"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.
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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.
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.
Well the problem is that Anchor was never cheap.
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