Everything Sucks

Breweries are closing, a governor is dragging his feet, and nobody wants to drink beer anymore

A beer in Anchor’s Public Taps in San Francisco in 2019

Yesterday felt like one of the darkest days in beer in a long time. Sapporo USA, the owners of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company, a 127-year stalwart of American brewing, announced that they would be closing early yesterday morning. It sent shockwaves through a beer industry that has already seen predictions of doom and gloom over the past few months, as demand for beer overall continues to decline and demand for craft beer has flatlined. Anchor was acquired by Sapporo, a company that had no prior experience in owning US craft breweries, back in 2017, and from a union-busting campaign to a controversial rebrand to a recent dramatic draw down of its portfolio and distribution footprint, it seemed ill-suited to manage the brewery’s legacy as among the oldest in the nation.

Maybe there’s still a last-minute buyer to be found for Anchor (could someone else pull a Fritz Maytag and save them?), but odds are their brand and intellectual property will be sold off in liquidation, and Anchor Steam and its other beers will live on as shadows of their former self. While they weren’t making beers I was drinking on a regular basis, I’ll miss their presence on store shelves and their ubiquity in old-school craft beer bars on the West Coast.

I’ll be honest, even before the news yesterday, I planned to use the space this week to paint a picture of a very rough road ahead for the beer industry. Whether Anchor’s closure is due to the larger overall trends in beer or the brewery’s own liabilities (workers say it’s option B), it is one huge closure among a slew of recent closures and other associated transactions in the beer industry, and it’s the new normal this year. This one just stings a little more for some people because Anchor’s national distribution helped to make them a gateway brewery for many aging beer nerds.

Commentary: Sign the damn bill, Governor Murphy

In what seems like a bright spot for the beer industry in New Jersey, a bill now sits on Governor Phil Murphy’s desk for signature that will overhaul the state’s brewery laws. S3038, which essentially strips out some draconian rules set unilaterally by the state’s Division of Alcohol Beverage Control that went into effect last year, passed unanimously in both the Senate (36-0) and House (77-0) in the final week of the legislative session just before the Fourth of July holiday.

Unanimously. As in, not a single vote was cast against removing these rules. And this goes to prove once and for all that the people in charge at the state’s ABC are running a protectionist racket for the restaurant and bar industry.

You see, the reason these rules were instituted was, in the words of the ABC at the time, “to strike a balance” between breweries and retail liquor license holders. Restaurant and bar liquor licenses are hard to come by in the state due to artificial caps and the ability of holders to resell licenses at their fair market value. Breweries can sell alcohol to consumers while paying significantly less for a brewery license.

But brewers also have to build and run a brewery, an expensive and time-consuming endeavor that restaurants and bars obviously don’t have to do. Seems like that strikes a balance on its own, but the ABC couldn’t resist an opportunity to cozy up with the restaurant and bar lobby, who wants to stick it to breweries they see as competition. So these arbitrary rules went into effect. Among them: restrictions on private events, food service, televisions, non-alcoholic beverages, and offsite events, plus a tour requirement. All of these restrictions would be lifted with the signing of S3038, a bill that was so wildly popular that its adoption was unanimous on both sides of the aisle.

But you know who else the restaurant and bar lobby seems to have the ear of? The governor. He’s stalling on signing the bill, claiming that he wants more “broad-based liquor reform.” That ignores the fact that an overhaul of the state’s archaic, Prohibition-era liquor laws would be a years-long, dragged-out process, and this bill merely rolls back some of the most draconian rules on breweries and still doesn’t afford them some of the rights breweries have in neighboring states. While the state’s brewers wait for a signature, the ABC has paused enforcement of these rules for six months, a move that the governor calls “temporary relief.”

But that’s all it is — temporary. The ABC also paused the implementation of these rules back in 2020 for COVID-19, only to blindside brewers with their return last year. A six-month reprieve does nothing to ensure the long-term future of breweries in the Garden State. The governor needs to sign the bill and grant permanent relief to an industry that’s already reeling from increasing production costs and declining consumer interest. New Jersey’s breweries can’t keep working in a state of limbo where they don’t know when their revenue streams could change again on the whims of bureaucrats. Sign the damn bill, Governor Murphy.

Brewery Tracker

Total brewery count: 3,125
Total breweries visited in 2023: 230
Total breweries visited in England: 166

Brewery Visit of the Week

Brewery #3,102, Buxton Brewery, Buxton, England (Visited 1-Jul-2023)

Okay, let’s try to be positive for a second here. There’s a brewery that’s been on my bucket list for a long time — a town’s namesake brewery. They’ve had pretty broad distribution across the UK for a while and I’ve always enjoyed it when I’ve come across it. They also made a name for themselves with a beer they brewed with Omnipollo that you might know by a different name. So when I realized I was a train ride away from Buxton on the first day of my vacation earlier this month, I hopped a ride to the edge of England’s Peak District to visit their brewery tap, which was hosting a small music festival on the picturesque lawn across a car park from their production space on an industrial estate (yes, breweries in industrial parks are just as much a thing in England as they are the U.S.).

I happened to meet owner Geoff Quinn that afternoon while I was working on my second half-pint, and he graciously showed me around the space, which has grown from its humble origins back in a family garage back in 2009. “The Beer,” as the aforementioned Omnipollo collab is now named, is far from the only thing they’ve perfected since that time. The Fringe Beer, a bright, citrusy English Pale Ale, was the quintessential summertime ale. Hatchet, a session version of their flagship Axe Edge IPA, was delightful on cask. But Buxton is no stodgy old English brewery. There was a Citra and Sabro IPA and a Blueberry Ice Cream Beer Slushie. Sorry if you were expecting me to be enamored with a brewery for sticking to local beer tradition.

One lager caught my eye: Downtown, a “New York Lager.” Being from New York, I wondered what the hell a “New York Lager” was. Well, apparently, our city has become known for dry-hopped lagers across the pond, and this beer, generously dry-hopped with Wolf, Azacca and Ahtanum Cryo hops with a small addition of oats and wheat, gave me plenty of idea of what inspired it. I finished that lager outside on the lawn while a cover band played the songs of Oasis and Blur, which seemed equal parts on the nose and absolutely perfect for my first day abroad.

The Weekly Reader

• Some NYC restaurants are partnering with local breweries on custom beers [Kevin Kain, Vinepair]

• New Great South Bay location will add to Lindenhurst’s booming beer scene [Maureen Mullarkey, Patch]

• It’s not a rosy picture to paint for the beer industry [Michael Stein, Slate]

• Meet England’s only Trappist Brewery [Stephen Castle, New York Times]

One More Thing

I don’t want to make this newsletter full of gloom and doom, but history repeated itself this week in Waterbury, Vermont. Beloved brewery Prohibition Pig’s production space was destroyed in this week’s flash flooding as the Winooski River overflowed its banks. It’s the same block where The Alchemist’s original brewpub was flooded after the remnants of Hurricane Irene flooded the town back in 2011. It’s going to be a long road to recovery for ProPig and I wish them the best.

Cheers,
Chris