Anchor Steam Brewery sold

[thatguy]

I just heard on the radio this morning. Sad...

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

This totally blew up my phone while I was away. So many text & dm messages. So sad to hear…

[Greg]

[Drunk Monk]

Anchor Brewing would consider sale to union employees, company confirms
by: Tori Gaines
Posted: Jul 22, 2023 / 03:19 PM PDT
Updated: Jul 23, 2023 / 03:54 PM PDT

(KRON) — Anchor Brewing Company would “gladly consider” a “bona-fide” offer to from its union members to purchase the brewery and save it from closure, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to KRON4. 
The Anchor’s Union spokesperson emailed the company and stated that union members met and discussed plans before deciding the launch the effort to buy out the San Francisco staple. The union also clarified that an “unidentified” group of Anchor employees are considering the purchase, but the union itself is not. 
Leadership at Anchor Brewing shared a positive note about the potential sale: 
“Given our deep respect for the Anchor Union and our team members, should our employees put forward a bona-fide, legally binding offer to buy the Company, one that includes a verifiable source of funds, we would gladly consider it,” the Anchor Brewing Company wrote in a statement.
Time is of the essence, the brewing company said. At this time, Anchor Brewing is still moving forward with an Assignment for the Benefit of creditors in August, but it is also fielding inquiries to purchase the business at the same time. 
Last week, Anchor Brewing announced that more than 20 investors had reached out with inquiries to buy the company. 

[thatguy]

https://sfist.com/2023/09/05/anchor-brew...-two-days/

Anchor Brewing Employees Launch GoFundMe to Buy Brewery, Campaign Makes Half of Its Goal in Two Days

5 September 2023

Community money is pouring in to the Anchor Brewing Company employees’ bid to buy the brewery after its August closure, as a GoFundMe campaign has hit more than half its goal in just two days.
It was bitter news when we learned in July that Anchor Brewing Company declared bankruptcy and announced its impending closure. That was the decision of Japanese brewing conglomerate Sapporo, who acquired Anchor Brewing in 2017.
But Anchor Brewing Company has risen from the dead before, most notably when Fritz Maytag bought the company on its deathbed in 1965 and fully revived the brand. And a few local suitors and investors announced possibly credible plans to buy the brewery, but none seemed as determined as the unionized Anchor Brewing Union employees, who announced aspirational  plans to buy the brewery and make it a co-op in late July.
Image: anchorunionsf via Instagram
And those employees are the first ones making a major move to line up the funding. The Anchor Union launched their GoFundMe fundraising campaign on Monday, with a goal of $50,000 in donations. As of 2 p.m. Tuesday, just one day after its launch, the total raised had already reached more than $25,000, and keeps growing. (As seen below, the campaign had already hit $15,000 before the first day was even finished.) 
Image: anchorunionsf via Instagram
“Workers have formed a co-op with the intention of purchasing and running the business collectively and carrying on the Anchor's legacy,” the workers say on their GoFundMe announcement. “We are working with organizations who specialize in worker ownership and are guiding us through this process. We need the community's help to cover our costs as we explore the possibilities of worker ownership.”
@anchorunionSF via Twitter
Still, how realistic is this employee bid to buy the brewery? Anchor employees had already said publicly they felt Sapporo was intentionally slow-walking on their offer, and the employees taking over may not be something Sapporo Brewing is keen to see. And honestly, a $50,000 goal seems pretty unambitious given the scope of the purchase. (The brewery and the property under it alone are likely worth millions!) 
Consider that the crowdfunding campaign to resurrect The Stud is asking a far heftier $500,000, and Anchor Brewing is a much more sprawling business enterprise with global fandom. But since the Anchor employees’ crowdfunding campaign is likely to surpass its goal by mid- to late-week, it’s a fair bet the Anchor campaign will exceed that $50,000 goal exponentially.
And as we've explained before, since Anchor Brewing is in bankruptcy, Sapporo Brewing does not get to decide who buys which assets. That decision goes to the third-party California Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, who will likely make their asset sale decisions based on cold-blooded financial calculations rather than who is the sentimental favorite.
Image: anchorunionsf via Instagram
But the Anchor employees do have legal counsel and employee ownership experts, so you figure they're getting pretty solid counsel. And for what it’s worth, NBC Bay Area reports that San Jose’s Fox Tale Fermentation Project just released a Solidarity Ale whose proceeds will go to support the Anchor employees’ bid. There's a similar Solidarity Ale proceed campaign at SF’s Enterprise Brewing on Howard Street, and other brewpubs may join that effort too. Though it’s unclear whether any proceeds raised in a limited edition beer release would even be a drop in the barrel given the money it would take to buy Anchor Brewing Company.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

