I can judge when a beer industry story has permeated mainstream consciousness by whether I get a text from my brother. He’s sent me messages me about aluminum can shortages, Bud Light losing ground to Modelo, and last week, I got three texts from him in quick succession:
“Anchor is closing down.”
“Shit.”
“That sucks.”
He’s no Cormac McCarthy, but my brother captured the general sentiment. As a devoted purchaser of Anchor’s Christmas beer, Our Special Ale, every December, he was bummed.
Then he went on with his day.
Among more engaged craft beer drinkers, however, the Anchor news was a bomb. Many drinkers, particularly those on the brewery’s Bay Area home turf, are mourning Anchor Brewing and its role in their lives. A good many more are lamenting the loss of a long-ago beer market in which Anchor thrived. We can discuss the degree to which Anchor’s parent company, Sapporo USA, mismanaged the brewery and bears responsibility for its closure, but the fact remains that in 2023—and in years prior—Anchor came to be better loved as a symbol than as a business.
“Anchor came to be better loved as a symbol than as a business.”
What a beautiful symbol it was, representing much of the hard-scrabble American ethos often reserved for novels and Hollywood movies: It was the country’s oldest operating brewery and a survivor rescued from the ashes. It had a unionized labor force and brewed classic and almost defiantly unsexy beers in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. It was a business that stood the test of time, natural disaster, and changes to drinking culture. It was the most romantic story in craft beer, now a footnote in its history. My brother is right: That ending does suck.
Anchor was an anchor, a tie to the origins of an entire industry and its West Coast mystique. From Fritz Maytag to Jack McAuliffe to Ken Grossman, U.S. craft beer celebrates its roots in these Californian beer pioneers armed with audacity and used dairy equipment. It’s no coincidence that Anchor was located in San Francisco, a city still alive with the ghosts of strivers, rebels, and lone geniuses and their complicated legacies. It had a scrappy but venerable reputation that breweries opening today could only dream of. Anchor was beloved by drinkers who think of craft beer as a hobby, as well as people who would raise an eyebrow at the very concept. Regardless, problems for the brewery began when people found themselves in love with the idea of Anchor and not its beer. Sales plummeted for most of the past decade.
Even still, what Anchor represented made it one of beer’s last great unifiers. Anchor’s closure hits the beer industry like the death of a celebrity: Time briefly pauses, and we think about who we were when we first loved that person or the thing they brought into our lives. We feel sentimental about who we were then, imagining that to be an idealized, purer version of ourselves. You can never hear Prince or Bowie again for the first time. You can watch clips of them live on YouTube, but it’s just an echo. What sweet summer children we must have been, to have our palates delighted by something like Steam Beer.
A death means we’re forced to confront what our lives will be without this entity, without Anchor. For most, our days won’t be different at all. Maybe that shames us, or scares us.
“For most, our days won’t be different at all. Maybe that shames us, or scares us.”
Anchor’s closure saddened me, but it wasn’t about the beer. It’s been years since I’ve drank anything from the brewery, and yet I’m tickled to know that I have a bottle of Old Foghorn Barleywine in my refrigerator. My emotion went beyond what I’d feel when any business closes, which is sympathy for its employees. I felt unmoored, a bizarre reaction, given the bigger picture. Businesses close every day. Breweries close regularly.
I talked this through with a friend, who reminded me about an episode of Marc Maron’s podcast from 2016 in which he interviews Chuck Klosterman; the two talk about why celebrity deaths are so destabilizing to people who didn’t know the celebrity closely, or at all. The pair talked about the mourning process as not just for the celebrity, but as a moment of shared emotional valence. I thought about Anthony Bourdain. Much of the public, myself included, felt rocked by the death of a complex person who we couldn’t begin to understand personally. Yet in our collective mind, he stood for something we all believed in.
In the interview, Kolsterman points out the lack of a “monoculture,” the idea that we all have something we know, understand, and appreciate together, typically at once. That used to be as simple as turning on a TV and choosing from one of three channels. Now, he says, we get a glimpse of what that means when a famous person dies because “we need these celebrity deaths to have shared experiences.”
“That's the only way people can know we’re having the same kind of emotional exchange at the same time,” he tells Maron.
There’s a petition to save Anchor that’s gained national media attention, but even this effort represents a hope born out of shared nostalgia, not business reality or even widespread consumer demand. As of publication, it’s yet to break 6,000 signatures. Anchor’s unionized employees have signaled their desire to buy the brewery, but have released few details about how this co-operative ownership plan would work in practice. (Employee ownership is no guarantee of smooth, long-term success; we have only to look to Modern Times’ woes to see this.) Anchor employees have a financial and deeply emotional interest in keeping the brewery alive—customers don’t. Less invested parties, such as other breweries who could have stepped in to buy Anchor, have not done so—Sapporo USA tried. Avenues for the brewery’s survival look like long shots.
But it’s not stopping many of Anchor’s fans from rallying around the common cause. Like network television, there was a brief period where U.S. craft beer was more unified. Few craft breweries existed; the average beer fan knew the major players. Today, craft beer is decentralized and cliquish in comparison; memelords have replaced some sincere writers of yore. Contrarianism and self-referentialism rules; sentimentality is out of favor.
Except for Anchor’s closure. It gave longtime craft beer fans permission to wax nostalgic—a deeply uncool indulgence, generally. Everyone seemed to have an Anchor story. The brewery was one of a handful, along with the likes of Allagash, Sierra Nevada, and Russian River, for which most drinkers express unselfconscious appreciation and shared gratitude. There’s satisfaction in sharing these emotions, even sadness. Maybe it's true: Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
Many craft beer drinkers, myself included, didn’t regularly buy Anchor but want to live in a world in which other people do. We want Anchor to matter enough to save the business because of its intrepid brewing history, and its workers, and its celebrated savior Fritz Maytag, who breathed life into a dying company when he bought it in 1965. And so we came together to debate who to blame for its demise. I can’t say with certainty who killed Anchor, but none of us, alone or collectively, allowed the company to live. The power of its story couldn’t overcome business realities, a downswing following U.S. craft beer’s historic arc of the early 2010s. Story was what craft breweries always had going for them. Now Anchor’s legacy lives on in the stories we tell about it.
“Story was what craft breweries always had going for them. Now Anchor’s legacy lives on in the stories we tell about it.”
That Anchor could be so beloved and yet, on an everyday basis, so irrelevant to a broad swath of drinkers was existentially scary to a certain era of craft beer fans. It speaks to a tension that’s only a decade old for most craft breweries: Authenticity, provenance, myth—they’re difficult to connect to nationally distributed consumer packaged goods, which is what a beer company the size of Anchor makes. A plucky founder or a history so rich it has a lengthy Wikipedia page can only carry a brand so far. Eventually people just have to still buy what you’re selling.
The future without Anchor isn’t completely severed from its past. Maytag and his brewery begat a generation of beer makers, and Anchor’s beers were no small part of creating a coast-to-coast patchwork of nearly 10,000 breweries. Its closure doesn’t change that part of the story: Anchor’s legacy has always been its defining feature. It’s a brewery whose past and present have always been closely knit for most drinkers. Completing Anchor’s full symbolic arc, they’re now one and the same.
Words by Kate Bernot