8 ms·

Employees bid on Anchor Brewery

181 points by selimthegrim 3y ago

femiagbabiaka 3y ago
That would be awesome. One can only hope Sapporo takes them up on it.
petarb 3y ago
I love their beer and look forward to the Christmas Ale Magnum bottles every year. I hope the employees are able to buy it and run it for many years to come. Big beer has been buying up and killing way too many breweries.
mikeryan 3y ago
I’ve followed this a bit. One take I’ve heard is that one reason Sapporo is shuttering the brewery instead of selling it is that the Union agreements make it difficult to sell. It can’t be cheap having a brewery in prime SF. It would certainly be interesting if they ended up buying it. I lived for 10 years blocks from the brewery and fondly remember the musty smell it gave off during certain days of brewing. I hope someone is able to keep it alive and a co-op may be the most tenable long term solution.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  A lot of Sapporo's acquisitions over the past few decades seem to indicate they prioritize strategic supply chain access over anything else. And that makes sense. It's easier to buy an established brewery with established supply chains and market access in a foreign country and use that as a boardwalk into the market rather than trying to figure it out from scratch. And Sapporo has clearly done well. But I can't see what they're getting out of owning a brewery in San Francisco in this day and age. Globally, beer consumption is way down. They're already supplying most of their addressable American market with beer they produce in and export from Canada. It makes sense to me that they'd want to cut their losses here. And as decent as Anchor has been, it's a wildly saturated market out there. Unless SF makes a U-turn recovery in the next year or two I can't really see how this ends well for Anchor.
  - User23 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, who drinks Sapporo? I've occasionally seen it at sushi houses of course, like Maneki in Seattle, but that's not going to be the volume that drives buying out regional breweries. Is there a big west coast immigrant Japanese community that drinks it habitually in mass market quantity like the American market drinks domestics? None of my east Asian American friends really drink to speak of, at least not where I can see.
    - mikeryan 3y ago
      Sapporo owns Sleeman Brewing in Canada which owns PBR and Old Milwaukee in the States.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      v common in canada, fresh bc it's made locally and often a cheaper menu option than other similar options. it's not popular w the japanese friends i know at least.
    - flomo 3y ago
      We used to buy it because it came in a huge can which you could bring into places. It is widely available in San Francisco at least.
    - caskstrength 3y ago
      I mean, they might have tried Bud and expected Americans to appreciate _any_ better product? Can't blame them I guess.
  - villaaston1 3y ago
    What’s your source for beer consumption being way down? Apart from the pandemic, growth looks strong: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1232738/beer-revenue-by-sales-channel-worldwide https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1232738/beer-revenue-by-s...
    - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
      You linked a revenue forecast. > In terms of domestic sales, about 64.2 billion U.S. dollars were registered in off-premise retail sales. Only 43.8 billion dollars in on-premise sales were recorded in 2021. While this is an increase from the large decline in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still below pre-pandemic levels. > Craft rebounded in 2021 and saw its largest share of the beer market ever even though dollar sales of craft beer remained below their peak. This indicates that although Americans are drinking less beer overall, they are more often opting for craft brews. https://www.statista.com/topics/1654/beer-industry-in-the-united-states/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/1654/beer-industry-in-the-un... I just looked this up now, but it's been a recurring topic to read reports about since the start of the pandemic.
- callalex 3y ago
  > It can’t be cheap having a brewery in prime SF. Real estate prices make things stupid expensive in SF, but this business has been around, owning the same property, for close to a century before real estate prices became insane in SF.
  - mikeryan 3y ago
    I'm more thinking of HR then the real estate. Brewers in SF are going to need to get paid a lot more then folks in Colorado or the South.
bruce511 3y ago
I hope they succeed in taking it over, and I hope that they follow through on the idea of documenting the process as TV. While making good TV will inevitably require editing to emphasise drama, I expect the editor won't have to look far. I think the evolution of union employees from the point of "brewing beer" to the point of "running a profitable business" (complete with functions like sales, marketing, purchasing, quality control, and yes, labor management) will be both fascinating and informative. It would help other transitions to co-ops go a lot smoother. I have no doubts it would be a success, but the process would be just as valuable as a learning tool. Plus the TV would act as marketing (tick).
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "I think the evolution of union employees from the point of "brewing beer" to the point of "running a profitable business" (complete with functions like sales, marketing, purchasing, quality control, and yes, labor management) will be both fascinating and informative." Or an unmitigated disaster. That would also make good TV...
  - bsder 3y ago
    It's dramatically easier to run a business when you merely need to be sustainably profitable rather than wildly profitable. So much of the business world is contaminated by MBA-think that must squeeze every single penny out of a going concern.
    - JimtheCoder 3y ago
