Tomorrow morning, 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, VinePair has learned, they’ll be told that the 127 year-old company is being acquired by another Northern California craft brewery.
Representatives for Anchor, considered by many the pioneer of the American craft brewing movement, and Sapporo USA, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate that bought the iconic brewery in 2017, declined multiple requests for comment about this situation. Three current employees have confirmed that there’s a full-team meeting scheduled for Wednesday at 9 a.m. local time. Normally, that wouldn’t warrant a story. But there’s nothing normal about what’s been going on at Anchor lately.
Over the past couple years, current and former workers tell VinePair, Sapporo USA 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.
In early June, Anchor abruptly discontinued its beloved Christmas seasonal ale, and pulled back its national distribution footprint to go California-only. It was a chaotic pivot that seemed to portend the brewery’s undoing, especially considering Sapporo USA had already slashed its entire sales team at that point, according to a current worker who spoke on background for fear of retaliation from the company. That employee says the ingredients for the first 2023 batches of Our Special Ale had already been purchased by then, too — a particularly galling twist given one of the reasons Sapporo USA and Anchor cited for the seasonal’s discontinuation was its cost.
Last week, the company had a mere 600 barrels of Anchor Steam scheduled to be brewed over the entire month of August, a tiny quantity that another current worker, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the company, described as “absurd.”
Workers are in the dark, their livelihoods hanging in the balance. One worker tells VinePair that Sapporo USA execs had been spotted inventorying the plant’s equipment, a worrying development. But: “They haven’t mentioned shit to us” about job security, another current employee says. “Upstairs,” shorthand for Anchor’s white-collar offices above the brewhouse, has become “a ghost town.” A gradual exodus has pared the close-knit workforce from around 85 people to just 30 or 40.
“I think Sapporo sunk Anchor,” says Nate Dias, a former production worker who left in June for another job, ending two-and-a-half years of employment at the Bay Area brewery. As recently as earlier today, current workers VinePair spoke with agreed. They were convinced that tomorrow’s meeting had been scheduled to tell them that Sapporo USA was shuttering Anchor entirely. It would be an unceremonious end for a brewery that had survived Prohibition, two World Wars, and over a century of the American drinking public’s notoriously fickle taste. Current employees who still speak fondly of “Fritz” (as in Maytag, the “gentleman brewer” who saved Anchor from the jaws of insolvency in 1965) were steeling themselves for the indignity and searching for answers.
Would Sapporo USA brass simply discontinue production of beloved Bay Area beers like Anchor Steam and Liberty Ale — the first India pale ale commercially brewed stateside since Prohibition — like they had with Our Special Ale a month prior, or try to shift them to another facility? Would that facility be Stone Brewing Co., the much-larger craft brewery in San Diego that Sapporo acquired just over a year ago? What would happen to the Potrero Hill brewery, its popular Public Taps, and its loyal workers, some of whom (those unrepresented by Anchor Brewing Union) are not even contractually owed severance?
Tomorrow should offer some answers. And they may not be all bad. A source close to the proceedings who is not authorized to speak publicly about it tells VinePair that rather than Anchor’s demise, tomorrow will be “a good day for [its] future.” At the 9 a.m. meeting, “Anchor is going to announce that it is being sold to another well-known craft brewer from Northern California.”
Which one? Our source won’t say. Both Russian River Brewing Co. and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. are rumored to have kicked the tires on a potential acquisition; both have irreproachable craft brewing bona fides and plenty of cultural overlap with Anchor, its workers, and its customers. Another potential acquirer is Drake’s Brewing Co., which acquired Bear Republic Brewing in February 2023 and is stationed right across San Francisco Bay in San Leandro, Calif. None of those breweries immediately responded to a request for comment.
Of course, it’s still possible that Sapporo USA will announce plans to shutter Anchor, as workers fear. Either way, we will update this story accordingly. In the meantime, here’s one more abnormal detail: multiple workers have received mysterious emails from UPS indicating they’d be receiving packages sent by Sapporo USA tomorrow. “Nobody gets packages from Sapporo via UPS,” one current worker tells VinePair. The explanation they’ve received from Anchor’s human resources? The shipment contains something pertaining to the meeting.
“We’ve never done that,” the worker says.
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