SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by zerocrates » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #207

deadballcretin wrote: post #190

Simply put, par for the course when it comes to what little of San Francisco's soul is actually left. Slowly dismantling the weird to make way for the boring. Saporro has mismanaged this from the very start, they had no plan when they bought the company and will almost certainly turn to victim blaming and crying foul amidst their successful unionization effort in 2019.

The idea that in the absence of Anchor we will be at a loss for "soul" breweries is somewhat hilarious. Over my 40+ years of life the number of breweries in America has exploded 100-fold. In San Francisco and the immediate area craft breweries are almost a menace. There must be 5000 of them in California. If you insist that your beer be sourced from your immediate political jurisdiction, you could get beer from Fort…

There's a decent argument to be made that there's a qualitative difference between a 100+-year-old institution and a mid-2010s local brewery of which there are, as you point out, untold similar ones all over the country.

Of course Anchor didn't exactly maintain its own "soul" on the way down to this end, selling to larger owners and eventually foreign ownership, and more recently abandoning their old logos and packaging. So it's not totally playing fair hearkening back to their proud history and all that.

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

#242

Post by alexanderscott » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

asielen wrote: post #124

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…

Anecdotally in SF it seems like the only places that haven't been shutting down are bars. I lost many of my favorite restaurants and coffee shops, basically all the bars except one is still open. But almost no one orders Anchor.

You mean in 2023? So many of my favorite SF dives closed during or as a result of covid: lucky 13, hemlock, whiskey thieves, bachus kirk just to name a few

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

#243

Post by saltcured » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

ChainOfFools wrote: post #162

dreamcompiler wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

Portland had Henry Weinhard's at the time, and I believe toward the late'80s at least that Sam Adams existed, and was actually a real craft microbrewery still at that time. And we could also add Rolling Rock and Yuengling in Pennsylvania to that as well. both also still around though against the standards of today or even a decade ago are barely distinguishable from mass market domestics. also some candidates that I…

Henry Weinhards! I miss the days when supermarkets in CA carried them in affordable 12-packs.

But I also miss when there was shelf space for a range of import beers, instead of 30 feet of IPAs with different circus colored labels...

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

#244

Post by ChainOfFools » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #224

gffrd wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a homeless fella ask me to buy him a beer by name: Voodoo Ranger. Which is like 9% alcohol, sold in 16oz cans. As casual drinkers drink less, maybe we're not the target market …

He must have had you pegged for a sucker. When bums spend their own money they are strictly economical. That means handles of vodka, fortified wine, or (maybe) something like Steel Reserve.

Or he's just a market savvy who understands his demographic. Ask your typical hipster beardo to gift you a handle of vodka and you're probably going to see the backside of an iPhone as he suddenly turns away to answer a very important call.

But ask for a borderline craft brew with ironic graphic design themes on the can and you might get shown some semblance of mutual respect as a fellow man of taste and culture who has thoughtfully given him a guilt-free excuse to go in the store and help himself to some of the same.

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

#245

Post by ak217 » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

mattmaroon wrote: post #118

acheron wrote: post #39

> Anchor was established in San Francisco in 1896 and was the country's first craft brewery. So what definitions are being used here to claim this? Yuengling is quite a bit older, for example.

Yuengling is not considered craft beer by a lot of people because it’s made mainly from adjuncts, in their case corn. It’s only recent that the Brewer’s Association changed the definition to include them, but most people in the industry disagree with it. Yuengling is just a cheaply made lager that’s really no better than Budweiser. But, that term doesn’t have an official definition so they still can claim the title.

Yuengling sure tastes better than most "craft" beers to me.

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

#246

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

deadballcretin wrote: post #239

jeffbee wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that in the absence of Anchor we will be at a loss for "soul" breweries is somewhat hilarious. Over my 40+ years of life the number of breweries in America has exploded 100-fold. In San Francisco and the immediate area craft breweries are almost a menace. There must be 5000 of them in California. If you insist that your beer be sourced from your immediate political jurisdiction, you could get beer from Fort…

I'm talking about the city, not the brewing scene. The brewery is a staple of the city and it is a shame to see it shutter in such a fashion. Looking at the rest of the scene and not what the brewery represents is intentionally missing the point of what I was trying to say. The city is being dismantled, bit by bit, being replaced with facsimiles of what people think San Francisco is supposed to be instead of letting…

As a long-time resident I think that most of the city needs to be scraped flat and redone, so this does not particularly bother me. Nostalgia does not befit any place.

Anchor is being dismantled by a corporate entity ten thousand miles away in Japan and arguably its dismantlement was foretold, and inevitable, when it was acquired. The time to grieve over it was when they sold it.

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

#247

Post by GenerWork » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

nunez wrote: post #135

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 brewerie…

Bud Light 0.0 was the only beer you could buy at the World Cup because Qatar has super strict alcohol laws.

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

#248

Post by tick_tock_tick » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 7:06 PM UTC

yamazakiwi wrote: post #163

sfpotter wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have the numbers... but I'm going to assume that regular beer drinkers drink the popular light beers or already have a craft beer they like and spend less money trying new products. It took contentious political media to get die-hards to stop drinking their favorite light beer. That's how ingrained these brands are. It's harder to sell a new Amber Ale than a Juicy Mango/Dragonfruit IPA. These 2 beers serve di…

Bud Light was the most popular beer in the USA until very recently Modelo Especial just passed it. Both of those are very straight forward beers.

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

#249

Post by spaceguillotine » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 7:06 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #235

MarkMarine wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a conclusion in the beverage world as well, the craft beer wave has broken and people are just trying to drink something that tastes like what it says on the label. I home brew beer and the instinct is to make something crazy, but I get sick of my own experiments and double sick of paying 18$ for a 4 pack of someone else’s experiments. I could never stand being told that hop burn was a sign of craft…

Some of the highest-status beers during Peak Beer were well-executed straightforward beers; Pliny comes to mind. As does Zombie Dust.

Pliny adapted to shifting tastes too, they reduced the grassiness and switched to bittering hop extracts to get a more mass appeal flavor and reduce waste with flower hops that would also soak up more wort. If you aren't constantly adjusting in beer you'll go the way of Anchor.

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

#250

Post by rdj » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

ibejoeb wrote: post #229

ecocentrik wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This news has nothing to do with lack of innovation. The entire beer market is currently contracting. Also, not everything needs to innovate. Every field needs a canon of notable creations that have stood the test of centuries or millennia and beer brewing is no exception.

I'd like to see what '23 the numbers look like before declaring it a contracting market. Sales by volume for the entire category are indeed down, but somewhere between 2-3%, and that is still likely attributable to the crash starting in 2020, when it was actually illegal to serve or even order beer in many places. (To this day, there are still aggressive measures taken against breweries, brewpubs, and taprooms, like…

If you are interested in the numbers, give Bart Watson a follow: https://twitter.com/BrewersStats

He's an economist that covers this for the Brewers Association. Based on the data, it's not looking good. Some of it is released in public reports and presos, others are member-only resources.

Here's a report from the TTB that shows the contraction:

https://www.ttb.gov/images/statistics/ttb-beer-2023-statisti...

Also, there are several industry talks that dive into the why...one factor seems to be that Gen Z just isn't drinking.