      Not sure I agree with that, but you also have to consider the interest rate environment we are in, along with the potential for an economic slowdown. To buy the brewery, they will more than likely be taking on a ton of debt at higher than normal interest rates...this would put them under a lot of pressure from the start...
      - bsder 3y ago
        How about they take on no debt because otherwise Sapporo is going to shut this down and simply take a big loss? When did "market clearing price" quit being a thing? When did we forget that market forces also work downward? This is like the "labor shortage"--there is no "labor shortage". There are simply companies unwilling to pay market rates. The real problem here, however, is political, not economic. If a Sapporo exec signs off on ... say, a $10 million deal ... and suddenly Anchor Steam suddenly starts pulling good profits it will make some Sapporo executives look really bad. And that is really bad for your career.
omot 3y ago
I live next to Anchor Brewery. I hope it shuts down and becomes a mall.
- gaze 3y ago
  Who was there first?
  - omot 3y ago
    they were there first.
    - gaze 3y ago
      strange decision to move there then, ey?
      - omot 3y ago
        Not really. Close to work, okay walkable amenities. It could even be better.
- pixelatedindex 3y ago
  Another mall is the last thing that SF needs. Anchor needs to stay, and a co-op would be quite fitting. Why the hate?
  - omot 3y ago
    No hate, would like more walkable utility around my house. We could probably pack a lot more stores and services in the two blocks Anchor occupies.
- adolfojp 3y ago
  Why?
  - omot 3y ago
justahuman74 3y ago
You know you've really screwed up when the employees themselves are like "we can do this without you, we'll put our money where our mouth is"
RhodesianHunter 3y ago
Seems unlikely that a business would willingly prop up a co-op, a union, and direct competition all in one.
roughly 3y ago
It's weird how many times I've seen this rough story - business starts, runs fine for years, gets bought by some large conglomerate, gets shuttered as unprofitable, gets re-bought by the employees, and runs fine again. One begins to wonder if there's maybe something gone awry in the modern model of business.
- CrimsonChapulin 3y ago
  What’s wrong with infinite growth? The only people that tell you it is unsustainable are those 8th grade math nerds. I agree with you, it seems like we are living in an era with global growth accelerators but no one to tell people it is impossible to keep increasing profits forever regardless of how many markets you can be a leader for.
  - gwill 3y ago
    how can there be infinite growth with limited resources? maybe i'm one of those 8th grade math nerds.
    - jacobo37 3y ago
      vast quantities of bullshit
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      Disruption, synergy, blue ocean thinking, vertical integration, blockchain, leveraged buyouts, stock buybacks, tax advantages, bunkers
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      a lot of limitedness currently is artificially generated. such as restaurants/groceries/farmers constantly binning unimaginable amounts of food
      - uoaei 3y ago
        A large amount is finite. Less of a large amount is also finite but does not make the initial large amount infinite retroactively.
iancmceachern 3y ago
I bought a few stickers this guy made while Dead and Company were in town playing their last concert ever. It was a sticker done in the style of the traditional Anchor Brewing logo, but said Dead and Company instead of Anchor brewing. At the bottom, it says "made in San Francisco until 2023". The end of two SF icons, but it seems that both may carry on. Here's hoping.
Abusiveasshole 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  What brought you to that conclusion? There are lots of counterexamples: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=union&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
smcl 3y ago
Something that's overlooked both in the comments here and in the article itself is that one of the figures behind the unionisation effort at Anchor was a guy called Brace Belden. He's a pretty interesting and slightly controversial guy who shot to fame by joining Kurdish fighters in Syria, periodically posting little snippets about the war to Twitter under his handle @pisspiggranddad. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspiggranddad-syria-isis.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspig... He could easily have written a book on his time in Syria or leveraged that somehow to join Vice or some similar company (he's charismatic and funny, so he probably would've been good in front of the camera) but he opted not to do any of that, joined Anchor and helped organise a union.
- noSyncCloud 3y ago
  Also does the TrueAnon podcast which is pretty good.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  the stubborn leftist idealism in the face of a mass of evidence that communism can't work, at least as it is usually idealized, is a bit off-putting
  - smcl 3y ago
    If you don't like him then that's fair enough. But I've found him to be quite entertaining and at times intelligent and thoughtful, and I'm definitely not alone.
  - Shawnj2 3y ago
    Not sure how that’s relevant here. Worker owner co ops and tank style communism are vastly different things
    - smsm42 3y ago
      The guy is a communist (yeah I know "democratic socialist", same beer, differeng label), it's a fact, and no communist can be ignorant of the mass crimes communist governments committed and keep committing, and of gigantic failures they presided over. If he still chooses to march under that banner, that tells us something about him, and making conclusions based on that is appropriate. That doesn't mean the business he's associated with will fail as a worker coop - maybe not, but it's still not entirely irrelevant.
jeffrallen 3y ago
They should open a website where I can reserve my first $500 worth of employee-owned beer. Shut up and take my money!
- user_named 3y ago
  Doesn't make sense. You'd be paying the wrong party.

