"The stake through the heart of Anchor was the pandemic," Sam Singer, a spokesman for the company, said by phone on Wednesday, noting that 70 percent of its product had been sold in restaurants and bars. In 2021, Anchor Brewing tried to adapt, rebranding and bottling and canning more of its beers to sell in grocery stores. But those changes "couldn't make up for the significant loss of sales," he added.
In a last-ditch attempt to stay afloat, Anchor limited sales of its beer to California, and stopped producing one of its products, a Christmas ale.
[...]
After Anchor was acquired by Sapporo, workers spoke out about what they described as inadequate pay and unfair working conditions, and voted to unionize in 2019.
I'm fuckin heartbroken about Anchor but Sapporo drove the oldest craft brewery in the country into the ground and now the worst people in the city are blaming the union. Solidarity to the incredible @anchorunionSF and sending co-op vibes your way💕
Anchor has always been very mid beer, but it could have otherwise continued being mid beer forever. Capitalism killed it on purpose. The company that bought it did not know what they were buying.
I found some after they unionized to try and it was not that great. However, mid beers are important because they are cheep and nice to have when you are chilling with your friends. But yeah it fucking sucks that capitalism killed it.
It pains me to say this but the local San Francisco craft beer scene is very weak, at least compared to what I grew up with
I think that's true lots of places. The Bay still has my favorite brewery (Rare Barrel) but I think the craft beer industry in general is not doing great.
I feel like that's in general becoming true. There's a bunch of craft breweries by me that all have like 1-2 good to decent beers and everything else is just there to check the box or not to style at all.
But it could also be I'm getting more snobby because I'm a Homebrewer so I just have a different mentality when trying beer.
Seemed popular enough in San Francisco for... 127 years.
I'm sure Sapporo's strategy of automizing in a way that cut productivity in half, doing an expensive pointless rebrand, cutting a popular Christmas line, and then aggressively scaling back sales nationally had no impact on sales.
Must have been the flavor.
they definitely seemed to think they could turn it into something more modern and hip just by tweakign the branding and opening a taproom (edit: I don't know if the taproom was always there but it looked new). Can't have been cheap to have the amount of real estate they did in SF.
If they owned the land for as long as the company had been around, then it was incredibly cheap due to Prop 13.
yeah the main brewery they've owned since the late 70s it sounds like. Not sure about the lot across the street with the taproom but definitely at least prior to 2010
TrueAnon recently spent most of their 300th episode discussing Anchor and were very critical of the decision to stop Christmas ale, and of the rebrand
According to
, who led the union push when he worked there, the management was incredibly incompetent.As much as I like giving brace credit, I think he was involved in the union push but was not any part of the leadership of that movement.
He was part of the drafting committee and on the team that served the papers up to management. I'd say he was as involved with leadership as anyone else, though probably no named role.
ik its just a beer but I got kinda invested after the trueanon eps about the union campaign and shit, and I really did like their beer fairly well, I visited the brewery once when I had a chance even, since I can't buy it where I live...Was going to be in the neighborhood in a couple of weeks, and planned to swing by.
I'm going to see if I can get one last pack of anchor steam so my friends who've never had it can try it
im not sure if i were a company spokesman that i would compare my company to a vampire
I just want to point out that it's definitely not the union's fault, other Saporro plants are unionized and the whole goal of the union was to get unscheduled as needed labor even close to 2/3rds what they were being paid at other plants, in a city that is one of the most expensive to live in on earth.
This is 100% Saporro killing off a 'less profitable' branch. Not 'not profitable' just not something that they feel is worth their time to invest money in for the returns they are getting, and it's probably completely on their shitty management for not knowing how to properly interact with the community.
This is capitalism, baby.
TBH ill never not be salty that they trademarked "steam beer" and sued everyone who made it.
It wasn't covid, it was your shitty business practice, even from a capitalist perspective these people are just losers who were kept afloat by low interest rates
