At the end of the day,” said Kelly, “it’s the intangibles that made Anchor special. It’s those things people will miss the most.” 

There is nothing quite like that first sip of a chilled Anchor Steam on a chillier San Francisco day. This was a beer made for us. Until it wasn’t. Pour one out for Anchor. Pour one out for San Francisco.