I'm a little surprised Anchor didn't do better. I personally got worn out by all the craziness and experimentation in the craft brewing scene. Really unique IPAs or sour beers were fun for a while, but after a while, I realized I just wanted something reasonably good and predictably normal, i.e. a Normal Good Beer. It seemed like Anchor was delivering on this, but maybe there were enough other options that they just didn't distinguish themselves well enough. Too bad, considering they're a local beer with a lot of history and had a successful unionization effort.

I don't have the numbers... but I'm going to assume that regular beer drinkers drink the popular light beers or already have a craft beer they like and spend less money trying new products. It took contentious political media to get die-hards to stop drinking their favorite light beer. That's how ingrained these brands are. It's harder to sell a new Amber Ale than a Juicy Mango/Dragonfruit IPA. These 2 beers serve different personas and the beer industry is focusing on growth over providing new products to their base.

I think this is right. When I was in my 20s I was really into beer. Now I'm older and I split my time between the usual light beer culprits when I'm drinking out and enjoying a few craft favorites when I'm drinking in and gaming/doing hobbies. Also when a four pack of 16oz cans is approaching $20 (or exceeding that) I'm less likely to be exploratory because who the he'll wants a fridge of rejects they don't like.

I (rarely) homebrew, for fun, but when it comes to beers in the fridge I have so many great local options to choose from (here on the south shore of MA, near Cape Cod), it's ridiculous: Second Wind, Stellwagen, Mayflower, Timberyard.... typically canned just a week or two before purchase. A few times a year I'll make a trip to Treehouse (worth it), otherwise the local package stores are well-stocked. I do remember enjoying Anchor Steam and IPAs back in the day (as a big upgrade from shitty mass-produced lagers), but my palate evolved and my preference for the best and freshest brew simply rules out generic bottles from the opposite coast.

My understanding is that this is kind of the pattern of the beer downturn. The huge operations are doing okay, shifting around amongst their sub-brands, introducing seltzers, etc. And the hyper-local stuff is still doing well it seems. But the "pretty big" craft brewers that went nationwide, they're facing the brunt.

Those light beers are also low ABV, which is ideal for warm summer days where to just want something refreshing without getting plastered. A simple tasting 4% beer works great for that. A complex, bitter 12% double IPA? Not so much.

I’d much rather drink an amber ale on a nice warm day than yet another IPA.

Just a point to the marketing and shifting norms... I would call a 4-5% beer normal, not low, ABV.

5% used to be considered high or an ‘export’ lager when I was a lad. We called Stella Artois at a massive 5.2% “wife beater”.

Typical session lagers like Heineken were around 3.5%.

Yeah, I'd call normal anywhere between 3.5 - 5%, with session beers being anything < 3.5%. Anything above 5% is strong and where, 15 years ago, beers used to top out at around 6.5% in your average supermarket (Carlsberg Special Brew aside), nowadays beers at 8 and 9% are commonplace, although perhaps not to the extent they were 5 - 8 years ago.

A lot of these are just too much, and too weird (as I and many others have commented), for day to day drinking. Nowadays I mostly drink session beers because I normally have to worry about driving, getting up early, or functioning in some at least semi-useful way later in the day.

Jesus, that ‘speccy brew’ burning tyre taste. We got a couple cans once when properly skint and choked them down.

Some of these 12% burned hops ipa’s taste like special brew to me.

> Jesus, that ‘speccy brew’ burning tyre taste.

Yeah, it's basically undrinkable. It was a bit of a staple at 6th form parties in the early 90s because it was cheap and strong, although I always struggled to get it down. I did buy a can many years later to try for a laugh as a fully fledged adult (is it really as bad as I remember, etc.?)... and couldn't finish it. Just awful.

To take that one step further I think most new drinkers find seltzers more refreshing in the heat than low abv light beers.

Worth noting that most 'hard seltzers' like whiteclaw are still brewed sort of like beers for tax reasons. Since brewed drinks have less excise on them than premixed drinks.

Well nah, the ingredients just like "alcohol": https://ussupport.whiteclaw.com/en/support/solutions/article....

You could argue that the alcohol in it was fermented, but all alcohol is fermented, aha. Apparently WC base alcohol is a pure spirit "5 times distilled from corn & gluten free".

