America’s “Oldest Craft Brewery” Is Coming Back from the Grave, Thanks to a Surprise Buyer

Christmas came early this year. Anchor Brewing Co., the iconic San Francisco craft brewery behind Steam Beer and Christmas Ale, has a new lease on life after shutting its doors in 2023 after 127 years in operation.

Craft beer lovers from coast to coast can thank Hamdi Ulukaya, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Chobani Yogurt, who also owns a majority stake in La Colombe Coffee Roasters. Ulukaya posted a video to social media stating that he had purchased the rights to Anchor Brewing Co.

Photo by Henry Phillips for Gear Patrol

“It might be old, it might be given up on,” Ulukaya said of the brewery, which many drinkers considered America’s oldest craft brewery at the time of its closing. “But it is the grand jewel.”

(D. G. Yuengling & Son, established in 1829, is technically the oldest qualifying “craft brewer,” as defined by the Brewers Association. The definition has been revised multiple times in recent years.)

History of Anchor Brewing Co.

Anchor Brewing Co. was founded in 1896 but its story starts half a century earlier in the middle of the California Gold Rush.

Gottlieb Brekle, a German immigrant living in San Francisco, started brewing so-called “steam beer” — a classic German style so tied to California and Anchor Brewing Co. that it’s sometimes called “California common beer.” It’s made by fermenting lager yeast at temperatures used to create ales, giving the beer a distinctive flavor.

A few years before the turn of the century, Ernst F. Baruth and Otto Schinkel, Jr. bought Brekle’s operation and named it Anchor Brewing Co.

The 20th century proved to be rocky for the brewery. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, two World Wars, Prohibition and declining sales all threatened to put it out of business, which indeed happened multiple times but never for good.

Anchor Brewing Co. always bounced back, and in doing so, it paved the way for thousands of craft brewers.

It’s widely credited with brewing the first American IPA, Liberty Ale, though it wasn’t labeled as such. It introduced American beer drinkers to dry-hopping and open-fermentation. And it invented perhaps the best holiday drinking tradition in beer history: the annual Anchor Brewing Christmas Ale.

Anchor Brewing Co.

The brewery was eventually purchased in 2017 by Sapporo, who closed its doors just five years later, citing complications from the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation.

What’s Next?

Details around the brewery’s reopening, such as a timeline, remain scarce. But Ulukaya told the The San Francisco Standard that he plans to bring back the brewery’s old, iconic label design, which Sapporo retired in widely criticized effort to boost sales.

“It’s the essence of San Franciso, it’s the essence of this country, that we can always bring it back, better than before,” Ulukaya said in his announcement video.

Time will tell, but for Anchor Brewing Co., beer fans everywhere will be happy to wait.

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