How a PR pro spun the Anchor story

This *definitely* wasn’t Sapporo USA’s fault, no siree!

Editor’s note: I had originally planned to take today off for my birthday, but obviously Sapporo USA had other plans this week. Please check out my column at VinePair for workers’ perspectives on how the company ran Anchor Brewing Co. into the ground. Below is a little inside-baseball from my perspective on how the company’s outside PR operative planted a favorable narrative about the closure in some of the biggest publications in the country.

No Weekender Sunday—I’m ringing in my mid-30s work-free, and I’m (actually) taking Monday off. I’ll be back in your inboxes next week!—Dave.

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Today we’re going to talk about The Mainstream Media sausage gets made. Specifically, how establishment news outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, NBC News, and the BBC swallowed talking points about Anchor Brewing Company’s imminent closure from Sapporo USA’s crisis-PR heavyweight, then laundered them into the public record without bothering to check in with any actual workers about it. I’ll warn you in advance, this newsletter is going to be a bit self-serving, because it makes the case for independent, labor-focused journalism about the beverage-alcohol business, and that’s what Fingers does. But it’s juicy and fun and important, and I promise to keep the preening to a minimum. Onward!

Last month, I broke the news that Anchor was pulling back from national distribution and discontinuing its beloved Christmas seasonal, Our Special Ale, which had been brewed annually since 1975. My source was rock-solid, so I ran with it on Twitter immediately, but I also reached out to the third-party public-relations agent I’ve interacted with in the past who reps Anchor to see if the company cared to comment. She briefly confirmed my reporting, then looped in with a new guy named Sam Singer, who delivered some boilerplate, attributed to both Sapporo USA and Anchor, about how Our Special Ale was expensive, the craft brewing market is shifting, they had to make a change, yadda yadda. Not only did this contradict what Anchor workers were telling me, it didn’t track with me for a bunch of other reasons I detailed in my 6/15 column at VinePair.

I don’t know whether Anchor had recently retained Singer in early June when I was reporting that story, but in the half-decade that I’ve reported on Anchor, I’d never interacted with him or even heard his name. Me not knowing him isn’t notable in itself: some companies have long-tenured in-house comms people, others run through hired guns like Raylan Givens at an oxy bust, and most are somewhere in between. But Singer himself is notable: he’s an award-winning crisis-PR pro who counts massive corporations (Chevron, Nike, Coca-Cola) and influential organizations (Stanford Public Health, the NAACP) amongst his client roster. In a dozen-plus years of reporting on the U.S. beer business, I have never come across that kind of freelance firepower flacking for a brewery of Anchor’s size—or even Sapporo USA’s size.

That a high-end (and surely pricey) PR operative showed up in my inbox running point for the latter firm just a month prior to its most controversial stretch running the former could be mere coincidence. Or, it could be an indication that Sapporo USA’s execs knew they were gonna need a sophisticated messenger to help them spin away any blame for the bomb they were about to drop. Either way, Singer would soon deliver in a big way for his brewing client.

In early July, my sources on Potrero Hill tipped me off to another, bigger scoop about Sapporo USA’s intentions for the historic institution. The parent company was going to cut bait on Anchor after less than six years of ownership, and shut it down rather than sell it as a going concern. This obviously turned out to be true, but it was way bigger than the prior month’s stories, so I decided to try to get Sapporo USA on the record about it rather than breaking it piecemeal in Elon Musk’s collapsing sandbox. I emailed Singer for the first time on the morning of (7/10), asking him to confirm or deny my sources’ claims that Anchor’s closure would be announced at an unusual all-hands meeting workers told me had been scheduled for Wednesday (7/12.) He asked for a call on Wednesday morning because he was “busy with other clients.”

