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SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

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Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#131

Post by floren »

samstave wrote: post #48
sparrish wrote: post #34

Honest question: how did this SF brewing company survive prohibition? If it really is 127 years old, it must have existed during prohibition. How was it not shut down then? I'm curious.

Some p[eople I knew purchased a really huge victorian in the Castro some years ago - and in the bottom floor was an original speak-easy with full bar and pool table and booths etc... I would assume that there were many of these speak-easys in SF during prohibition... Sadly they immediately remodeled and took the speak-easy out.

> Sadly they immediately remodeled and took the speak-easy out.

Well sure, gotta get that basement unit... bar & pool table out, vinyl flooring & Ikea in!

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#132

Post by ifyoubuildit »

alex_young wrote: post #76
Solvency wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can start dropping useless affectations like "it's important to note" now that ChatGPT has utterly co-opted them and revealed how meaningless they are. You could have simply stated that Anchor division is being dropped. I'm already reading your comment. You don't have to sell me on why you're noting it.

Personally I think it’s important to note the community standards here when replying to comments. It’s better to thoughtfully discuss something than to criticize the writing style of someone else in my opinion.

That style of comment does bother me though. It implies some kind of authority or consensus. "It is important to note" should just be read as "I (and people as enlightened/ informed as myself) think".

Just tell me your opinion, and I'll evaluate it based on it's content. You telling me that it's Important only puts me on alert for some kind of bias.

EDIT: to clarify, if I'm doing my job correctly as a critical reader, I can't trust a commenter to be speaking for anyone but themselves. Phrasing like "it's important to note" serves to divert from that, because it implies that it's not the commenter's opinion, they're just spreading the gospel.

Their assertion may be correct, but I'm doing it wrong if I take their word on it just because "it's important to note." Which is why I would prefer they leave it out, because I still need to do the work whether they tell me to or not, and telling me not to makes me suspicious.

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#133

Post by pastor_bob »

tristor wrote: post #94

This doesn't surprise me. As somebody who got deep into craft beer, I have always thought of Anchor Steam as being relatively mediocre. They were likely a breath of fresh air well until the 1980s, but my the early 1990s there was a burgeoning US craft brewing revival that had a solid brewery (and in most cases better than Anchor) in every US state. They also aren't the only old craft brewery in the US, generally. It'…

How many readily available American Porters are better or even comparable to the Anchor Porter? I can only think of 1 (Sierra Nevada) off the top of my head.

It's a sad that you can't just sell a Porter anymore. Have to throw banana and peanut butter in it or make it 15% alcohol to get accepted by the 'craft beer' aficionados.

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#134

Post by crazygringo »

sfpotter wrote: post #110
softwaredoug wrote: post #107

The pandemic has triggered / accelarated a lot of trends One trend I wonder about is cutting back on drinking. From a health perspective, I see more and more health officials loudly saying no healthy amount of alcohol[1]. It's simply poison. Not that I'm aggressively for any kind of prohibition, and don't very rarely drink, but I wonder if we'll see increased awareness and more people just deciding not to drink as mu…

Didn't the pandemic accelerate drinking, if anything?

I think stopping drinking was a response to exactly that -- it got out of control, then people quit.

At least in NYC that's when we saw the first non-alcoholic "liquor" stores emerge. Because people still want a sophisticated treat to sip to mark the end of the day.

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#135

Post by nunez »

softwaredoug wrote: post #107

The pandemic has triggered / accelarated a lot of trends One trend I wonder about is cutting back on drinking. From a health perspective, I see more and more health officials loudly saying no healthy amount of alcohol[1]. It's simply poison. Not that I'm aggressively for any kind of prohibition, and don't very rarely drink, but I wonder if we'll see increased awareness and more people just deciding not to drink as mu…

The pandemic definitely triggered an uptick in "healthier" drinking options, specifically non-alcoholic beers (that are actually good now, hard kombucha and seltzers (that are usually just as alcoholic as beer but have fewer carbs so they are "healthy").

Athletic Brewing Company out of Stamford, CT has grown like gangbusters because of it (and because their beer is legitimately good). Even the big commercial breweries have embraced the trend (Bud Light 0.0 was the only beer you could buy at the World Cup last year, and the only NA you'll find at a lot of bigger restaurants are Heineken 0.0 or Dos Equis 0.0. They are good!).

This has created a lot of problems for taproom-only breweries, as they've had to pivot towards making seltzers (very easy to do for commercial breweries, but some brewers consider it morally wrong), making beers that don't taste like beer (peanut butter chocolate milkshake pastry stouts, anyone?), and/or opening a kitchen/restaurant (completely different business, super thin margins with high operational overhead) to draw patrons in.