The home of S.F.’s iconic Anchor Brewing Co. is on the market. Here’s the price
[/url]
[url=https://www.sfchronicle.com/author/laura-waxmann/]Laura Waxmann
Oct. 12, 2023Updated: Oct. 13, 2023 11:35 a.m.



The home of Anchor Brewery Co. has been listed for sale, months after the 127-year-old operation was closed.
Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle 2019
The property that for 44 years has housed San Francisco’s historic Anchor Brewing Co.’s “steam beer” plant in Potrero Hill officially hit the market on Thursday. 
Japanese brewing giant Sapporo Holdings Ltd., Anchor’s current owner, is seeking $40 million for the 2.17-acre property, which includes two buildings at 495 and 501 De Haro streets, totaling 108,728 square feet, sources familiar with the listing have confirmed.
The Anchor brand is also available for sale but is not included in that price tag.
Sapporo paid roughly $85 million for the San Francisco brewery in 2017. The company did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Thursday.
Real estate services firm CBRE has the listing for the property, which is being marketed for sale by Kyle Kovac, Mike Taquino, Joe Moriarty, Giancarlo Sangiacomo and Kati Thabit.

Brewer Eric Svendberg operates brewing equipment at Anchor Brewing Co. in 2019. The business was closed in July, and now the property is for sale.
Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle 2019
The listing comes three months after Sapporo’s board of directors voted to cease the 127-year-old brewery’s operations and liquidate the business as part of an assignment for the benefit of creditors, or ABC — a voluntary alternative to formal bankruptcy proceedings. At the time, the company cited a “combination of challenging economic factors and declining sales since 2016” as reasons for the closure. The brewery’s 61 employees received 60-day notices.
In June, Anchor halted its national beer distribution in an effort to reduce costs as the company’s management made final attempts to evaluate all possible outcomes, stating that its expenses increasingly eclipsed its revenues. The liquidation process began at the start of August. 
At the tail end of 2019, the Anchor workers ratified their first union contract, and their second contract was approved in June. Since the news of the brewery’s closure, the Anchor workers have been in the process of forming a co-op in order to make a bid to purchase the company and its assets.
Patrick Machel, of Anchor Brewing Co., said that the workers have voted in a board of directors for the co-op, and that he serves as its chair. In September, the workers launched a GoFundMe fundraising campaign that sought to raise $50,000; to date, they've raised $107,000. 
Machel said that the workers are "still very serious" about purchasing the brewery and have been engaging investors. He said that Sapporo has not shared the financial information surrounding the property and business with the workers and described the property's listing as a "step in a certain  direction."
"We can't really make a bid until we know the financial data," said Machel. "We're still in the dark about a lot of things."
Sam Singer, who is Anchor’s spokesperson, said that the creditors hired CBRE to market the brewery’s property and “because there are disparate buckets of value” — the creditors wanted to maximize the cumulative value of Anchor’s assets.
The creditors have also hired an investment bank to sell Anchor’s business entities but declined to name the bank.
“The union will have to, like other potential buyers, make a presentation to the investment bank, and the investment bank will weigh all of them equally depending on a maximization of value to the creditors,” Singer said.
Sources told the Chronicle that a range of investors have expressed interest in Anchor’s buildings — some that would want to maintain the site as a brewery and others that would not.

Taproom guide Philip Todd fills glasses with beer for a tour group at Anchor Public Taps in 2019. Anchor Brewing Co. was the nation’s first craft brewery.
Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle 2019
CBRE did not comment on the listing, but confirmed that the site could be “repositioned” under its current PDR — production, distribution, repair — zoning, which allows for a range of activities in industrially zoned areas such as research and development, storage, electric vehicle charging and shipping logistics. The firm noted that the City Planning Department recently expanded the permitted uses within PDR zoning districts to include laboratories. 
The Anchor plant is located in an industrial stretch of the city that has been described by real estate stakeholders as “Area AI,” due to a number of artificial intelligence startups taking up industrial spaces in the Mission, Potrero Hill and other adjacent neighborhoods.

