Professor Good Ales

Update: At 4:44am ET on 7/12/2023, roughly 12 hours after this story was published, Anchor Brewing Company issued a press release announcing it will cease operations and liquidate its business. VinePair will be updating reporting throughout the day.

Today at 9 a.m. local time, employees of Anchor Brewing Co. will gather at the historic San Francisco firm’s plant on Potrero Hill for an all-hands meeting with leaders from its parent company, Sapporo USA. There, they’ll be told that the storied company will cease operation and be liquidated, ending 127 years of production.

A representative for Anchor Brewing Co., Sam Singer, issued a press release early on the morning of July 12 announcing the closure. VinePair first reported yesterday on the imminent possibility that Sapporo USA would shutter the iconic brewery, which it acquired in 2017. Now, America’s first craft brewery and the maker of the Bay Area-born Steam Beer will be sold for parts.

It’s an unceremonious demise for the famous brewery. Anchor and Sapporo USA declined multiple requests for comment in the run-up to this watershed decision. In the release, Singer attributes the decision to a mix of familiar factors: “the impacts of the pandemic, inflation, especially in San Francisco, and a highly competitive market left the company with no option but to make this sad decision to cease operations.”

Current and former workers cite another factor: Sapporo USA’s ownership itself. Over the past few years, they tell VinePair, the Japanese conglomerate’s United States’ subsidiary has been deferring necessary plant maintenance, picking fights with its union, and investing in costly automation equipment in hopes of retrofitting the urban manufacturing landmark into a facility that could handle its lager-based ambitions. A controversial 2021 rebrand caused anguish among workers and drinkers alike who viewed the vivid packaging and slick logo as an affront to Anchor’s singular, artisanal aesthetic. Continue reading “Sapporo USA Will Shut Down Anchor Brewing Co.”

America has fallen out of love with beer, the story goes. Sales are down. Market share is shrinking. Spirits-based drinks are ascendant. And for breweries, a storm is coming.

That story is incomplete, at the very least. A seismic shift really is occurring within the beer industry, which weathered a pandemic that kept Americans out of bars and, before that, withstood the Trump administration’s trade war that put a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports, and which now faces intense competition from hard seltzers like White Claw and Truly. Today American consumers have the most diverse array of alcoholic options, from the most diverse array of producers, in the country’s history. And while this may be great news for drinkers—especially those who don’t like beer-flavored beer—it may not be for brewers.

The overall business picture of beer is that it’s in decline. But the decline is not a free fall. Beer is still, by far, the most widely consumed alcoholic beverage by volume. In fact, overall alcohol consumption had actually increased in the past couple of decades leading into 2021. So, when alcohol industry analysts say beer is falling, they’re talking about beer losing market share of retail dollars. In 2022 spirit sales amounted to 42.9 percent, and beer accounted for 41.2 percent—its first year in second place.

Beer has actually been losing market share for some time. From 2011 to 2021, for example, Anheuser-Busch InBev—the conglomerate behind Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob, Stella Artois, and more—fell from 46.9 percent of the market to 38.6 percent. But now Americans’ changing taste in alcohol has reached an inflection point, and it isn’t the Budweiser bottle that’s sweating. If your brewery is very large—or, perhaps surprisingly, if it’s very small—you’ll likely find comfortable shelter from the storm coming for the beer market.

It’s the brewers in the middle—the craft-beer makers that have a regional or national footprint, the non-Buds, the non-Millers, what you probably think of as the good beers—that could get soaked.

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Dozens of London pubs have acquired a new decorative feature this summer. On bar tops across the city stand vaguely old-fashioned, totem pole-like objects amid serried ranks of colorful keg fonts. These are handpumps, traditionally used to serve cask ale — for so long a staple in this country. But in many of the British capital’s pubs, they’re now purely for show.

Covid-19 has been hard on cask ale, the “warm” British beer that completes its fermentation in the serving vessel. This is how it acquires its distinctive soft carbonation, a key part of what makes it so enjoyable and such a contrast to keg beer, which generally has carbon dioxide added from an outside source. Cask needs to be drunk quickly, within three days of being breached, because when beer is pumped out of the cask, air enters. Also known as “Real Ale,” a term coined by consumer organization the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in the 1970s, it’s best enjoyed at cellar temperature, around 53 degrees Fahrenheit, not chilled like keg.

