There’s a Showdown Brewing Between Anchor’s Old Workers and Its New Owner

The Willy Wonka parallel is hard to miss.

There’s the enigmatic foodstuff virtuoso. The iconic factory sitting sadly silent in the middle of a bustling city. The adoring public, watching closely for any activity within. Look, some steam curling from the roof! Lo, signs of workers operating within! Surely any day now the doors will once again swing open to restore delight to a fallen world.

When Anchor Brewing Company finally reopens for business after a Sapporo-induced hiatus that has lasted nearly three years — and it appears poised to do so sooner rather than later — it won’t be Oompah-Loompahs working the copper kettles. But who will it be?

The San Francisco icon’s new-ish billionaire owner, Hamdi Ulukaya, has been extremely tight-lipped about his plans on Potrero Hill ever since he scooped up the property and intellectual property in June 2024. At the time, he told The San Francisco Chronicle he wanted to get the storied steam brewery chugging again as soon as he gets “alignment with the community and the people who worked there a long time.”

With steam occasionally curling from the legendary Art Deco plant, work crews spotted in its parking lot, and permits and label approvals stacking up a paper trail, some of Anchor’s former workers are now asking the self-styled “anti-CEO” to practice what he preached.

“Movement is happening and we wanted to be first in the public conversation to say that we wanted our jobs back with the union we fought hard for fairly,” Patrick Machel, a former production worker and shop steward for Anchor Union SF, organized by brewery workers in 2019, tells me in a recent text exchange. Together with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 6, which had represented the organized workforce in collective bargaining until Sapporo sent the 155-year-old brewery to the liquidator’s auction block in August 2023, Machel and other erstwhile employees still loyal to Anchor went public earlier this month with their call for a callback.

Their request is fairly straightforward. “Workers were thrown out of the jobs they loved and the stability they had fought so hard for” when Anchor unceremoniously shuttered three years ago, reads a petition published on Change.org by Evan McLaughlin, a lead organizer with the international. Ulukaya, the document continues, should “offer all workers their jobs back and to sign a neutrality agreement with ILWU Local 6” promising not to interfere with rehired employees’ future organizing efforts. The union is hosting a “drink-in” in San Francisco next week to rally public support for its cause.

Anchor did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment sent to its media address.

It’s possible that Ulukaya has kept silent on all things Anchor because he’s busy tending to the rest of his consumer-packaged-goods empire, which began with Chobani in 2005 and expanded with the acquisition of La Colombe Coffee Roasters in late 2023. This is big business, and it’s booming: In October 2025, the company announced a $650 million fundraise that would send its valuation north of $20 billion and its founder’s own net worth north of $12 billion. The fact that billionaires are broadly unaccountable to social, legal, and economic forces is bad for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with the ongoing closure of the Bay Area’s most beloved brewery. But as I argued on Anchor’s first Uluka-nniversary (?) last year, it will reopen on its new owner’s agenda, no matter how you — or its former workers — feel about it.

To be clear, though, its former workers seem thrilled about the uptick in activity on Mariposa Street.

“First and foremost, I was excited that steam beer can exist again,” says Nate Dias, a former production worker, describing his initial reaction to the observable progress at the brewery. After two years grasping at “hearsay” and “fake news” about Anchor’s future, the signs of life this spring renewed the Bay Area native’s optimism that it would actually have a future. He hopes to be a part of it. “If Anchor can come to the table and have meaningful discussions with the union and the workers? Two of those things happening simultaneously will make me happy,” he says.

It would be fairly uncommon, in this dismal era for American labor law, for an owner of a company to negotiate with a union, or even sign a neutrality agreement, when he or she isn’t required by law to do so. (The opposite is probably more true, in that it’s fairly common for owners to stonewall on collective bargaining even when they are required to do so.) But the former Anchor workers campaigning for reinstatement, some of whom were involved in the quixotic bid to raise enough money to acquire Anchor themselves and run it as a worker cooperative, believe they have a win-win proposition with the mysterious yogurt mogul who ultimately won out.