Bud Light was the most popular beer in the USA until very recently Modelo Especial just passed it. Both of those are very straight forward beers.

The recipe changed after the acquisition by Sapporo. Fans of the original Anchor Steam didn't like the new taste and stopped buying. So it faded into the background with the other ~3-5 domestics being served at a given bar.

Lots of people talking out their ass here, clearly none of them spend any time in SF dives talking to other patrons.

Do you have proof that they changed the recipe/process. My wife and I have long suspected this, but I believe officially they denied any change.

The rebrand was an absolute disaster of marketing. You have a 125 year old brewery with an old-fashioned looking logo, and you throw that all out for a more modern design that looks like every other beer on the shelf that got their designer off of fiver.

Shades of New Coke.

> Too bad, considering they're a local beer with a lot of history and had a successful unionization effort.

127 year old company, unionizes in 2019, shuts down in 2023, I wouldn't really call that successful.

Unions in the US are on the ropes. Union membership is down, and companies have loads of resources and help to stymie unionization efforts. Frankly, unionizing at all is a successful unionization effort at the moment, since it shows other people it can be done. Can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

It’s on the ropes in corporate America - but not in the public sector.

I know this is just one example, but public school teacher unions don't seem to be doing so great, seeing how teaching is still the example always brought up as the most tragically underpaid profession.

Sure, a union isn't a magic bullet that fixes all problems, but I know school teachers in some very different districts in the US, and their pay is universally awful for the amount of time they put in, and some of them even end up having to buy their own school supplies, out of pocket, because their classroom is way underfunded. I guess we could argue that, without the unions, things would be even worse, but I still think teachers unions have mostly failed their members.

On the flip side, police officer unions seem to be doing pretty great, negotiating reasonably high pay, and helping to shield their members from accountability for wrongdoing.

Like you said it depends on the sector. I have a lot of friends that work for the state and it seems like their unions are doing great. Six figures, guaranteed raises, 2 Days in office per month, and what seems from an outsider to be like a 20 hour work week

Labor movements don't like public sector unions. When unions are talked about, it's almost entirely assuming private sector unions.

Well it could be management didn't meet labor's demand and labor got the brewery closed. So in that sense it could be success.

20th century labor movement: We want improved working conditions and more jobs to exist, let’s bargain in pursuit of that goal

21st century labor movement: we’d consider it a success to destroy all of the jobs altogether rather than accept less than 100% of our demands (which may or may not be economically feasible).

It sure incentivizes eliminating human labor as fast as possible.

That's not exactly being generous to the unions. The corporations fight unionization at every turn, so the unions need to play aggressive to get the kinds of wins that keep them being supported. At the same time, the corporations have taken the position that unionization is such an existential threat that they'll happily close a profitable location if it unionizes, in order to make an example of them, raising the stakes for unionization even higher. Meanwhile, the government will happily back the bigwigs at every turn.

The result is that good faith negotiations between capital and labor are now impossible. If the government would do its job, and seriously punish companies and investors (think less "angry email" and more "Old Yeller") who engage in illegal union busting, then unionization wouldn't be a massive risk for the employees, and more modest demands could be seen as acceptable.

The best way to 'fight' unionization is to offer a great employment package, so that the workers are reasonably happy. Workers know that unions come wih a lot of disadvantages. And unions often use heavy-handed methods to create a union shop, like effectively open elections and shaming.

But who says that’s related?

> had a successful unionization effort

Just forming a union should not be a measure of success. If it ultimately led to shutdown of the division because it was unprofitable, I would argue it was a pretty unsuccessful effort.

I haven’t seen anyone suggest unionization has had anything to do with it, in fact I’m going to groundlessly state that it probably is the only reason they lasted this long.

They only unionized four years ago. The union probably wasn't a reason why they lasted.

I was just pointing out the obvious anti-union bias of just mentioning they were unionized as if it had something to do with them failing. Sounds like they got bought by a conglomerate who closed them down. Normal capitalistic practice unrelated to the existence or lack of existence of a union.

It should be. See my other comment.

This seems to be a conclusion in the beverage world as well, the craft beer wave has broken and people are just trying to drink something that tastes like what it says on the label.

