What’s the Point of a New Billionaire Owner if Anchor Still Hasn’t Reopened?
The collapse of Republic National Distributing Company’s California division at the beginning of this month is the biggest story in the booze business, for reasons I’ve reported at length here and elsewhere. But amid the epic, multibillion-dollar disintegration of the country’s second-largest distributor, another story about a different beverage-alcohol firm that was mismanaged into insolvency in the Golden State hit a dubious milestone. It’s been a year since a consumer-packaged-goods mogul acquired Anchor Brewing Company off the liquidator’s bench and saved the erstwhile San Francisco icon from the proverbial scrap heap. The fact that the dismal tenure of Sapporo USA (now Sapporo-Stone Brewing, or SSB) didn’t wind up as the final chapter in America’s pioneering steam brewery is an unalloyed good. But with Anchor still idle a year later, its next chapter is turning into a cautionary tale about taking even “benevolent” billionaires at face value.
Recall the recent history. It feels like a decade since I broke the news here at VinePair that Anchor was closing its doors and halting its copper kettles after a century and a half of brewing in the City by the Bay, but in reality, it’s only been a couple years come this July. Following the various managerial mistakes that SSB made while it owned the firm from 2017 to 2023, there was some initial hope that an American craft brewer with a better grasp of the domestic market and a better vision for Anchor’s place within it might scoop up the beloved brewery. When none did, the firm entered a pseudo-bankruptcy proceeding known as an “assignment for the benefit of creditors” (ABC). This is right around the time when I started getting a lot of inbound emails from search-fund bros and family-office financiers asking about buying Anchor. Its declining sales notwithstanding, there was a groundswell of interest in buying one of the country’s oldest breweries — to reposition it for the future, to reopen it and run it at a loss for the nostalgia value, to bulldoze its magnificent sandstone Art Deco edifice on Potrero Hill and build a bunch of condos, you name it.
The most ambitious effort to acquire Anchor, and the one that felt best to root for, was the one some just-axed Anchor workers started shortly after SSB transferred the brewery’s assets to the liquidator. The grassroots effort, led in part by former members of the Anchor Brewing Union, eventually grew to include all the trappings of a properly certified cooperative. Anchor SF Cooperative was able to raise nearly half a million dollars, no mean feat for former brewery workers with nothing but a business plan and a dream of stewarding the company they loved into the next generation. “We’re figuring it out as we go along,” Patrick Machel, one of the cooperative’s co-founders and a former union shop steward at the brewery, told me in September 2023. Alas, the longshot bid wasn’t to be, and Anchor SF Cooperative signaled it wouldn’t bid on the firm outright in January 2024, pivoting in hopes of partnering with the eventual buyer to “keep some key decisions in the hands of workers,” as it put it in a wistful Instagram post at the time.
From there, a lull. With each passing month, it seemed more and more likely that Anchor — more precisely, the collection of assets formerly known as Anchor — would be divvied up and sold off for parts. Then, in June of last year, an unlikely new steam-beer champion emerged: Hamdi Ulukaya, the billionaire founder of Chobani Yogurt and a newly minted enthusiast for Anchor’s rich cultural and zymurgical traditions. “It was embedded in San Francisco’s fabric. … It’s the essence of San Francisco, it’s the essence of this country that we can always bring it back stronger,” he said in a slick video announcing his terms-undisclosed acquisition. (The underlying real estate cost $9.9 million, according to The San Francisco Business Times.) In a gauzy interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, he indicated he was keen to fire the plant back up: “I don’t want to sit around.”
In the year since, I’ve periodically checked in with sources in San Francisco to see whether Fritz Maytag’s old brewery was showing signs of resurrection. I heard about the foul smells emanating from the wastewater treatment tanks SSB had apparently left behind. I heard it had hired a new brewmaster, not previous brewmaster Dane Volek, who moved into an unrelated field after Anchor’s 2023 closure. I heard the taproom remained boarded up, much to my sources’ chagrin. In other words, I didn’t hear much, and it’s kind of my job to hear stuff. So I was relieved when the San Francisco Standard dropped a big one-year-anniversary piece last week by Kevin Truong and Astrid Kane to learn that I wasn’t the only one.