“You’d at least be getting some people who know how parts of that place work,” says Ryan Poulos, a San Francisco native who was working at the brewery when it closed, in a recent phone interview. “I think it’d be very difficult to train new people on how a lot of this older equipment works, unless you had … people that actually knew it pretty intimately.” As Sapporo was cutting bait in 2023, Anchor’s then-still employed workers told me the Japanese conglomerate had struggled with efforts to modernize the plant. A year later, wastewater tanks that hadn’t been properly decommissioned at the idled brewery were emitting a stench so rancid that it made the news. The vagaries of operating the half-century-old plant are real and significant, and Anchor’s old workers understand them better than anyone. “Anybody can learn it, but [we would] definitely have an upper hand” on running the plant on Day One, Dias says.

Beyond technical expertise, the displaced workforce has a deep and abiding passion for Anchor’s legacy that has endeared them to the local market, if not yet Ulukaya. One of the reasons many of them are interested in returning to the brewery — which was no paragon of stability before Sapporo took over, and now faces a prolonged downturn in the craft-beer segment it helped to launch — is because work there had an almost vocational quality. “All of us, and I think I can speak for all of us, care[d] about the beer and working for Anchor as an institution,” says Dias.

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard again and again from the brewery’s former staff in reporting on it for the better part of the decade. McLaughlin, the ILWU organizer, knows it well. “This job meant so much to a lot of people,” he says in a recent phone interview, citing an unnamed former worker who told him they’d move back to the Bay Area just for another chance to work at Anchor. “This place is so connected to where I grew up, like I was genuinely happy to just be working there,” adds Poulos.

Evidence abounds that wealth is no great predictor of intelligence, or vice-versa. But if Ulukaya is smart, he will just give Anchor’s former workers their jobs back, sign a neutrality agreement, and become a San Francisco hero. He has the money. They have the skills. Anybody with even a passing interest in the beer business has been thirsting for Anchor’s ascent from its post-Sapporo purgatory, and its former workers can help with the hoisting. What Ulukaya might spend in higher labor costs — unions reliably improve wages, and the money has to come from somewhere — he stands to recoup in lower turnover, fewer f*ck-ups, and the adulation of a city and an industry desperate for good news about steam beer. And if it winds up as nothing more than a break-even business, who cares, man? That’s what the fortune is for!

This is good business, but it’s shrewd strategy, too. The clear path forward for Anchor is as a deeply local operation. San Francisco is a union town, and beer — yes, even beer as special as Anchor Steam — is a volume business. Will people forget if Ulukaya snubs the brewery’s former workers in favor of newcomers with no allegiance to the place, or one another? Maybe. Probably. Memories are short. But so is the shelf space in America’s beer aisle; so are the open handles on America’s tap towers. Ulukaya’s gobs of yogurt money can bring Anchor back, regardless of the workforce. But in order to return it to its rightful place in America’s beer pantheon, and keep it there, he’ll need to give people a reason to reach for it again and again.

Even Wonka’s golden-ticket gimmick can’t drive repeat business like good beer and goodwill.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

As we just discussed, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s marketing leaves a lot to be desired these days. But not for the elite media-knowers behind the Cannes Lions, apparently! The scene-y French advertising festival named Michelob Ultra’s parent firm its Creative Marketer of The Year on Monday, making it “the first company in history to receive this accolade three times.” Taste is a matter of taste (and also, presumably, sponsorship budgets), but one has to wonder if the judges took into account ABI’s gross and ongoing silence in the face of the bigotry recently broadcast by nine-figure media partner Ultimate Fighting Championship — or if the Lions were simply too cowardly to grapple with it.

📈 Ups…

Tickets are now on sale to the 2026 Great American Beer Festival, which has switched to an outdoor venue this year… Boston Beer Co. finally settled those janky noncompete lawsuits with former employees from a couple years back… The Trump White House sent a letter to Congress asking for relief from the impending THC ban that the president himself signed into law less than a year ago… Following the wild success of Deschutes’ x Costco collaboration, Rhinegeist announced plans to rebrand its Cheetah beer as Super Lager for a partnership with Kroger…

📉 …and downs

Diageo did a bunch of layoffs this week, and Beer Marketer’s Insights is reporting that Guinness’s lead was among the pink-slipped… I regret to inform you that ABI is clout-farming again, this time with the big dumb ComBar… One-time Louisville leader Goodwood Brewing and Spirits filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy… In the second week of World Cup, non-host states didn’t see nearly the on-premise boost as the hosting ones, and draft growth has slowed, per BeerBoard…

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