I home brew beer and the instinct is to make something crazy, but I get sick of my own experiments and double sick of paying 18$ for a 4 pack of someone else’s experiments. I could never stand being told that hop burn was a sign of craft beer, it’s a sign of a shit process and you should never have those flavors in your beer.

I’ve actually been shocked to discover hard kombucha with some fruit juice is great. I still drink my beer, but this stuff is light, refreshing, and it’s 7% so it gets the job done.

Anchor’s taste changed to me sometime after the acquisition, I liked it in years past and there was something off to me now.

Homebrewer here too. I agree. I like some experimentation but also like some "normal" stuff. I also don't like the really expensive odd stuff in the store. I've also begun to dislike the really plain stuff in the store.

Even if my beer is a little different every batch, I think I prefer it. It's fun to grow your own hops and even grow/malt your own grain.

Some of the highest-status beers during Peak Beer were well-executed straightforward beers; Pliny comes to mind. As does Zombie Dust.

Pliny adapted to shifting tastes too, they reduced the grassiness and switched to bittering hop extracts to get a more mass appeal flavor and reduce waste with flower hops that would also soak up more wort. If you aren't constantly adjusting in beer you'll go the way of Anchor.

I think the whole world is off axis if Pliny is a straight forward beer. Maybe we were all better off when Russian River was sending it out for us to buy in lots of 2 bottles to a local store that you had to call every day and check to see if they got any.

I just bought a random craft beer 4 pack that cost me $17 the other day, reminds me why I don't buy craft beer.

Is it hard to home brew something like a Pilsner? I imagine the hard part is consistency

At small scales, a rule of thumb is that it's harder to brew beers with lighter/subtler flavors. You can hide a lot of minor brewing mistakes behind an IPA or a heavy stout. Not so much with something like a pilsner.

To add on, in addition to needing more consistency and skill to brew something light in flavor, it also more difficult to brew a lager (which a Pilsner is) than an ale -- the yeast involved are different, and the fermentation process is generally longer (more opportunity for stuff to go wrong) and more temperature sensitive (more opportunity for stuff to go wrong.)

It’s not hard to brew a Pilsner, and brewing your own beer is rewarding, but the light German styles are the hardest to really improve on. If you just put some quality ingredients and decent temp control fermentation at a Pilsner, you’re going to get a super great beer judged against some regular commercial offerings, and a good beer in general. To get better that that, look into LoDo brewing if you want to go down the rabbit hole.

If you like to strive for perfection, the german styles will scratch that itch for you.

Edit: I will add that brewing Pilsner or Helles will literally never impress your friends. You’ll get a shrug and a “oh that’s good” out of them when you’ve put your heart and soul into driving out one little off flavor from your ferment that no one else can taste but you. IPA is basically the polar opposite.

There's other Bay Area breweries that have become Normal Good Beer. SF itself has had 21st Amendment, which isn't quite as good as it used to be, but is still Normal Good Beer, that you can get in stores no less.

I think there's a point that they got displaced by the general availability of Normal Good Beer that's just a notch better, in most of the places where they would be sold in stores. You go to Eureka, there's Normal Good Beer, made locally. You go to Portland, oh yeah lots.

I still only love sours; I'm a little gay cocktail freak usually, but sour beers have always seemed kind of special to me - I love the flavour and the history of using wild yeast (I think there was a river somewhere with the right type of yeast where they just used to leave fruit next to the river for the yeast to collect).

But unfortunately there doesn't seem to be as many sours around in the UK now, when I was still in NZ we have tonnes, but now all I find in the UK is IPAs and "DIPA"s etc. So boring.

Ah there we are: https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/lambic-... tbf idt they leave the wort by the riverside anymore per se, the yeast seems to just be in the air all around that area. Super cool, though.

Belgium is definitely worth a visit if you like interesting beers, there are countless places, but I'd have to recommend Delirium Café (a honestly confusing maze of various beer halls) but for good weather "Little Delirium" is great too, smaller location but with nice outdoor seating.

Anchor actually did have a bunch of more modern beers after the Sapporo acquisition, but they were only available at the taproom. They only had retail distribution for the old reliable flagships (and then had a rebranding that was not well received).