181 points by selimthegrim 3y ago

That would be awesome. One can only hope Sapporo takes them up on it.

I love their beer and look forward to the Christmas Ale Magnum bottles every year. I hope the employees are able to buy it and run it for many years to come. Big beer has been buying up and killing way too many breweries.

mikeryan 3y ago

I’ve followed this a bit. One take I’ve heard is that one reason Sapporo is shuttering the brewery instead of selling it is that the Union agreements make it difficult to sell. It can’t be cheap having a brewery in prime SF. It would certainly be interesting if they ended up buying it. I lived for 10 years blocks from the brewery and fondly remember the musty smell it gave off during certain days of brewing. I hope someone is able to keep it alive and a co-op may be the most tenable long term solution.

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
A lot of Sapporo's acquisitions over the past few decades seem to indicate they prioritize strategic supply chain access over anything else. And that makes sense. It's easier to buy an established brewery with established supply chains and market access in a foreign country and use that as a boardwalk into the market rather than trying to figure it out from scratch. And Sapporo has clearly done well. But I can't see what they're getting out of owning a brewery in San Francisco in this day and age. Globally, beer consumption is way down. They're already supplying most of their addressable American market with beer they produce in and export from Canada. It makes sense to me that they'd want to cut their losses here. And as decent as Anchor has been, it's a wildly saturated market out there. Unless SF makes a U-turn recovery in the next year or two I can't really see how this ends well for Anchor.
- User23 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, who drinks Sapporo? I've occasionally seen it at sushi houses of course, like Maneki in Seattle, but that's not going to be the volume that drives buying out regional breweries. Is there a big west coast immigrant Japanese community that drinks it habitually in mass market quantity like the American market drinks domestics? None of my east Asian American friends really drink to speak of, at least not where I can see.
  - mikeryan 3y ago
    Sapporo owns Sleeman Brewing in Canada which owns PBR and Old Milwaukee in the States.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    v common in canada, fresh bc it's made locally and often a cheaper menu option than other similar options. it's not popular w the japanese friends i know at least.
  - flomo 3y ago
    We used to buy it because it came in a huge can which you could bring into places. It is widely available in San Francisco at least.
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    I mean, they might have tried Bud and expected Americans to appreciate _any_ better product? Can't blame them I guess.
- villaaston1 3y ago
  What’s your source for beer consumption being way down? Apart from the pandemic, growth looks strong: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1232738/beer-revenue-by-sales-channel-worldwide https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1232738/beer-revenue-by-s...
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    You linked a revenue forecast. > In terms of domestic sales, about 64.2 billion U.S. dollars were registered in off-premise retail sales. Only 43.8 billion dollars in on-premise sales were recorded in 2021. While this is an increase from the large decline in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still below pre-pandemic levels. > Craft rebounded in 2021 and saw its largest share of the beer market ever even though dollar sales of craft beer remained below their peak. This indicates that although Americans are drinking less beer overall, they are more often opting for craft brews. https://www.statista.com/topics/1654/beer-industry-in-the-united-states/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/1654/beer-industry-in-the-un... I just looked this up now, but it's been a recurring topic to read reports about since the start of the pandemic.
callalex 3y ago
> It can’t be cheap having a brewery in prime SF. Real estate prices make things stupid expensive in SF, but this business has been around, owning the same property, for close to a century before real estate prices became insane in SF.
- mikeryan 3y ago
  I'm more thinking of HR then the real estate. Brewers in SF are going to need to get paid a lot more then folks in Colorado or the South.

bruce511 3y ago

I hope they succeed in taking it over, and I hope that they follow through on the idea of documenting the process as TV. While making good TV will inevitably require editing to emphasise drama, I expect the editor won't have to look far. I think the evolution of union employees from the point of "brewing beer" to the point of "running a profitable business" (complete with functions like sales, marketing, purchasing, quality control, and yes, labor management) will be both fascinating and informative. It would help other transitions to co-ops go a lot smoother. I have no doubts it would be a success, but the process would be just as valuable as a learning tool. Plus the TV would act as marketing (tick).

