Anchor Brewing Is Reopening: Here’s What We Know

Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing Company | Photography courtesy of Anchor Brewing Company

Three years ago, we ran this story under a headline about endings. Anchor Brewing, America's first craft brewery, shut its doors after 127 years, and it felt final. Turns out final was optimistic.

As of this fall, Anchor Brewing looks like it's coming back. Not confirmed-with-a-tap-list back. Not grand-reopening-party back. But back enough that we felt like we owed this story an update instead of leaving it standing as a eulogy.

Here's what's actually happened, what's still speculation, and why the beer world is watching Potrero Hill again.

This one falls squarely into our Craft Beer Breweries coverage, right alongside stories like the Westmalle Brewery's Trappist dubbel turning 100 and PubKey's bar culture piece, the kind of places with more history than hype.

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Wait, Didn't Anchor Brewing Close?

It did. In August 2023, Sapporo, the Japanese beverage giant that had owned Anchor Brewing since 2017, shut the brewery down after years of declining sales, a distribution pullback that cut the beer off from most of the country, and a rebrand so unpopular it became a punchline in its own industry.

We told that story in detail back then: the mismanagement rumors, the COVID hit, the end of the annual Christmas Ale after nearly fifty years of a recipe that changed every season. All of it still happened. None of it got walked back.

What changed is who owns the building now.

Enter Hamdi Ulukaya

In May 2024, Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya bought Anchor's assets through his family office, Shepherd Futures. The deal picked up the brands, the trademarks, the original recipes, and the brewery's 2.17-acre Potrero Hill campus on Mariposa Street, the same building Anchor has brewed in since 1979.

Ulukaya said at the time he intended to bring the brand back. Then, for almost two years, he said almost nothing else publicly. That silence is a big part of why this story kept resurfacing in San Francisco media and on local subreddits: people had a confirmed buyer with stated intentions and zero visible progress, which is exactly the kind of gap rumors love to fill.

That gap has been closing fast in 2026.

The Signs of Life Are Piling Up

Since the start of the year, the evidence has gone from "someone saw a guy near the building" to something closer to a paper trail:

• In January, contractors were spotted doing work at the Mariposa Street plant.
• By spring, neighbors and reporters were noticing regular activity: a loading dock gate open, staff badging in and out, the kind of low-key operational noise a building makes when it's not actually dead.
• In June, Ulukaya posted a photo to his personal Instagram of himself watching a World Cup match from inside Anchor's landmark taproom, which is about as close to a wink as a notoriously quiet owner gets.
• Also in June, a fictitious business name filing hit the San Francisco County Clerk's office, formally registering "Anchor Brewing Company" as a trade name at the Potrero Hill address, filed by Potrero Hill SF Brewing LLC, an entity tied straight back to Ulukaya's Shepherd Futures.
• And the company applied for and received federal label approval on two beers using Anchor's original illustrated artwork, the label style everyone actually loved.

None of that is a press release. None of it comes with a reopening date. But taken together, it's a company doing the boring, expensive paperwork of standing an old brand back up, not a company sitting on a vanity purchase.

More Details: Check out the Anchor Brewing popularity on Amazon. 

About That Rebrand

If you want to understand why the label approvals mattered so much to longtime fans, you have to go back to 2021, when Anchor rolled out a modern redesign under its old ownership: new logo, new can art, a clean abstract mark that swapped out the varsity-style rope-and-anchor lettering the brand had worn for most of a century.

It landed badly. Beer writers, design critics, and loyal drinkers all clocked the new look at the same moment and none of them recognized it as Anchor. Patrick Costello, a former Anchor brewer who's since moved on to a brewery in Alameda, put it plainly to reporters: the backlash over that rebrand was "one of the nails in the coffin" for the company.

So when the new ownership's first public move was filing for approval on the old labels, longtime fans read it correctly, as an apology nobody had to say out loud. As of this past spring, anchorbrewing.com was already quietly running the pre-2021 mark again: Since 1896, rope detail and all.