As a result, lots of breweries have been merging or shutting down since COVID, and the new ones that have been opening are taproom/restaurants because it's simply not profitable to be a brewery with good beer anymore.

(Interesting fact: There were roughly 2,000 craft breweries nationwide back in the heydays of craft beer in 2010 or so. There are now over 8,000 breweries nationwide! However, the number of craft beer drinkers in the US has been flat since then and actually started falling before COVID started.)

As for me, I initially entered COVID drinking two pints of beer daily; usually heavy IPAs or stouts. Because this agitated my acid reflux to levels I've never experienced, I decided to cut back to a pint or two every other day, with NAs (or nothing) filling the gap.

I've also slowed the rate at which I drink beer so that I drink less (and get less tipsy; truth be told, I love beer but HATE getting drunk).

When I drink, I have a good-sized sip every ten minutes and drink water between sips. As a result, because it takes me 30-60 minutes for me to down a pint this way, I enjoy the beer more while drinking way less per session.

Regardless, Anchor closing is huge and very sad. It looks like Sapporo EEE'd them, which is kind of surprising since they weren't really a threat to their core business.

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#136

Post by bob1029 »

sfpotter wrote: post #110
softwaredoug wrote: post #107

The pandemic has triggered / accelarated a lot of trends One trend I wonder about is cutting back on drinking. From a health perspective, I see more and more health officials loudly saying no healthy amount of alcohol[1]. It's simply poison. Not that I'm aggressively for any kind of prohibition, and don't very rarely drink, but I wonder if we'll see increased awareness and more people just deciding not to drink as mu…

Didn't the pandemic accelerate drinking, if anything?

I believe it mostly just accelerated the thinking around drinking and why we do it.

Convincing yourself you don't have an alcohol problem when you are out with friends every night is one thing. Trying to accomplish the same persuasion when you are locked in your apartment with just your cat for months on end is much more challenging.

It would seem to me a person typically has 2 paths they can explore at that point: Go deeper into the rabbit hole, or GTFO.

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#137

Post by dreamcompiler »

rco8786 wrote: post #58
krustyburger wrote: post #21

It’s important to note that Anchor as a division is being shut down as a cost-saving measure by its owner Sapporo, a transnational, publicly-traded corporation. Sapporo says they have tried to find a buyer for Anchor, but to no avail. Meanwhile Sapporo recently purchased Stone Brewing in San Diego and are beginning Sapporo production there while still making Stone beers. If Sapporo hadn’t also bought Stone, presumabl…

Genuine question. Why is this important to note?

For me it's the end of an era. I started drinking Anchor in the 1980s on frequent trips to Silicon Valley. This was long before microbreweries existed or were even legal in most places, with two exceptions that I'm aware of: Anchor in San Francisco and Shiner in Texas. One's choices of beer in the US included the ones made by the giant breweries and ... almost nothing else except Anchor and Shiner, which were both much better than Bud or Coors or Miller.

But today Anchor and Shiner are objectively not that great compared to modern craft-brewed beers. I still drink them mostly because of nostalgia.

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#139

Post by golemotron »

VohuMana wrote: post #130
softwaredoug wrote: post #107

The pandemic has triggered / accelarated a lot of trends One trend I wonder about is cutting back on drinking. From a health perspective, I see more and more health officials loudly saying no healthy amount of alcohol[1]. It's simply poison. Not that I'm aggressively for any kind of prohibition, and don't very rarely drink, but I wonder if we'll see increased awareness and more people just deciding not to drink as mu…

I could definitely see this, I also wonder if this is why many breweries are scrambling to make non-alcoholic beers. The non-alcoholic beers have become so good IMO, I usually find myself reaching for one of those on a hot day rather than the real deal.

Yeah, I can't really tell the difference. I liked beer more for the taste than the buzz anyway.

Re: SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

#140

Post by uoaei »

sfpotter wrote: post #117
bartread wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is an important point but, with that said, I'd suggest that perhaps the reason Anchor were struggling is they didn't really innovate. Rather they rested on the laurels of that 127 year heritage. Certainly a very personal opinion but the first time I tried Anchor beers sometime in the noughties I was underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong: they're certainly better than Bud, Coors, etc., but as a Brit coming fro…

I'm a little surprised Anchor didn't do better. I personally got worn out by all the craziness and experimentation in the craft brewing scene. Really unique IPAs or sour beers were fun for a while, but after a while, I realized I just wanted something reasonably good and predictably normal, i.e. a Normal Good Beer. It seemed like Anchor was delivering on this, but maybe there were enough other options that they just…

The recipe changed after the acquisition by Sapporo. Fans of the original Anchor Steam didn't like the new taste and stopped buying. So it faded into the background with the other ~3-5 domestics being served at a given bar.

Lots of people talking out their ass here, clearly none of them spend any time in SF dives talking to other patrons.

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