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Anchor Brewing has new (old) labels

Federal database shows recent registrations from the shuttered San Francisco icon

Author

Dave Infante
May 18, 2026

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at Anchor Brewing Co, please get in touch by emailing me ([email protected]) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported new action at Anchor Brewing Company. The historic steam brewery has stood idle for almost three years: Sapporo Holdings’ stateside subsidiary unceremoniously shuttered it in August 2023, and billionaire Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya bought it in June 2024, but with the exception of some sporadic work at the Potrero Hill plant in January 2026 first reported by Fingers, there has been precious little indication of an imminent comeback.

Still, earlier this month, a longtime tipster reached out with word that a close friend had wound up chit-chatting with some sort of contractor outside the Mariposa Street plant. And this past Tuesday, Chronicle reporter Jess Lander wrote (emphasis mine):

The vest of one worker, captured in the Chronicle’s photos, displayed a logo for Barnum Mechanical, a design-build engineering company based in Loomis (Placer County) that specializes in brewhouses and food & beverage production facilities. On its website, Barnum lists breweries including Sierra Nevada, Drake’s, Stone Brewing and 21st Amendment as past clients. Also on its client list: Chobani. (Dairy processing is one of its other markets.) Russian River Brewing hired Barnum to lead the build of its 85,000-square-foot production brewery and taproom in Windsor, which opened in 2018.

[…]

Chronicle photos of an alleyway on De Haro also show two work trucks parked in front of Anchor’s historic brick wall displaying logos for Kemper Industrial, an Idaho company that specializes in industrial refrigeration. According to its website, Kemper designs, installs and maintains ammonia and carbon dioxide refrigeration systems, which are necessary for large-scale brewery operations. Like Barnum, Kemper lists Chobani as one of its clients.

Another of Fingers’ tipsters, this one in San Francisco proper, was able to snap some shots of the partially open bay door at Anchor, which track with the Chronicle’s item.

The door open at Anchor. | Provided to Fingers

Slightly closer-up look of the door open at Anchor. | Provided to Fingers

Neither firm responded to the Chronicle’s request for comment, and Lander was unable to turn up any building permits in San Francisco’s public records. But local permits are just one potential paper trail a reopening brewery might generate. Fingers has found another.

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