Yeah, that was the weird thing. I visited their tap room a few times here and there (I live fairly close), and some of their selections were truly different and interesting and good. But you couldn't get them anywhere else. Meanwhile, I hardly ever go for an Anchor beer when in a bar, as there are always more interesting choices. I wouldn't call myself a beer connoisseur, even. Seemed like shooting themselves in the foot.

This news has nothing to do with lack of innovation. The entire beer market is currently contracting.

Also, not everything needs to innovate. Every field needs a canon of notable creations that have stood the test of centuries or millennia and beer brewing is no exception.

I don't know. It seems a mix of traditional and innovation does well. Yuengling seems to be a good example of a small brand becoming regional and now almost national. They have their traditional brews and have added a few new ones.

Grew up in PA and love seeing Yingers blow up, but I bet their success is largely due to the same reason we loved them back in the early 2000s: they brew a tasty no-frills lager at a good price.

Seems a lot of the brewing industry chased fads for 20 years.

I like Yingling Porter. I'm annoyed they aren't in NYC while brewed so nearby.

I'd like to see what '23 the numbers look like before declaring it a contracting market. Sales by volume for the entire category are indeed down, but somewhere between 2-3%, and that is still likely attributable to the crash starting in 2020, when it was actually illegal to serve or even order beer in many places. (To this day, there are still aggressive measures taken against breweries, brewpubs, and taprooms, like this extrajudicial order that is crushing the business in New Jersey: https://www.nj.gov/oag/abc/downloads/LimitedBrewerySpecialCo....)

Still, imports are up, and regionals and crafts are up as a percentage of total beer. The small operations that weren't entirely destroyed are still in the process of coming back online. I'm not convince the empirical decline is the market at work and not external forces.

If you are interested in the numbers, give Bart Watson a follow: https://twitter.com/BrewersStats

He's an economist that covers this for the Brewers Association. Based on the data, it's not looking good. Some of it is released in public reports and presos, others are member-only resources.

Here's a report from the TTB that shows the contraction:

https://www.ttb.gov/images/statistics/ttb-beer-2023-statisti...

Also, there are several industry talks that dive into the why...one factor seems to be that Gen Z just isn't drinking.

Oh my gosh. Section 1 of that about tours. What a ridiculous ordinance. I assume all this is in there to protect some other class of business that lobbied for it, right? Like bars trying to prevent breweries from competing?

Yeah. They nailed it, too:

"licensee may offer for sale or make gratuitous offer of de minimis types of food such as water" (2)

...but...

"licensee shall not brew and sell coffee" (7)

That is full de minimis lol.

There's multiple kinds of liquor licenses.

You can be a bar or restaurant that serves alcohol (retail consumption license).

You can also be a brewpub (restricted brewery license), which comes with production limits and requires the above.

You can be a brewery, which mostly makes and sells beer to retailers and distributors to consume elsewhere, but might have some tasting events (limited brewery license).

New Jersey strictly limits the number of liquor licenses of different types. Limited brewery licenses don't count against these limits: it's expected they're mostly selling their goods to other licensees.

It might be protectionism, but more likely it's just an effort to regulate alcohol that doesn't take into account the changes in the craft beer scene in the last couple of decades.

> more likely it's just an effort to regulate alcohol that doesn't take into account the changes in the craft beer scene in the last couple of decades.

This isn't a law. It's an order that was issued just 3 years ago.

A bill to undo it--which should not even be necessary given it's not legislation--was passed unanimously by both houses of the state legislature. The governor is sitting on it and hasn't commented.

> > effort to regulate alcohol

> This isn't a law.

Yes, this was why the word "regulate" was used.

> which should not even be necessary given it's not legislation

Lawmakers empower regulators to make ordinary rules without specifying every detail in laws. Sometimes lawmakers don't like what regulators do, though, and choose to exercise more direct oversight.

Their Porter is fantastic and on par with Fuller's.

I love porters but they're getting hard to find. Every supermarket is wall-to-wall IPAs. I assume they know what sells, so apparently that's what the market wants right now. You can't make a living brewing porters.

I would be a lot more disappointed with this turn of events if I had access to their porter. But the ubiquitous steam beer was never one of my favorites.

