Anchor Brewing Is Being Revived by the Billionaire behind Chobani Yogurt

The complex and often sad saga of San Francisco’s iconic Anchor Brewing, which shut down last summer after 127 years in operation, is about to turn over to a new era. Today, the San Francisco Chronicle dropped some bombshell news for the city: Anchor is being revived, having been purchased by the billionaire founder and CEO of Chobani Yogurt, Hamdi Ulukaya. The company hopes to begin production in its original Potrero Hill campus as quickly as possible, while bringing back most of its previous employees. The resuscitation effort is clearly intended to restore public appreciation and street cred for the Anchor brand in the craft beer marketplace, including a return to the company’s previous logos after a much-maligned redesign in 2021.

Ulukaya has acquired every prominent piece of Anchor Brewing as a company: Its Steam Beer (and other) recipes, the Potrero Hill campus and all its brewing equipment, and various warehouses. A price has not been disclosed. Speaking with the Chronicle, the Turkish-born businessman makes the brewery sound like a turn-key operation, saying that things in the facility are pretty much exactly as they were left.

“I think everything is operational, but we don’t know,” he told the newspaper. “It’s like a movie — they pressed stop and left. You see boxes on the conveyors. You see bottles on the fillers. You see tickets written halfway. It’s like time stopped. And literally we are going to go and press start and move those conveyors and start it back up.”

Anchor Brewing Co. was founded in 1896 but until the mid-1960s was a brewery of relatively little note, struggling financially in a depressed beer market in which the top few companies controlled almost the entirety of U.S. beer sales. It was then acquired by Frederick Louis “Fritz” Maytag III in 1965 to prevent its closure, and began slowly modernizing. In the mid-1970s, Anchor began to introduce its own versions of what we would come to think of as American craft beer styles, such as porter, pale ale and American barleywine. In doing so, they provided absolutely indispensable inspiration to other start-up breweries that would soon follow, such as Sierra Nevada Brewing. Anchor, meanwhile, remained nationally famous for their Steam Beer, but the brewery’s public perception began to decline following their acquisition by Japanese brewing giant Sapporo in 2017, and the unpopular rebrand in 2021, which also coincided with the craft beer industry’s wider downturn. At the same time, Anchor’s workers successfully unionized, and members of this union announced their intention in July of 2023 to attempt to purchase the brewery and operate it as a co-op. They ultimately could not put the financial backing together to turn that dream into a reality, alleging that they were not given a fair chance to make the acquisition.