Obviously, at this point I knew the game was afoot: when a PR rep asks for two days to answer a yes/no question about a client’s ongoing existence, the leading reasons are incompetence or subterfuge, and as you’ll see in a moment, Singer isn’t incompetent. From a source in San Francisco, I got the tip that a photographer for the Chronicle showed up at Anchor’s Public Taps on Tuesday morning; my assumption at that point was Singer gave the local paper an embargoed exclusive in exchange for friendly coverage of the closure, timed to his say-so.¹

So I reported it out a bit more, and filed a report at around 6:30pm ET on 7/11 outlining what I knew, and what I didn’t. Sapporo USA was about to get Anchor off its books, either via sale or shut-down.² Less than 12 hours later, at 4:44am ET, a press release from Singer hit my inbox announcing the latter, laying the blame for the closure on “the impacts of the pandemic, inflation, especially in San Francisco, and a highly competitive market.”

Because I’d been interviewing workers at the brewery, I knew that wasn’t the whole story. As Nate Dias, a former production worker who left just last month, told me earlier this week, “Sapporo sunk Anchor.” Thanks to him and some of his former colleagues, I was able to detail the management decisions—like Anchor’s disastrous 2021 rebrand—that led the iconic brewery to this point in my column yesterday at VinePair.

The top of Singer’s press release. I thought the red font was a bit melodramatic, personally, but taste is a matter of taste I suppose.

I’m glad I did. Less than an hour after Singer’s press release hit my inbox, the Chronicle pushed a cued-up story live—this is the middle of the night, remember—based on Singer’s version of events and zero perspective from workers. (At least initially. They may have updated it since, but here’s the archived version. It stinks!) Another followed a few hours later, an update on a gauzy history piece about Anchor’s many near-misses with insolvency in its 152³ year run; it also presented Singer’s favorable framing as fact, with no other sources or context to alert the paper’s millions of readers that there was another side to the story. Chronicle readers woke up to the news that Anchor had to be closed and it definitely wasn’t Sapporo USA’s fault, no siree! (To the Chronicle’s limited credit, it did follow up later in the day with a piece that centered workers. But it sorta gives the game away to see which angle they pushed first, and harder, no?)

From there, things snowballed, with tons of food/drink outlets and aggregators running with the news as written. Then it bubbled up to the big, general-interest publications. By midafternoon, NBC News had picked up the story, again running Singer’s well-crafted quotes unscrutinized. Also Wednesday, the New York Times published a story on the closure. Pro: it included a few other sources besides Singer! Con: they were not workers, and broadly corroborated industry themes Singer smartly deployed in his release to absolve Sapporo USA’s management of blame and make Anchor’s demise seem like the inevitable outcome of the invisible backhand⁴ of capitalism. It’s true that craft brewing’s growth is flatlining, that the pandemic was hard for breweries like Anchor, that San Francisco is an expensive place to operate—but other breweries are facing and overcoming these factors, and if the Times bothered to ask a single Anchor worker, its coverage stood a chance of at least gesturing to the idea that Sapporo USA’s management might have had something to do with this outcome.

Instead, the Gray Lady ran maudlin quotes from Singer, like “The stake through the heart of Anchor was the pandemic,”⁵ and, (I swear to god this is a real quote, emphasis mine):

San Francisco’s flag is a phoenix rising from the ashes, and Anchor has had many phoenix moments in its history […] But that’s out of our hands now […] We can only hope for the best.

The Western Hemisphere’s paper of record let a high-dollar spin doctor blather on about mythical creatures and almost explicitly wash his client’s hands of the situation with nary a scintilla of pushback to alert its enormous, enormously influential readership that this was at-best a half-truth! I mean!!!

Scenes from Anchor Public Taps yesterday via Twitter user @YipperYapper. "It’s been open 35 mins and being drunk dry," he told me. An anonymous insider later told me Anchor was selling 300 cases an hour as San Franciscans flocked to buy what'll likely be the last real Anchor Steam ever made.

On Wednesday evening, I got called by a producer on the BBC’s Worldwide Business Report radio program for a quick live interview about Anchor.⁶ It was a brief press hit, and I could tell from the jump that the host had little interest in anything other than the tidy story his producer had served up for him, which was the one that all the mainstream media outlets in the U.S. had already served up for the producer, which was the one that Singer planted just 12 hours prior. Here’s the host’s lead-in to the segment:

Have you ever had an Anchor beer? Well, if not, you better hurry! The first and oldest craft brewery in the United States, which started in San Francisco in 1896, announced on Wednesday would end its operations. It survived the San Francisco Earthquake and Prohibition, but a competitive market inflation and declining sales makes it no longer viable, and now now it seems to be the pandemic that actually finished it off.

