After 150+ years, the San Francisco legend and the original craft brewery is closing. Looks like it can be chalked-up to a larger corporate owner not realizing what they had. Anyone who has lived in the SF Bay Area has probably had some of their beer at some point. Bummer.
I saw this news yesterday and meant to start a thread. Sad news, I loved me some Anchor Steam.
Crummy.
I heard that yesterday, and now today Facebook’s algorithm thinks I need to see this story from literally every NorCal news outlet.
I actually have an Anchor Steam sign hanging in my dining room. Ironically I picked it up at a thrift store in New York.
They were never my favorite beer (that honor would probably go to North Coast Brewing up in Fort Bragg), but I liked it well enough and drank it occasionally, and am sad to hear they’re shutting down. So I bet what they said about increased competition from other craft breweries is partly true. Now that they’re closing I’ll have to pick up one last case this weekend.
The macrobrew (AKA fake microbrew) and the many microbrewers that, like AS, have been bought by a giant and turned from a company into a brand within a brand portfolio are all exerting a lot of pressure on each other.
A brand owned by a big company needs a certain minimum volume to make it worth their while. The USA might support (made up numbers) 300 true local craft microbrewers. If they’re all magically sold to big operators aiming for regional, national, and maybe even international distribution, there’s no way more than WAG 10 brands survive.
AS was caught in that funnel. As are lots of others.
I discovered Anchor Steam in Southern California back in the day when basically the only ‘premium’ beers that were available were Heineken and St. Pauli Girl. (OK, the local Round Table had San Miguel Dark on tap.) Good beer. But today, I think, there are way too many craft beers to support a market for Anchor Steam. I’m surprised Sam Adams is still making the rounds. A mile’s walk down the beach is Beach Cat Brewing Company, where I can get better beers than Anchor Steam. Georgetown Brewing down in Seattle has a nice variety (I like Mac & Jack’s). Closer to home, Bellingham has Aslan, Boundary Bay, Twin Sisters, Kulshan… There are at least 15 breweries in Bellingham, and three more in Whatcom County. And that’s in addition to other breweries in the state (e.g., the previously-mentioned Georgetown).
If Sam Adams is still selling nationwide, then Anchor Steam could too. But not without a lot of marketing, which I can’t remember seeing any of. (FTR: I do like Sapporo – or Kirin – with Japanese food.)
My hot take was going to be that microbreweries left Anchor without a marketing niche, but that article paints a completely different – and very sad – story.
(FYI this is NOT about the Anchor Beer that’s so popular in SEAsia…not THAT Anchor Beer!)
Anchor Steam has long been my favorite beer. I knew trouble was brewing when the new owners changed the label.
Thank gawd I never saw that rebranding. Don’t think it made it nationwide.
I first drank Anchor Steam in 1980 and it was an epiphany of what beer could be. Michelob and Killian’s Red were premium beers. Baby Sweet Jesus, Anchor Steam is still my benchmark. If your beer isn’t as good a Anchor Steam, then don’t bother. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was the other benchmark I have had for about 45 years now. I am also a homebrewer, and Anchor Steam recipe is well known, but it’s tricky to duplicate and I never tried because I can get the real thing any time I want. To be clear, I’m not saying Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada are the best beers out there, what I am saying is they set the standard for which craft beers must exceed. RIP Anchor Steam
The Macro Breweries are doing just fine. The local on-premise breweries (thousands of them), seem to generally be making a living if they keep costs down. It’s the regional brewers in the middle that are getting squeeze out hard.
How Sapporo Sank Anchor Steam" No idea what Sapporo was thinking? Sapporo is a Japanese lager brewer, and no real experience with the Anchor Steam open fermentation and relatively high temperature lager yeast. Not sure where it fit in the global portfolio.