[Greg]

An update in the SF Chronicle today:

The billionaire behind the Chobani yogurt brand has acquired Anchor Brewing Co.with plans to modernize and reopen the historic San Francisco brand that closed last year after 127 years in operation.
On Friday, Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani founder and CEO, announced that his family office had bought all of Anchor’s assets: the iconic steam beer recipes, the 2.1-acre Potrero Hill campus and all the brewing equipment in the De Haro Street warehouses. The price was not disclosed.

[Drunk Monk]

Beat me to the punch here. 

But here are some more deets:

Yogurt billionaire to bring back historic Anchor Brewing

• Megan Rose Dickey
  

Anchor Steam beer circa 2017. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The billionaire owner behind yogurt brand Chobani has acquired Anchor Brewing Co, the historic San Francisco brewery that shut down last year.
Why it matters: Anchor Brewing, often called the godfather of steam beer, had become a staple in San Francisco, so its closure after 127 years of business sent shockwaves through the city.
Driving the news: Shepherd Futures, the family office of Chobani CEO and founder Hamdi Ulukaya, on Friday announced its acquisition of Anchor Brewing's assets.

• That includes the recipes, the Potrero Hill facilities, brewing equipment and original logos.
  

What they're saying: "Being part of a rebirth and brand of the company and being part of maybe a new dimension of the city is pretty exciting," Ulukaya told The San Francisco Standard.
The intrigue: Ulukaya told the San Francisco Chronicle he did not know Anchor Brewing existed until last August, when he read about the news of its closure.

• Ulukaya, who lives in New York, has only been to San Francisco a handful of times but "felt completely home" when he first visited Anchor Brewing's facilities, he told the Standard.
  

Flashback: Anchor Brewing began in the Gold Rush era, when pioneer brewer Gottlieb Brekle came to San Francisco from Germany in the mid-1800s and bought an old billiards saloon in 1871.

• The brewery did well after officially launching in 1896 but struggled when the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires wreaked havoc on San Francisco.
  
• After Prohibition ended in 1933, American demand for lighter, mass-produced beers almost forced Anchor into bankruptcy until a young Stanford graduate named Fritz Maytag bought 51% of the craft brewery in 1965 and transformed its products and distribution approach.
  

• The brewery soon expanded its beer offerings and began partnering with local venues to serve its beverages.
  
• Ahead of Anchor Brewing's closure last year, then-owner Sapporo pointed to declining sales as the reason for its shutdown.
  

What to watch: Ulukaya told the Chronicle that he would like to resume operations in time for Christmas, but the company first needs to get approval from the city.

• Ulukaya has already met with some city officials, including Mayor London Breed, who told the Chronicle she's "grateful for his commitment to being a part of the future for our city" and keeping Anchor's beer "right here where it belongs."
  

[Drunk Monk]

Missing Tom now. 

A ‘Good’ Billionaire Bought Anchor Brewing. What Happens to Its Union?
Union members want to get back to work at the storied San Francisco brewery, but they have yet to hear from the brewery’s new owner
by Jaya Saxena  Jun 28, 2024, 9:25am EDT


