There are some great amber ales, especially newer ones that have given up the heavy hand with crystal malts. I’m a fan–and I don’t even hate drinking some of the older ambers out there–but I don’t think there is much of a market to make them commercially viable.
Kinda the same with brown ales. I can’t count how many people I’ve heard say, “brown ales: why?” in a market full of 15% stouts. Personally I’d rather drink some of those brown ales over a lot of stouts on the market but the totality of consumers do not agree.
Mid-tier breweries can’t compete with AB et al. on economies of scale but also can’t compete with micro- and nano-breweries on local-ness / personableness / etc.
Grocery-store shelf space is hyper competitive, but local places can just skip that and focus on taproom sales (unless we get another COVID scenario…). Anchor doesn’t didn’t have that luxury.
Homebrewing has a long history of keeping styles alive after they went extinct commercially. For some it may be nostalgia, and for others it may be to explore beers they can’t get commercially. That’s the beauty of this hobby - if I want to drink it I’ll just brew it.
I’ve read a number of articles about Anchor closing since becoming aware of this situation. One common problem, mentioned in a number of the articles, were increased labor costs. The labor costs combined with other factors are what led Sapporo to “let go”. In other words, Anchor just wasn’t profitable anymore.
I’ve seen several of these stories, too, mostly advancing a particular political position about Anchor’s unionized workforce. Sapporo’s Japanese facilities are all unionized so that wasn’t exactly something Sapporo didn’t know how to handle from a financial perspective. More to the point, Anchor collapsed under poor sales which began before unionization and before the sale to Sapporo in 2017. Several other regional craft breweries bought out at the peak of craft beer at inflated prices are seeing the same exactly demise despite no unionization of their workforces (e.g. Alpine/Green Flash, Ballast Point) and many others acquired during that period are struggling assets for the buyers.
Bottom line here is Sapporo bought a struggling business and failed to turn it around. Unlike buyers who acquired breweries at the top of their game and didn’t plan for the craft beer market to ease, Sapporo knew it was buying a business on the downslope in an industry on the downslope. Bad bets rarely pay off.
Many articles have pointed out costs that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Did the workers get a big pay raise when they unionized, or were they after better working conditions? As stated above, Sapporo is union in Japan.
I’ve seen the high inflation in San Francisco as a reason, but I’d you do a Google search you find that SF is slightly less than the Nation average inflation (2.9 vs 3% national).
I’m surprised that my metro area is so high, but no midsized breweries are closing around Detroit. Same for Florida.
The reporters don’t know the beer business. They haven’t seen the books. No reports on ingredient costs increasing, or the shipping in and out of an urban location increasing. Some urban breweries have to pay for spent grain disposal as farms are too far away for the farmers. Nothing about a crap rebranding. No words about a legacy style(s) in a changing market. No words on what the plans are for the property, which will be worth more to developers than as a brewery, see the fate of Young’s Ram Brewery in London as to what will happen.
Weren’t they already losing money before Sapporo acquired them? I’m not saying that Sapporo did a good job by any means but the ship was already sinking possibly.
They did a great job bringing back the Narragansett brand using the lager as their main brand, and then piggybacking their craft brewery off of it. I just don’t see anyone being able to get enough steam behind the Anchor brand (see what I did there) to get it back off the ground. Anchor Steam beer just doesn’t have the same mass-market appeal as 'Gansett lager.
I’d feel good about the quality of the beer with the brewery in their hands, though. The Narragansett taproom is just a couple of miles from where I work and the beers they put out are top-notch.
While I don’t think of vinepair as the benchmark of journalism, it is an inside look I haven’t seen reported elsewhere. If true, it paints an extremely poor picture of Sapporo’s management of Anchor. If true that Sapporo thought they could brew their lagers at Anchor, it makes a lot of sense that they looked to abandon it after buying out Stone which has plenty of modern and closed fermentation equipment capable of brewing Sapporo’s other brands.
I really, really wanted to like Anchor products (and could get them fairly easily here in SoCal), but was disappointed more than once over the years. The bottles frequently had oxidation issues, which just shouldn’t have been the situation for local-ish beer that was in the fridge case.
It’s a bummer from a nostalgia/historical perspective, but from a business and beer quality perspective I’m just not terribly surprised at all. The beer market has changed so much in the past 20 years that I imagine a resurrection of Anchor would be an uphill battle. Aging homebrewers who have a fondness for the mythology of steam beer (that includes me) aren’t enough to keep a brewery afloat, as much as it pains me to say it!
I’m glad to have the clone recipes…I did an Anchor Steam clone a few years back, and was quite pleased with it. I’ll probably brew it again (and Liberty Ale…and others) from time to time. As styles of beers I enjoy get harder to find in the beer cases at the store (amber ales, classic American pale ales and IPAs, etc.), I only see more homebrewing opportunities in my future!