Totally agree. The craft beer industry needs to stop with all this IPA nonsense. It’s absurd how hard it is to find anything but yet another weird IPA.

If the craft beer industry is shrinking, this is one large component. Stop with the nonstop IPA’s. There is way more beers than just IPA’s.

Not sure why you were downvoted. What you say is true!

I’m a bit biased, but I’d like to see a few more Porters and Stouts.

Stouts are so good but even in a store with a large beer selection they are hard to find.

At least you can usually find Guinness. Obviously not the best stout in the world, but at least it's consistent and you know what you're gonna get.

Everyone rants about how great guinness is, but the draught cans taste incredibly watered-down to me for some reason. Extra Stout and Foreign Stout are fine and I have to imagine that's what guiness tastes like for EU customers.

Guinness Foreign Extra stout is so good! It’s a shame its so difficult to find.

Yeah that's my favorite of the guinesses. Extra is an acceptable example of a stout, drinkable but I've had better. But Foreign is actively good and I'd put it near the top of my list. My local grocery store was clearing them out, 4paks for $7.50 and it was a nice little turn of events.

Bell's Kalamazoo Stout is my One Beer For The Rest Of My Life though, just absolutely perfect in every way, as is customary for Bell's. I still enjoy some Fat Tire in the summer, and Bell's does a fantastic Czech Pilsner, and their Flamingo Fruit Fight pomegrate sour is actually fantastic too, but Kalamazoo Stout is the one I could never live without.

Sad that Bell's has gotten bought out too, it's a trend recently where macros are buying up micros so they don't have to do the work of building their own products and branding. The macros know they're in trouble, nobody under the age of 40 is actively seeking out a budweiser or coors these days. A few of them are acceptable (Milwaukee's Best Ice, Rolling Rock, Genesee Cream Ale, etc) but most of them I'd rather drink something else than suffer through Budweiser or whatever. Goose Island is coors iirc, Sierra Nevada got bought a couple years ago iirc, Blue Moon is macro, etc.

I work at a craft beer bar, in general folks want live fresh beer...I pour 1 stout for every 50 Ipas I pour. We have the option but folks love their pale ales and ipas. Anchor would just go bad on our rotation...a freshly brewed pilsner, i'll sell a bunch. A blaise steam beer that isn't "fresh" isn't winning any body over. That said I'm a big fan of anchor porter, the general public is not.

I do wonder how much of this phenomenon is just self-reinforcing. Sell a large variety of IPAs, and only a small number of other choices, and sure, people will tend to gravitate toward IPAs. Add on top of that heavy marketing of IPAs over other options, and people will gravitate toward them.

I think this is a lot of it: people order IPA because they think they know what it is and because they're everywhere. It's the John Smith's of the 2010s/20s.

I went through a phase of drinking a lot of different IPAs, and it was fun, but now I'm looking at other options. The IPA thing has just been overdone and there are only so many iterations of weird IPA formulae that I can deal with.

I will still drink IPA if that's the only ale/craft beer on offer in the bar... and that really goes back to your point about self-reinforcement.

Well we have 10 taps...representing nearly 10 styles...I'll tell ya I change pale and Ipa every shift. The others, once a week.

pale ales are frankly a lot more palatable than IPAs imo. When I looked back at the IPAs I liked, I realized most of them weren't actually IPAs, they were just pale.

but yeah I'm tired of being assblasted by overhopped west-coast IPAs. The ones I've liked, it turns out to be east coast. Even then, I'm tired of being hit over the head with hazy, juicy, mosaic, fruity, citra, etc. Very very rarely do I see these hops used effectively - Oddside Citra Pale Ale is an example of an exception.

At least the super markets aren't wall-to-wall hazy like the draft houses haha. I can't wait for more West Coast and Pacific IPAs to get back on tap.

And things are better now! I feel like 10-15 years ago it truly was wall-to-wall IPAs, and if you wanted something else, you had maybe one or two choices. Now at least it seems like the IPA craze has died down a bit, though they're still well over-represented.

I personally don't like IPAs at all, and it's really frustrating. Most of the time I end up going for a cocktail or wine since the beer selection at most bars is still pretty IPA-heavy. I do enjoy that a lot of more beer-focused places stock sours and stouts, both of which I love, but I feel like most bars don't sell them, or much of them.