Anchor Steam
 Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Jaya Saxena is a Correspondent at Eater.com, and the series editor of Best American Food and Travel Writing. She explores wide ranging topics like labor, identity, and food culture.
Patrick Costello didn’t know Anchor Brewing Company had been bought until his phone started buzzing with questions from friends. Like the rest of Anchor Steam’s unionized workforce, Costello had lost his job in August 2023, when Sapporo USA, which had purchased the San Francisco brewery in 2017, announced plans to liquidate the business. It was a devastating blow to the city where Anchor Brewing had been brewing its signature steam beer for 127 years. But on May 31 of this year, billionaire Hamdi Ulukaya, who owns popular food brands Chobani and La Colombe, announced he had purchased the company and had plans to restart production. Costello is optimistic for the future. “Being just a single owner versus a corporation, I think is the best possible outcome,” he says.
It’s a profound statement, given that Costello is also the chair of the Anchor SF Cooperative, a group of former Anchor Brewing workers who were attempting to raise money to purchase the company and restart it as a worker-owned collective. The workforce, which had unionized under Sapporo’s ownership, had by the end of Sapporo’s tenure realized that the workers were really the ones running the show. Costello says for a while the packaging line didn’t have a packaging manager, and the workers were collectively working to get the product out. “I think the idea of the co-op was like, well, if we can run the floor by ourselves, what’s to stop us from trying to run the company ourselves?”
In a video published on May 31, seemingly filmed inside the Anchor brewery, Ulukaya, who has described himself as the “anti-CEO,” said he had been unfamiliar with Anchor Brewing until he came across an article about its closure. He felt compelled by its history as the oldest craft beer company in America, and inspired by the city of San Francisco in general. “It might be old, it might be given up on. But it is the crown jewel,” he said of the brewery. The San Francisco Chronicle reports Ulukaya’s family office purchased the company’s recipes, warehouses, and equipment for an undisclosed amount, though the Real Deal says its former plant went for $9.9 million, far below the $40 million Sapporo had listed it for.
Ulukaya has said he intends to bring back former Anchor Brewing workers to get the company up and running again. And national news outlets have framed this as a slightly feel-good story about the brewery’s sale. How nice that, in a city that seems to produce billionaires who are white supremacists or want to replace everything with AI, there’s one who wants to support a storied institution, and bring back a product so many people already love?
In a statement, Anchor Union, which is represented by the International Longshore & Warehouse Union, says that 30 out of 39 workers are committed to returning to work for the brewery if offered a job, and more are interested if Ulukaya gives them concrete plans on what business reopening would look like. “We were committed to doing our best for Anchor and we all took pride in our work and being part of a company that is so connected to San Francisco’s history,” said former worker Ryan Poulos. “I would come back to Anchor Brewing in a heartbeat.”
Ulukaya told the San Francisco Chronicle he had met with four former employees on an undisclosed date, and wants to get production up and running as soon as possible. But crucially, as of this writing, unionized workers have not heard from Ulukaya. “It’s great that he bought it, and that he’s on record saying that he wants to bring us back,” says Costello. “But no, we haven’t been reached out to yet. We’re trying every possible avenue to get this guy to actually come sit down and talk with us.” And the Chronicle reports that while Ulukaya still hasn’t spoken with the union, “he didn’t know whether the union that formed there shortly before the brewery closed will be part of the new operations.” (Ulukaya has not responded to Eater’s multiple attempts at contact.)
The idea of the benevolent billionaire is alluring. Surely many of us have fantasized about what good we’d do with such an astronomical amount of cash. But Anchor Brewing now exists at the whim of a man who admittedly has little experience in beer and little connection to San Francisco. Anchor Brewing’s path — from local operation to a company run by an international corporation that mismanaged and ultimately shut down production — is familiar in the history of craft brewing in America. Is one nice, rich guy the only way for a brewery to survive?
While craft and regional brewing has long been a part of the American beer landscape, “craft beer emerged into the mainstream really in the mid-to-late aughts,” says Dave Infante, a beer and liquor industry expert and author of the newsletter Fingers. “That was at a time when distrust in institutions was on the rise. America goes through the Great Recession and the mortgage crisis. There’s an understanding that corporations are not behaving in a way that benefits their communities.”
The entire mid-aughts “foodie” movement (out of which Eater was born) came as a reaction to the vast corporatization of what we eat. Slow food, local ingredients, seasonality — these all became the core values of someone who cares about what they ingest. It was no different in beer. Early craft brewers like Boston Beer Company, Brooklyn Brewery, and Allagash touted their European-style beers, or new American creations, made in small batches with quality ingredients. This ethos also applies to breweries like Anchor, which had been around for far longer, but which still represented locality and commitment to craft. To support local, small brewers was seen as an inherent good. The product was better, more creative, and your money wasn’t going to an international conglomerate like AB InBev. As consumers began to put their money where their values were, existing craft and microbreweries found financial success, and more began opening to capitalize on demand.
