> The corporate overlords are doing what corporate overlords always do.

Killing what doesn't make money? If this was profitable what exactly are the 'corporate overlords' achieving here?

Killing what doesn't make enough money. To a corporation, a product line that sells reliably and consistently year after year is a failure unless it can be turned into something that pushes the stock price ever upward.

I think craft beer fans would argue that their Christmas Ale is iconic and provides much of their respect as a brand and that discontinuing just pushes the brand further into irrelevancy.

Pulling back to California makes sense of sales aren’t strong enough, but also killing off a beloved brand seems that it could hurt in the long run.

Whenever I see "Christmas Ale" I can't help but remember Denis Leary's standup bit about beer, particularly the part about Christmas beer[1].

1: https://youtu.be/YgBvdPH8TZw?t=75

I know quite a bit about Anchor, who used to be an SF institution. After the new Giants baseball park was built in 2000 Anchor as an independent local company were going to build an additional brewery there in 2013. https://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/Anchor-Br...

Sadly this never came to fruition due to the big beer bust a few years later. Lagunitas sold out to Heineken, Anchor to Sapporo etc - there was a big drop off in sales due to all the endless 6 month lifespan craft IPAs that split the market (many of these went bust too).

Lagunitas and Anchor are now a shadow of their former selves after cost cutting etc. Keith Greggor's innovations when he was running Anchor are now a distant memory. The recent mediocre rebranding of Anchor is an indicator of how out of touch Sapporo are with the market.

Conspiracy stuff: just removing competitors outright and taking advantage of inroads to sell what they really want to sell (their own brands).

A similar thing I saw: Asahi was in charge of Budweiser distribution in Japan. Absolutely miserable sales (not that I like Budweiser, or would drink it by choice), almost no presence. AB got the rights back to sell it, and now Budweiser is a reliable presence in many places and I see it out there in ways I never did.

My head canon is that Asahi got the distribution rights purely to slow roll it and make it so that AB would have no reason to build up a local presence. That way Asahi protects its local brands and simply needs to send some executive once a year to be like "hey I dunno nobody seems interested in this drink"

>sold to Sapporo in 2017

And suddenly a great mystery is solved! I had Anchor Steam in 2013 thereabouts and liked it quite a lot. When it became available locally I was happy to get it but it didn't quite taste as I remembered it. As time went on I quit buying it because it just wasn't as good as I remembered it to be.

I wonder what they changed in the recipe?

Might not have had anything changed in the recipe itself. Beer (and cooking) scale weirdly and the flavors you associate with one size of batch change completely when you scale up to larger batches. For beer, it maybe isn't even that surprising given how much living yeast contributes to flavor and yeast is highly susceptible to environmental conditions including size of fermenting container or subtle things like location of fermenting container (even sometimes within the same building).