The Daily Feather — Anchor Out of Steam
In 1849, a year before California became the 31st United State, drawn to the Gold Rush, Gottlieb Brekle arrived in San Francisco from Germany. Thankfully, Brekle never abandoned his roots as a pioneer brewer. In 1871, he bought an old saloon on Pacific Street near Russian Hill for $3,500. There, America’s first craft brewery was born. A quarter century on, German brewer Ernst F. Baruth and his son-in-law, Otto Schinkel, Jr. bought the brewery and, for no known reason, renamed it Anchor. It was a happy place and time…for 10 years. In February 1906, Baruth died suddenly. Two months later, the Great Earthquake consumed the brewery whole. And just in time for the January 1907 reopening, Schinkel was run over by a streetcar. While the next century had its ups and downs, including entering and exiting Prohibition, the future looked bright in 2017, when Sapporo Brewery, founded in 1876, acquired the Anchor Steam brand.
Anchor’s next chapter, however, proved to be its last. The year 2020 began with its 62 employees unionizing to attain stout pay and generous benefits. On January 20th, the first case of the coronavirus was reported in nearby Washington State. As any San Francisco-based business can attest, what came next was the equivalent of the opposite of “Location, Location. Location.” Just yesterday, Trepp reported that a 30-day delinquent office in downtown San Francisco had seen its appraised value drop from $349 million to $183 million. The best that can be said of the destruction politicians have inflicted is that the shrinking of California’s population by 138,000 in 2022 was lower than the prior two years, the only time since 1850 that the state has recorded net outmigration.