JimtheCoder 3y ago
"I think the evolution of union employees from the point of "brewing beer" to the point of "running a profitable business" (complete with functions like sales, marketing, purchasing, quality control, and yes, labor management) will be both fascinating and informative." Or an unmitigated disaster. That would also make good TV...
- bsder 3y ago
  It's dramatically easier to run a business when you merely need to be sustainably profitable rather than wildly profitable. So much of the business world is contaminated by MBA-think that must squeeze every single penny out of a going concern.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    Not sure I agree with that, but you also have to consider the interest rate environment we are in, along with the potential for an economic slowdown. To buy the brewery, they will more than likely be taking on a ton of debt at higher than normal interest rates...this would put them under a lot of pressure from the start...
    - bsder 3y ago
      How about they take on no debt because otherwise Sapporo is going to shut this down and simply take a big loss? When did "market clearing price" quit being a thing? When did we forget that market forces also work downward? This is like the "labor shortage"--there is no "labor shortage". There are simply companies unwilling to pay market rates. The real problem here, however, is political, not economic. If a Sapporo exec signs off on ... say, a $10 million deal ... and suddenly Anchor Steam suddenly starts pulling good profits it will make some Sapporo executives look really bad. And that is really bad for your career.

omot 3y ago

I live next to Anchor Brewery. I hope it shuts down and becomes a mall.

gaze 3y ago
Who was there first?
- omot 3y ago
  they were there first.
  - gaze 3y ago
    strange decision to move there then, ey?
    - omot 3y ago
      Not really. Close to work, okay walkable amenities. It could even be better.
pixelatedindex 3y ago
Another mall is the last thing that SF needs. Anchor needs to stay, and a co-op would be quite fitting. Why the hate?
- omot 3y ago
  No hate, would like more walkable utility around my house. We could probably pack a lot more stores and services in the two blocks Anchor occupies.
adolfojp 3y ago
Why?
- omot 3y ago

justahuman74 3y ago

You know you've really screwed up when the employees themselves are like "we can do this without you, we'll put our money where our mouth is"

RhodesianHunter 3y ago

Seems unlikely that a business would willingly prop up a co-op, a union, and direct competition all in one.

roughly 3y ago

It's weird how many times I've seen this rough story - business starts, runs fine for years, gets bought by some large conglomerate, gets shuttered as unprofitable, gets re-bought by the employees, and runs fine again. One begins to wonder if there's maybe something gone awry in the modern model of business.

CrimsonChapulin 3y ago
What’s wrong with infinite growth? The only people that tell you it is unsustainable are those 8th grade math nerds. I agree with you, it seems like we are living in an era with global growth accelerators but no one to tell people it is impossible to keep increasing profits forever regardless of how many markets you can be a leader for.
- gwill 3y ago
  how can there be infinite growth with limited resources? maybe i'm one of those 8th grade math nerds.
  - jacobo37 3y ago
    vast quantities of bullshit
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    Disruption, synergy, blue ocean thinking, vertical integration, blockchain, leveraged buyouts, stock buybacks, tax advantages, bunkers
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    a lot of limitedness currently is artificially generated. such as restaurants/groceries/farmers constantly binning unimaginable amounts of food
    - uoaei 3y ago
      A large amount is finite. Less of a large amount is also finite but does not make the initial large amount infinite retroactively.

iancmceachern 3y ago

I bought a few stickers this guy made while Dead and Company were in town playing their last concert ever. It was a sticker done in the style of the traditional Anchor Brewing logo, but said Dead and Company instead of Anchor brewing. At the bottom, it says "made in San Francisco until 2023". The end of two SF icons, but it seems that both may carry on. Here's hoping.

Abusiveasshole 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
What brought you to that conclusion? There are lots of counterexamples: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=union&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

smcl 3y ago

Something that's overlooked both in the comments here and in the article itself is that one of the figures behind the unionisation effort at Anchor was a guy called Brace Belden. He's a pretty interesting and slightly controversial guy who shot to fame by joining Kurdish fighters in Syria, periodically posting little snippets about the war to Twitter under his handle @pisspiggranddad. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspiggranddad-syria-isis.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspig... He could easily have written a book on his time in Syria or leveraged that somehow to join Vice or some similar company (he's charismatic and funny, so he probably would've been good in front of the camera) but he opted not to do any of that, joined Anchor and helped organise a union.

noSyncCloud 3y ago
Also does the TrueAnon podcast which is pretty good.
pmarreck 3y ago
the stubborn leftist idealism in the face of a mass of evidence that communism can't work, at least as it is usually idealized, is a bit off-putting
- smcl 3y ago
  If you don't like him then that's fair enough. But I've found him to be quite entertaining and at times intelligent and thoughtful, and I'm definitely not alone.
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  Not sure how that’s relevant here. Worker owner co ops and tank style communism are vastly different things
  - smsm42 3y ago
    The guy is a communist (yeah I know "democratic socialist", same beer, differeng label), it's a fact, and no communist can be ignorant of the mass crimes communist governments committed and keep committing, and of gigantic failures they presided over. If he still chooses to march under that banner, that tells us something about him, and making conclusions based on that is appropriate. That doesn't mean the business he's associated with will fail as a worker coop - maybe not, but it's still not entirely irrelevant.

jeffrallen 3y ago

They should open a website where I can reserve my first $500 worth of employee-owned beer. Shut up and take my money!

user_named 3y ago
Doesn't make sense. You'd be paying the wrong party.