Anchor Brewing Co. Will Reopen to a Beer Industry It Won’t Recognize

It’s been nearly three years since Sapporo USA (SUSA) unceremoniously shuttered Anchor Brewing Company, and two almost to the day since the billionaire founder of Chobani, Hamdi Ulukaya, scooped it off the scrap heap with the stated goal of returning the historic firm to its former glory. It has not yet reopened for business. But lately, there are definite signs of life at Potrero Hill’s beloved brewery, which has thrilled San Francisco homers and diehard steam beer fans across the country. As Anchor’s new ownership hoists the 155-year-old business back into operational form, it’s worth reexamining how the storied old firm got here, and how it stands to rejoin the craft-brewing industry it more or less created as it navigates some very choppy seas.

For the first year, Ulukaya made no meaningful moves with the business, despite initially talking a big game about moving fast and brewing things. “I don’t want to sit around,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview timed to his purchase announcement on May 31, 2024. But as the San Francisco Standard reported on the one-year anniversary of Ulukaya’s Anchor acquisition in May 2025, the Art Deco plant produced nothing but weeds for the intervening 12 months.

“[T]he brewery has been quiet, apart from making occasional headlines over noxious odors emerging from its depths,” wrote reporters Kevin Truong and Astrid Kane, referring to an August 2024 incident in which old wastewater tanks left behind by Sapporo USA started raising a serious stink in the San Francisco summer. “There have been no public announcements on what’s next, and the facility is largely bereft of activity, other than a skeleton crew of maintenance workers.” As I wrote here at Hop Take the week after the Standard’s big no-updates update:

A downside of putting your hopes in the hands of a “good” billionaire is that no matter how much they insist they care about you, your culture, and your future, they’re on their own agenda. Which is fine; everybody is to some extent. But when you’re worth $2.4 billion — as Forbes estimates Ulukaya to be — you can afford to do whatever you want with whatever you want, whatever anybody else says. It strains credulity to imagine Ulukaya could not afford to hire back Anchor’s union workers and prioritize the idled brewery’s renovation. Whether the process is going slower because he decided not to is hard to say. But the fact that he decided not to says something on its own. Namely, a brewery that was the sum of its beers, history, and people — that belonged to the city of San Francisco as much as it ever did Maytag — is now his to do with as he pleases, and when.

A year later, Forbes estimates Ulukaya’s net worth at $12.4 billion, an increase so staggering I cross-referenced it with Bloomberg, which, yep, ballparks it at $12.1 billion. The boon is due to an October 2025 announcement of a $650 million fundraise that would push Chobani to a $20 billion valuation, not turbo-charged sales of Chobani or La Colombe (which the firm acquired in late 2023 for $900 million). But before looking it up, I already knew for sure the spectacular spike in Ulukaya’s wealth didn’t come from booming sales of Anchor Steam, because the brewery still ain’t making it.

But about those signs of life. In January 2026, I reported at Fingers on social-media posts from a third-party technician showing himself at work inside Anchor and checking out its unmistakable copper kettles. Later that month, a longtime tipster in the neighborhood texted to let me know the brewery was “maintained, looks less abandoned. Painted over the murals and graffiti that were on the walls.” It took receipt of a grain delivery. Locals spotted steam curling over the sandstone building, an almost papal portent.

“Still no official word yet on opening or brewing,” Mike Gutierrez, owner of MG Draught Service, the company whose Instagram Stories from within Anchor had gotten the attention of another tipster, who’d then flagged them to me. But: “They are definitely making some progress.”

Progress at Anchor! Ring the bell! Call the governor! For so many drinkers across the country, the pioneering brewery’s Sapporo-induced demise in 2023 felt like losing a parent, or at least a pretty chill uncle. Not to mention Anchor’s workers past and present, some of whom still call me from time to time to see if I’ve heard anything they haven’t about the reopening timeline for the brewery they adore. Some of that love is unrequited: Despite multiple attempts to make contact with Ulukaya, who claimed to want to rehire as much of Anchor’s old staff as possible, its old union couldn’t get a meeting. “We’ve since moved on,” Patrick Machel, a former production worker, Anchor Union shop steward, and organizer of Anchor SF Cooperative, told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Jess Lander this past week. “That was a huge chapter in our lives. It’s unfortunate that we got the cold shoulder.”

Just as quickly as the anticipation swelled, though, it dissipated. I spent the spring reporting on Republic National Distributing Company’s collapse, not Anchor’s triumphant return. But last week, Lander set off a new speculation cycle when she reported that crews from a pair of brewing-industry contractors were working in and around the plant. The Chronicle staffer also did some LinkedIn sleuthing and confirmed that Ulukaya’s family office had secured permits from the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control to produce beer and import beer, wine, and spirits. Intriguingly, Lander also got some corroboration on a semi-open rumor in the trade that Shaun O’Sullivan, the co-founder of the Bay Area’s closed-last-year 21st Amendment Brewing Co., was consulting for Anchor in some capacity. (I had reached out to O’Sullivan via Instagram and email in January about this, but he never responded; Lander got four “Bay Area beer industry sources” on background about his alleged gig.)