As for trying to convert Anchor Steam into a Japanese lager brewery in 100 year old building in high rent San Francisco? Who would have been that stupid?!? And what’s the point? The Sapporo that is brewed in N America tastes like ass compared with the Japanese flagship brewed on the island of Hokkaido. Sapporo changed the recipe to be sweeter for N America. It’s barely drinkable compared with “this is great for a flagship lager.”
Fritz Maytag must be hearing demons in the multiverse. He’s 85 now and was instrumental in creating the craft brewing wave in the US. Even Sierra Nevada give Fritz his due. Fritz’s story is simply fascinating, and there is much better stuff out there including interviews that do more justice than the wiki page I linked to above.
Agree. Not my favorites, but dependably solid and as with so many Californians the first craft beers I tried (in my case late 1980’s).
Sad days. I always meant to take a tour and just never got around to it.
Me too 
Anchor Steam(and Newcastle) were my first tastes of something other than mass market macrobrews. I’ll miss it.
Yeah, I think this is where I am headed. All the brew pubs in my area have a “to-go” fridge with 4- and 6-packs. May as well support them - think globally, drink locally.
Can somebody explain to me what it means that they’re “the original craft brewery”?
There must have been people brewing beer in the country before that; I expect since before it was the USA. Many of them must have been doing it on a relatively small scale – probably all of them, to start with. Some of them were presumably making good beer. What makes this one the first? Was there a legal definition of the term, around that time?
Fritz Maytag was the great-grandson of a home appliances magnate and the son of an Iowa dairy farmer. Already set for life as he approached his thirties, the Stanford grad began looking for an industry where he could make his own mark. Anchor Steam was his favorite beer, and when he heard its 69-year-old brewery was facing closure, he snatched a 51% stake in it for a few thousand bucks. Thinking he would just financially advise them, he was shocked when creditors quickly started approaching him with IOUs. He would need to figure out a way to sell more beer. Maytag immediately decided to focus his attention on raising his beer’s quality. It was 1965, and beer in this country mostly meant so-called “fizzy, yellow” macro-beers. Thus, he began to build an impressive portfolio of diverse styles that didn’t really exist in America just yet, like Anchor Porter (1972), Christmas Ale (1975), and Liberty Ale (1975) , generally labeled the country’s first modern IPA. So far ahead of his time, it took Maytag nearly a decade to turn a profit. By then, the country was finally warming up to “flavorful” beers, and many imitators were soon to follow.
Essentially, Anchor started brewing good beer instead of flavorless yellow water of the time, and made it accessible, before anyone else did. Sort of like how Starbucks opened eyes to what good coffee could be like, instead of percolated brown water.
What’s the name of that poem that mentions “the nonesuch Anchor Steam”?
I love the Anchor Christmas beer. I had no idea it has been around that long. Fond farewells.
I just read an article talking about how Sam Adams has invested heavily in non-beer products like boozy lemonade, malt liquor and pre-mixed cocktails that are crowding out the mid-size regional beer makers. If I remember the article right, Sam Adams is selling more of those types of things than beer at the moment. The article was all about how these non-beer products are sucking up buyers that were shopping for craft beers a few years ago. The macro brewers are coasting along and the really micro brewers operating a brew pub and selling a pint at a time are making money. Those mid-size brewers who committed to costly bottling and canning lines and pushed for distribution in stores are getting crowded out by the hard lemonades and pre-mixed cocktails. I suspect that Anchor Steam is facing the same headwinds.
I’ll be darned if I can find that article again though.
Ah – in 1965!
All the news stories I’d been seeing gave the 1896 date, and then said they were the first craft brewery. I thought they meant because of the 1896 date, and it seemed implausible that nobody else was making what we’d now call craft beer in or before 1896.
But in 1965 all those little breweries that must have existed in the 1700’s and 1800’s were long gone, along with whatever excellent, terrible, and inbetween beers they’d presumably been making (I’m sure there was some in all those categories); and in the USA “beer” was indeed pretty much flavorless yellow water. IIRC you couldn’t even make your own; at least, not legally. So Anchor was the first modern craft brewery in the USA. That makes sense.