Fritz Maytag, heir of the Maytag Corporation, who bought Anchor Brewing when it was also at risk of shuttering in 1965, was also a nice rich guy. He is sometimes credited as the inventor of microbrewing, and by all accounts he was committed to quality over quantity and felt his values aligned with that of the wider movement in California cuisine. “I think Anchor, to the extent that Anchor was able to be successful over the course of the last century and part of this century is because it was very, very closely tied to the Bay Area, but also the slow food movement there,” says Infante. Microbreweries grew in popularity and succeeded because they were smaller, because you could only get them in certain parts of the country, which made them both alluring to connoisseurs and allowed for more direct control of the product.
For Infante, this David and Goliath story always deserved some skepticism. While international beverage conglomerates certainly made it difficult for smaller brewers to get to market, ideas of goodness and fairness and equity were heaped onto local brewers in ways they may not have deserved. “A lot of macro breweries are organized union workforces and to this day have higher wages, better health benefits, more of a voice on the job, and better safety” than at craft breweries, says Infante.
This is what many craft brewery workers began to realize as the craft beer movement grew, and small, local breweries were acquired by the same international companies the movement had initially rebelled against. Anchor Brewing’s workers unionized in 2019, after Sapporo bought the company, and bargained a contract that secured them higher wages, and according to Costello, allowed front-of-house workers at the tap room to keep working in production throughout lockdown. They were followed in 2020 by Fair State Brewing Cooperative, and unionization efforts at Great Lakes Brewing, Surly Brewing, and Goose Island, the latter two of which failed after company owners laid off organizers. 
Costello says the first thing he did when he heard Ulukaya had bought the company was try to ascertain his stance on unions. To his relief, he hasn’t found any evidence of overt union busting. However, in 2019 a coalition of labor unions wrote to Ulukaya, asking Chobani to support union efforts in the dairy industry. The company responded, “We absolutely respect their right to organize, and share their commitment to improve worker welfare, safety and legal status. We’re fighting for the same progress — just taking different approaches.” The lukewarm response echoes Ulukaya admitting that he “didn’t know” if the Anchor Union would be part of new operations. And while Ulukaya has spoken of the importance of treating employees well, these are far from firm statements in support of a unionized workforce that gets to define for itself what that means.
While Anchor Brewing unionized under entirely different ownership, Costello says that regardless of Ulukaya’s presumed good intentions, the union needs to stay put. “A lot of people have asked me, ‘Will you still be union?’ Yes,” he says. “Being union just keeps the quality of the beer up. There’s an understanding that the workers are cared for, and we’re in control of our destiny of how we get treated.”
The craft beer industry as a whole is facing some of the same problems that are affecting many businesses right now. There are the rising rents and interest rates that are making it harder for longstanding businesses to stay afloat. But there are also issues specific to the beer world. While the number of operating craft breweries continues to rise, according to the Brewers Association, the beer market “shrank 5.1 percent by volume in 2023.” Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson attributes this to consumers opting for different kinds of alcohol. But overall, this creates an incredibly competitive distribution market. 
This is why both Infante and Costello hope that Ulukaya leans into the locality of Anchor Brewing. “You can’t turn a craft brewery like Anchor corporate,” says Costello. “We could just chill and make cool beer. But for a corporation, that’s almost impossible. [It’s about] profit and money signs in people’s eyes.” The goal of the profit line forever climbing up isn’t sustainable for any business, but that’s especially not the case for food and beverage, an industry in which attempting to release your own version of the latest trend to chase profits often results in bad-quality products and a dilution of the brand. This is something Costello and the other workers in the proposed co-op understood. Their goal was to focus distribution in California, and to “reverse choices customers saw as ‘trend-chasing’ by staying with our traditional recipes and avoiding the over-hopped, seltzer-based fads of current times.”
Although Ulukaya hasn’t said much about his plans beyond reopening the brewery, Costello hopes he can trust Ulukaya’s word that he wants to bring back as much of the former team as possible. The Anchor Union has posted that they have repeatedly requested a meeting with Ulukaya to speak about the future. “We know that facility like nobody else. It wouldn’t be that difficult to just turn on some machines and start brewing beer,” he says. But for now, he waits.