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

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

#151

Post by mrobins » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:18 PM UTC

RC_ITR wrote: post #103

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…

Also worth noting that Sapporo went through with a rather disastrous rebrand that both made it less unique and harder to find on shelves. https://sfist.com/2021/01/28/anchor-brewing-dragged-on-twitt...

The rebranding really was disastrous. Echoing other comments, as someone who bought 6 packs largely for nostalgia or to reconnect with SF from the east coast the new packaging ruined that.

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

#152

Post by pinot » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

awithrow wrote: post #121

ryandamm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the article is a little muddled; it’s better to understand Anchor as the oldest existing brewery that makes what we think of as craft beer. When it started there were many small, local brewers making a variety of beers. Prohibition and changing tastes killed off most of the breweries — it helped to be above a certain size so you could profitable brew, say, malted syrups during prohibition. Those that remained af…

Yuengling's flaghsip is an Amber Lager, not a light lager in the same vein as bud/miller/coors. Also, they didn't introduce their amber until the 80s. Prior to that their main beer was their porter. I don't think there is a coherent definition of craft breweries that includes Anchor but not Yuengling

Yuengling is "Craft" per the BA and older then Anchor. Author is wrong.

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

#153

Post by dpifke » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

gohwell wrote: post #80

This beer always reminds me of NOFX - Scavenger Type

I miss the days when you could get a pint for 13 quarters.

And as someone who left SF almost a decade ago, I just checked and was very surprised to see that Bottom of the Hill is still open.

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

#154

Post by nilespotter » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #134

sfpotter wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got any example of this new wave of sophisticated non-alcoholic liqour?

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

#155

Post by annexrichmond » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

From SFChronicle:

> In 2019, dissatisfied workers successfully formed a union for the first time in Anchor’s history

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

#156

Post by tanjtanjtanj » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

awithrow wrote: post #122

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.

Its just plain incorrect. As you note, Yuengling is older (1829) and is considered a craft brewery by the Brewers Association. Given that this is just a local news website, I just assume they're not exactly doing a ton of work verifying the press release

The definition of a craft brewery from the brewer's association is more practically stated as "The same size or smaller than Sam Adams".

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

#157

Post by edmundsauto » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

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 it did both - seems like a barbell distribution. Medium drinkers became heavy drinkers, others drank less - but there was a change in the distribution. Lots more non-alcoholic options popped up as well, both for purchase at home but also a lot more restaurants list NA options for fancy drinks while out to eat.

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

#158

Post by splonk » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

The local reports were that Anchor had been slowly losing money for years before the Sapporo acquisition. Supposedly Sapporo was intending to use the Anchor facility to brew Sapporo locally and then eventually found out that the site wasn't really suitable or would require too much renovation. Whether this led directly to the Stone deal, I don't know (I doubt it, given relative sizes, but it may have been a contributing factor). In general, even before the Sapporo acquisition, Anchor was slowly getting pushed out of local bars by other, smaller local breweries. Once I started seeing things like Standard Deviant's kolsch or Harmonic's pilsner taking up one of the taps in smaller restaurants that only had 2-4 taps, the writing was probably on the wall.

I suspect one of the local breweries will be happy to acquire Anchor if Sapporo's going to sell it off at fire sale prices (c.f. Cellarmaker/Rare Barrel, Drake's/Bear Republic).

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

#159

Post by HDThoreaun » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

joshuaheard wrote: post #150

I loved this beer when I was in my twenties. My college-age daughter and her friends, however, don't even drink beer. They drink this fruit-flavored hard seltzers.

Really surprising to me how long it took for the seltzers and cocktail in a can stuff to take off. Especially among college age people my informal survey has around 70% of people preferring their flavor yet until like 5 years ago the only fruity beverage widely available was mikes hard lemonade. And not only do most young people prefer the taste, seltzers are much cheaper to make than beer and require much less expertise. I guess it was just a tradition is hard to break thing.

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

#160

Post by lamontcg » Wed, Jul 12, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

Entirely unrelated but I turned off support for DRM'd videos in firefox yesterday and this crappy news website now just has a firefox banner for "You must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page" instead of having some video player desperately chasing me around the page trying to get me to play it.