I really love IPAs myself, but I'm very tired of hazy styles (hazy, NEIPA, etc). My favorite hop varieties are from NZ and I can tell you they have been doing some excellent stuff with IPAs there for over a decade. West Coast and NZ collabs are also awesome.

Why does a beer have to innovate?

Not the beer, but the company. Even places like Guiness come out with new stuff like Baltimore Blonde to increase their line up and appeal to a bigger market for better scale.

the same reason as any market needs to innovate : consumer trends and goals shift with the times.

Let's take the most run-of-the-mill common bolt in the world as a product example : the 200 year old company that has changed to sell that run-of-the-mill bolt online w/ fast delivery and with a companion app has innovated without a product change.

innovation doesn't imply a product change, it implies that a company is necessarily flexible to meet the shifting demands of consumers. This can be done in other ways than shoving newer and shinier products out the door.

It doesn’t have to necessarily, however, it does have to in inverse proportion to how much their product appeals to the market presently. If your popularity and sales, for instance, take a 50% hit, you’d better introduce some new product lines. That doesn’t have to mean abandoning your original recipe product.

My beer journey started in the 90s and Anchor had good distribution when such things were difficult for smaller brands, but even back then it was always the last beer in the cooler at a party. I'm surprised they lasted this long.

> the last beer in the cooler at a party.

I'm a bit surprised by this. I think a lot of my disappointment with Anchor stems from the fact that people raved about, and feted them, whereas to me they were always at about the level of a fairly mediocre British ale (sorry). But then, on the other hand, if what you're used to is Bud, Coors, etc.[0], then they're absolutely going to be a breath of fresh air, so it sort of blows me away to hear that it was so unpopular at parties.

I guess it all depends on point of view and I absolutely don't want to come off as gatekeepy about what good beer is because, as I said in my original comment, the last 20 years US brewers have really pulled it out of the bag with a ton of absolutely great beers that can stand amongst the best. I forget exactly when but I guess I had Anchor Steam Beer for the first time somewhere between 2005 and 2009, just as the craft beer movement was starting to build up steam.

Back in 2005 a friend and I took a roadtrip partway across the US, including a stop at Salt Lake City. Irony of ironies, that's where we had the best beers on the trip, in a "private members club" (literally just a bar). I particularly enjoyed a local brew called "Polygamy Porter" - a really lovely beer, and better than anything I've had by Anchor in the years since. No idea if it's still in production, although I hope so.

[0] Of all the mass produced beers in the US I do have quite a big soft spot for Blue Moon, to the point that if a bar offers it, because it's relatively uncommon in the UK, I'll often order it in preference to craftier offerings, particularly if those craftier offerings are mostly IPAs or APAs.

> [1] Pure speculation: I don't remember ever trying any of Stone's beers so have no comment to make on their quality or otherwise.

Most of the Stone beers I've tried have ranged between "meh" and "pour out the can". Buenaveza (salt and lime cerveza) is the only one I've really enjoyed from them, and I've given them a number of tries. Buenaveza is a perfectly fine lawnmowing beer or party beer though and I do get it occasionally, but there's also several other cervezas here that are super good and super cheap too (Cerveza Delray is great).

They seem reasonably popular so it's entirely possible it's just me, I'm a picky drinker and I know what I like and don't like. But that said, it doesn't seem like "brewed by stone" is some massive mark of quality for sapporo, at least to me. Maybe they're good relative to the alternatives who could produce beer at macro scale.

(is there a term for the Goose Island-style operations that are owned by macrobrews and produce relatively large quantities? Some of those operations really straddle the line between macro and micro.)

Anyway though, there are definitely companies where I agree with the head brewer's taste and ones where I don't.

Sapporo's "innovations" for the Anchor brand were to pick a fight with labor, tinker with the recipe of their most historic beer, and green-light of the most infamously eye-searing rebrands in recent memory.

> but as a Brit coming from somewhere with a by then thriving real ale scene,

Served at room temperature. Yikes.

Served at cellar temperature, so around 55 F, sometimes cooler.

You can buy more than Ale in the UK.

Out of all countries I've been to, New Zealand has the best craft beer scene though, imo.