Not everyone's in a forgiving mood. San Francisco political commentator Richie Greenberg had choice words back in 2023 for the union that pushed for raises right before the shutdown, telling the New York Post, "You schmucks ruined a legacy business." Craft beer message boards are still arguing about how much blame belongs to labor, management, or a corporate parent that never seemed that invested to begin with. We're not here to referee that fight. We're here because the taps might actually turn back on.

What About the People Who Worked There?

This is the part of the story that matters most to us, honestly, more than the label art. A few months back, a group of former Anchor employees gathered at Buzzworks, a San Francisco bar, to rally support for reforming their union, ILWU Local 6, in case the brewery does come back to life. The bar owner pulled a reserved case of actual Anchor Steam out of the back for the occasion, itself a small miracle given how hard the beer has been to find since production went on hiatus.

Costello and several other former workers say they're open to coming back if the opportunity's real. New ownership has reportedly made it clear they want to reconnect with former staff, which tracks: rebuilding a 155-year-old brand isn't just about recipes, it's about the people who know how to actually run the place. So far, though, those former employees say they haven't heard anything directly from Ulukaya's side. The silence that's defined this whole saga hasn't fully lifted, even for the people who'd be pouring the beer.

San Francisco locals have been trading their own sightings and theories too. Over on r/sanfrancisco, neighbors of the Potrero Hill plant are swapping the same kind of on-the-ground details we've been chasing down here, delivery trucks, lit windows, the general sense that something's stirring behind those walls.

Remembering Fritz Maytag

No Anchor story, comeback or otherwise, skips Fritz Maytag. He bought a controlling stake in a nearly bankrupt Anchor back in 1965 and spent the next few decades rebuilding it into the brewery that basically invented the idea of American craft beer as we know it. Small batches, real ingredients, an obsession with quality over volume long before "craft" was a marketing word.

Whatever Anchor becomes under Ulukaya, it's rebuilding on a foundation Maytag poured. That's worth remembering every time someone pours a steam beer with the old anchor stamped on the glass.

So, Is It Actually Reopening?

Here's the honest answer: nobody outside the company knows for sure, and Ulukaya's team hasn't given anyone a date. What we know is that construction crews have been on site, the brand's paperwork is getting filed, the old labels are approved, and the website already looks like the Anchor people remember. What we don't know is when a keg actually leaves that building again, or whether the historic taproom reopens to the public the way it used to be.

Craft beer has changed a lot since Anchor closed in 2023. The market's more crowded, drinking habits have shifted, and "the brewery that started it all" doesn't automatically mean "the brewery that wins now." Anchor's not walking back into the same industry it left. But an institution with this much goodwill banked up gets a real shot at a second act, and San Francisco seems ready to welcome it home.

We'll keep watching Mariposa Street. When there's an actual date, you'll hear it from us first. More to come.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Anchor Brewing coming back?

All signs point to yes, though there's no official reopening date. Since early 2026, owner Hamdi Ulukaya's team has filed a business name registration for the Potrero Hill brewery, won federal approval for two beer labels using Anchor's original artwork, and shown steady signs of construction and staffing activity at the site.

Who owns Anchor Brewing now?

Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya bought Anchor Brewing's assets, including its brands, trademarks, recipes, and its historic Potrero Hill campus, in May 2024 through his family office, Shepherd Futures.

Why did Anchor Brewing close in 2023?

Sapporo, which had owned Anchor since 2017, shut the brewery down after years of declining sales, a distribution strategy that pulled back to California-only sales, and lingering backlash from a widely disliked 2021 rebrand.

What happened to Anchor Brewing's rebrand?

In 2021, Anchor replaced its classic varsity-style anchor logo with a modern abstract design. The change was unpopular with longtime fans and is widely cited as a factor in the brand's decline. New ownership has already restored the original branding online and is bringing back the old label artwork.

Will Anchor Steam be sold in stores again?

Not yet. Anchor Steam production has been on hiatus since the 2023 closure. Federal label approvals and site activity suggest production could resume, but no distribution timeline has been announced.

Where is Anchor Brewing located?

Anchor Brewing operates out of its longtime home at 1705 Mariposa Street in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, where it has brewed since 1979.