“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,” they reported last week. The pair managed to track down a couple locals who had interacted with Ulukaya earlier this spring; those folks told the outlet the billionaire had indicated he was still committed to the project. The reporters also turned up a brewing license that was awarded earlier this year to the president of his investment firm, Shepherd Ventures. Thin soup, that, especially as Ulukaya’s Chobani has made a bunch of investments and acquired Daily Harvest in May 2025. “To Potrero Hill neighbors, former employees, and anyone who misses their pint of Anchor Steam, the silence has been deafening,” Truong and Kane wrote.
When I first broke the news of Anchor’s closure, I joked somewhere (maybe the website formerly known as Twitter?) that it presented an opportunity for an ultra-rich tech overlord in the Bay Area to buy some much-needed goodwill with their fortunes. Ultimately, that’s more or less what happened, except the eventual billionaire made his bucks in CPG, not CRM, AI, or SaaS. As I wrote in Hop Take in June 2024, “It’d be one of those win-win-wins of capitalism that I’m always hearing about” if the self-styled “anti-CEO” was to rehire Anchor’s union workers — who absolutely loved the place, as I learned in hours of interviews dating back to 2019, when they first organized with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. “Ulukaya locks in all this goodwill for a small premium that’s laughably insignificant to his vast and viscous fortune; Anchor workers get their union salaries and benefits back, and the opportunity to go back to work at what, for many of them, is a nearly vocational endeavor; and San Franciscans (and the rest of us) all get to go back to enjoying Anchor Steam without another thought.”
Unfortunately, that’s not more or less what happened. A year ago, Machel estimated to Hop Take that the experienced workforce could’ve had the place up and brewing within a month. Instead, the union workers who weathered the storm of SSB’s chaotic mismanagement, then went through the arduous process of establishing a cooperative and fundraising some decent dosh against impossible odds, have mostly moved on, as Machel told the San Francisco Standard. How could they not? They’re not billionaires, after all. And still, no steam beer flows from Mariposa Street.
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.
Is that better than condos? Sure, I guess. But Anchor and its old workers deserve better still.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Craft beer exporters have a very tough go of things at the moment, what with President Donald Trump’s pointless, probably corrupt trade war and rising anti-American sentiment abroad. But CraftCanTravel, an exporter of Kona Brewing Co. and other Craft Beverage Alliance brands to Pacific Island markets, alleges its problems are more acute: namely, macrobrewer Anheuser-Busch InBev encroaching on its exclusive territory and deliberately undercutting it on price. The latest turn in this ongoing saga adds up to death “by a thousand cuts” for CraftCanTravel, its lawyers claimed in a U.S. District Court filing last week. On the other hand, ABI — a global firm with a market capitalization of ~$130 billion — argued in its own filing that this was a “small and isolated” “error” and “there is no cause for the court’s involvement” because the exporter should have just called them. What’s a little oopsie among friends, really?
📈 Ups…
After 30 years, Colorado’s venerable, but recently debt-burdened Ska Brewing, has new family owners… And in other Rocky Mountain State M&A news, roller-uppers Wilding Brands scooped up Station 26 Brewing in Denver… Congrats to excellent name-haver Prinz Pinakatt on the promotion to Tilray Brands’ new beverage lead… National restaurant employment hit a record high in May, adding jobs for the third consecutive month…
📉 …and downs
Constellation Brands’ chief executive cited the “immigration question” (phrasing!) as a factor in Modelo’s flattish performance this year… Tilray Brands’ shareholders approved a reverse stock split to prevent the firm getting delisted from the NASDAQ, but implementation is paused… National Beer Wholesalers Association chief economist Lester Jones said the U.S. beer market still hasn’t sunk to its “post-Covid market equilibrium”…
The article What’s the Point of a New Billionaire Owner if Anchor Still Hasn’t Reopened? appeared first on VinePair.