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SO…within the past couple of months, some breweries have failed and some have made some drastic decisions, spurred along by the well-established New Reality of post-pandemic America. Yes, certainly Covid was exactly like a nuclear warhead, planted within an earth fault, exploding and wrecking shit in every direction. MANY business of all types closed the doors for good and some of those – actually a reasonably small number – were breweries. And of course, I read this morning that reaction to this latest couple of Unthinkable Events – The brilliant Lost Abbey scaling back, moving, and curtailing distribution to California only and Anchor Brewing cancelling their iconic Christmas Ale and similarly limiting distribution – constitute Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling and that “everything’s Changing!!”.

And that part, certainly, is true…but not for the reasons given.

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Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a thing in The Pour Fool about seeking out smaller, less celebrated (or even downright obscure) breweries, wineries, and distilleries in your own area. Around the Seattle/Tacoma area, names like Top Down Brewing Company in Sumner, Olalla Vineyard & Winery, off state route 16, Wind Rose Cellars, in Sequim, Old Soldier Distillery of Tacoma, and Yoked Farmhouse & Brewery, in Purdy, come to mind.

Many producers like these are punished because they have sinned: they have the audacity to start a business outside the Cluster and breweries and wineries BOTH cluster like mad. There is, for lack of a better term, a Force at work in this. This Force repels people away from the very real fact that, given all the remote breweries being built and started, every year, a few WILL, inevitably, be objectively better than the buzz-worthy ones that inhabit those urban Clusters. It doesn’t happen frequently but it does happen. Breweries in Washington that are not in Seattle suffer tangibly because they are Over There. Some overcome that. Bale Breaker Brewing Company, Iron Horse Brewery, Dwinell Country Ales, and Echoes Brewing of Poulsbo are just a few of my own local examples.

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There is a growing, well, for lack of a better term, “substratum” of US craft beer that’s been labeled “convenience store only”. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably seen some of ’em: tall, 19.2 ounce cans, usually cartoon or otherwise attention-grabbing artwork, and the message “9%” large and unmistakable, there on the front.

As one of those tiresome beer snots who does NOT, like EVER, buy his beer in a convenience store, I didn’t find out about these beers for a very long time. But we were taking one of our frequent day trips around this magical state of Washington, one sunny afternoon in late spring, and found ourselves in a line for a ferry, with maybe an hour to kill. As we were hungry and, on this unseasonably warm afternoon, THIRSTY, I walked out of the ferry lot to a nearby independent market and looked in their beer cooler and…it was like looking through Stargate. A whole new world was there, clearly visible…and a bit frightening.

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got this sample from the folks at Double Mountain Brewery & Cidery, located in the absurdly, other-worldly gorgeous Columbia River Gorge, in quaint-but-JUMPIN’ Hood River, Oregon, and groaned audibly when I opened it and saw the label.

“What’s wrong?” asked my darlin’ new bride.

“I’ve just been PUN-ished by Double Mountain Brewing,” I replied, proud of myself, with what I felt was a justified twinkle in my eye.

“Why?” she scowled, “What did you do to them?“

Sigh…

I ADORE my wife, in a way that I never expected I was even capable of. But the woman is where Jokes Go To Die; the rocky shoal on which the little boat of humor runs aground. She is inadvertently funny. (Listening to her learn to pronounce “gewurztraminer” was ten days of riotous fun) And wickedly smart but not inclined to whimsy…

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“Edinburgh, where have you been all of my life?” That was my very first thought when I stepped off the train at Haymarket Station on that sunny autumn day. The stone buildings, bustling thoroughfares, and convivial pub terraces overflowing with people reminded me of London. But the further I got from Haymarket Station, the more Edinburgh revealed its own unique charms, by turns cosmopolitan and whimsical.

dinburgh’s narrow wynds, vaulted stairways, and covered alleys are like a cross between going down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole and entering J.K. Rowling’s Diagon Alley. You’d half expect to meet a wizard down one of those lanes after a few too many pints at the pub.

As for those pubs, Edinburgh’s drinking establishments are a testament to when the city was one of the world’s premier brewing centers. Edinburgh boasted around 280 breweries in its heyday during the early/mid-nineteenth century.

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