Damn. Anchor Steam was always good with a crab feed over yesterday’s newspapers.
I expect some brewery will buy the brand, if not the whole business.
Corporate booze companies sometimes do the stupidest things. A few years ago some Japanese company bought Scharffenberger Cellars, which had an excellent reputation, and renamed it Pacific Echo.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/anchor-steam-comeback-story-18194861.php
Anchor steam is the city’s most iconic beer, and the ultimate San Francisco comeback story. It joins products like It’s Its ice cream sandwiches, Buena Vista Irish coffee and the Oracle Park garlic fries on the Mount Rushmore of iconic San Francisco foodstuffs.
It’s Its haven’t been made in SF for years and when they moved to the suburbs to increase and industrialize production the quality went way downhill. The garlic fries at Your Name Here Park are perhaps the worst thing I’ve eaten in SF in 50+ years.
There’s nothing iconically SF about anything Oracle except maybe the hellish traffic jams caused by their annual convention.
Buena Vista still makes Irish coffee.
I agree that their garlic fries are disgusting.
However, I’ve had some really bad bar food at Irish Times as well.
I wish I held on to some of the bottles with the old logo
Wow that sucks.
Historically an important place for the craft beer movement but if you look at their beers, those are relatively “old fashioned” and can’t really compete with many of the existing small breweries. It is also a good reminder for many of the craft breweries that if you get bought out by a big commercial brewery you most likely won’t meet their (unrealistic) sales expectation and will get shut down (we will see how places like Stone will do in the next few years now that they are also part of big brew)
Sad news . I toured anchor brewing in the early 2000 . Fritz still owned the brewery. Beautiful in all ways .
I still admire him to date . Took his inheritance in 1965 and invested in a brewery. Worked hard and made it successful. Thank you Fritz . Still my favorite beer to date
I never got a chance to taste a beer from New Albion brewery. The first craft brewery in the US . Then came Sierra Nevada, Samuel Adams and so on . And a shout out to Jimmy Carter who made homebrewing legal in the United States in 1978 .