In August, Sapporo USA unceremoniously shuttered Anchor Brewing Co., the iconic San Francisco institution it had acquired in 2017. You probably heard about it, and perhaps from this very column: Thanks to hot tips from Bay Area and brewing industry sources, your humble Hop Take columnist was able to break a bunch of news and generally cover the shit out of the closure and its lead-up all summer.
But summer is over. On Aug. 2, Sapporo USA (SUSA) transferred Anchor’s assets to a third-party fiduciary, known as an “assignee for the benefit of creditors,” to manage the process of liquidating the venerable old brewery, which had until then been producing beer in San Francisco in one capacity or another since the late 1800s. The process itself is called an “assignment for the benefit of creditors,” or ABC, and it’s currently afoot, meaning that even though Anchor no longer exists in a legal sense, it may in the future.
For now, though, the House That Steam Beer Built sits idle on Potrero Hill. Anchor is in liquidation limbo.
“It’s kind of like a pause, or hitting the pause button as we figure out the future of the assets that were part of Anchor before,” says Larry Perkins, the founder and chief executive of SierraConstellation Partners. The firm is managing Anchor’s ABC process via a specially spun-up LLC, ABS OpsCo. “My job is almost to be agnostic to the process,” he tells Hop Take in a phone interview. “This is the business