Shortly after the Chronicle’s piece hit the wire, a tipster reached out to me with another shred of the paper trail. As I reported earlier this week at Fingers, in late April, Anchor applied for and received at least two certificates of label approval (COLAs) from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) — one for an Anchor Steam keg collar, and another for a bottle of Old Foghorn, the brewery’s venerable barleywine. The lawyer who filed for the approvals on Anchor’s behalf, Dan Kramer of Dan Kramer Law Group, declined to comment further on the situation when I reached him by phone Monday, and Anchor itself has not responded to an emailed request for comment. It’s also important to note that COLAs don’t really expire; there’s a lot of runway there. But it’s more circumstantial evidence that the pride of San Francisco is very much on the comeback trail.

Turn your attention now to what Anchor is coming back to. The craft brewing industry was already well in the throes of its second shakeout by the time SUSA cut bait, but it has only gotten worse since. Craft beer volume tracked by the Brewers Association declined 1 percent year-over-year in 2023, just under 4 percent in 2024, and 5 percent in 2025. Proudly independent firms are forming collectives and selling off brand rights to anybody who’s buying. (Anchor’s one-time frenemy in SUSA’s ill-fated portfolio, Stone Brewing, itself just got shunted over to Firestone Walker.) It’s only a matter of time before Voodoo Ranger Imperial India pale ale overtakes the fading Blue Moon in sales; Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. just overtook the once mighty Boston Beer Company on beer volume, the latter having staked its claim on fourth-category stuff like Lytt. Closures outpaced openings last year; spirits-based ready-to-drinks are outpacing everything this year. If SUSA misread the moment in 2021 with a universally panned Anchor rebrand that replaced its flagship’s unmistakable hand-illustrated label with a retina-searing get-up reminiscent of Twisted Tea — and given the outcome, I don’t think there’s any serious argument to the contrary — Ulukaya and company have an even less legible text to parse as they plot its return.

Yes, the aforementioned Anchor Steam COLA is in the style of the classic old label, rather than the garish new one. And no, that’s not a guarantee of success. My reporting shows that SUSA’s management of the company was riddled with missteps, but the hard truth is that this is no country for old breweries, and Anchor was not in terrific shape even before its new owner started screwing up. It was selling most of its key brands in California while maintaining a national footprint. Its forays into IPAs — the most lucrative style at retail, and for many years the one most instrumental for getting distributors’ attention — were a mixed bag. Much of its cachet came from its anachronistic aesthetic and century-spanning legacy, which are very thin reeds on which to hang a brewery in this market. (Just ask Leinekugel’s, or, hell, Schlitz.)

Ulukaya would be a fool to try to extend the brand, Tilray-style, into ripoffs of segment-leading hard teas, non-alcoholic beer, and so forth. That dog won’t hunt. But what dog will? A deep and disciplined return to California-only distribution of a few core beers might. Indeed, SUSA, before it threw in the towel, flirted with that idea, and workers who formed the Anchor SF Collective in hopes of buying the brewery out of liquidation and running it as a cooperative saw wisdom in such a scheme. It’s a very narrow lane for a guy who knows from scaled consumer packaged goods brands like Chobani and La Colombe.

Maybe Ulukaya just wants to run Anchor at a loss and bask in the Bay Area’s goodwill. Lord knows he has the money. But San Francisco’s steam brewery has few obvious moves as a brewery meant to pencil out as a going concern. Sustainable growth for a heritage brewery with a sub-scale facility, three years of missed placements, and a beer-flavored-beer portfolio? In this beer industry? It’s not impossible. But it’ll be a heavy lift.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

What is a brewery? Most people would describe it as a business that sells beer for money. But Armed Forces Brewing Company, the military-themed outfit to which the state of Virginia inexplicably extended over $300,000 in potential subsidies to bring it to Norfolk in 2023, has never been exclusively in that trade. In its short existence, the pander-brand has also functioned as a vehicle for collecting investments from credulous (and unaccredited) Troop Respecters, doing slopaganda at the Mexican border, and bilking vendors and staff as it blamed the “local woke mob” for its own closure. When I last checked in on AFBC, it was contract-brewing a few beers for sale via a liquor store in Florida. But this past week, the company filed a $50 million lawsuit in state court alleging that some of its Norfolkian antagonists’ protests over its whole deal crossed the line into illegal. One hole has already emerged in the 27-page filing. But so have at least five new donors to the company’s “Legal Justice Fund.” Isn’t that what it’s really all about, when you think about it?

📈 Ups…

Seattle’s beloved Cloudburst Brewing is selling to fellow Evergreen State firm Bale Breaker Brewing as the former’s founder prepares for an international move… Brooklyn Brewery has some brand new digs in Williamsburg and they look extremely slick… Anheuser-Busch InBev is making multi-million-dollar investments in its Ohio and Virginia plants…

📉 …and downs

Pabst Brewing Co. is discontinuing Schlitz, ending the 177-year run of “the beer that made Milwaukee famous” … RNDC’s operation in Oregon is laying off 146 workers as it prepares to sell to Columbia Distributing… Everybody is still trying to make hard soda happen, and now everybody includes Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., which is launching “Shred” in its California and North Carolina gift shops… Bauhaus Brew Labs of Minneapolis announced plans to close, citing in part the deadly federal occupation of the Twin Cities…

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