As you can see, Singer’s talking points made it from San Francisco to the United Kingdom nearly verbatim. Very neat! After some context questions about craft beer and Anchor’s history, here’s how I responded to the host’s final question about whether the closure simply meant tastes were changing:

Certainly American tastes have changed. But I do want to […] push back a little bit on the frame that this was inevitable, and the result of economic forces that were outside of Anchor’s control. Anchor was acquired in 2017 by Sapporo USA, subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate by the same name, and workers tell me that the story that Sapporo has put out about its closure, about Anchor’s closure, does not square with the reality that they witnessed, which was a pattern of mismanagement and neglect that they say lead to Anchor’s demise.

“Ah, so the demise coming perhaps from management rather than taste,” said the host, audibly annoyed that I robbed him of time to properly cue up the following program by contradicting his entire segment with my reporting from actual Anchor workers.⁷ Sorry!

I didn’t write this to be petty towards any one reporter, which is why I’ve omitted their names here. Or to pat myself on the back here: lord knows I’ve fallen for Singer-style spin in the past. I wrote it to document the way in which this story got perverted by access, regurgitated due to ignorance or laziness, then rapidly codified into The Narrative by mainstream media outlets that hold themselves out about being unbiased arbiters of truth. All these outlets do fantastic, essential work most of the time, don’t get me wrong. But without funding journalists to become experts on their beats over the course of years on the job, publications get out of their depth on niche-but-important stories like this—and that makes their reporters and editors vulnerable to savvy operators like Singer.

The mere fact that I was able to scoop Anchor’s hometown daily (and everyone else) from 3,000 miles away on some of San Francisco’s most historic cultural/culinary news in years is an indictment of an economic system that consolidates wealth upward and values journalism purely based on the revenue it can produce, rather than the public good it provides. In that way, it’s not dissimilar to the story of Anchor’s closure. The brewery’s worth to generations of drinkers around the world was never, could never be wholly accounted for on a balance sheet. Only in its absence can you see how valuable it really is.

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🤯 Who killed Four Loko?

As you maybe/hopefully know, I’m producing a podcast for VinePair about the beer industry called Taplines. I don’t always promote it here, but this week’s episode was really fascinating—I interviewed Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, MD, who was the principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration when Four Loko mania reached mainstream fever-pitch in 2010, about bringing the brand’s chaotic, cash-rich, caffeinated first act to a close. Check it out, and if you dig it, consider subscribing to the pod to catch new episodes every Tuesday—I’d love to have ya.

📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately

Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.) Also sorry for the screenshot. Apparently Instagram embeds, like Twitter embeds, are also broken on Substack (the platform I use to publish Fingers.) Thank you to our billionaire website oligarchs for destroying the internet’s basic functionality in pursuit of infinite profit!

1. Singer’s website lists the Chronicle among his clients, by the way. Make of this what you will!

2. We ran this framing in the original hed of the report based on a couple tips that turned out to be wrong about a Hail Mary deal involving (according to different sources) Sierra Nevada, Russian River, or Drake’s Brewing Co.

3. Most accounts date Anchor to 1896, but Anchor historian and recently retired three-decade employee Dave Burkhart prefers 1871, when the forerunner brewery opened under a different name. “If you're going to trace Anheuser-Busch back as far as they trace it, then you might as well trace Anchor under different names all the way back to 1871,” he told me in a phone interview Wednesday. Can’t argue with that logic.

4. Credit Friend of Fingers Kelsey D. Atherton for introducing me to (and/or maybe coining?) this banger.

5. This is the fucking subhed of the entire article! I’m going insane!

6. Some annoying dipshits in my Twitter mentions have been hassling me as to why I’m focusing so much on “one brewery.” This is why: Anchor has global significance, and not just because Sapporo is based in Japan. It represents a lot of things to a lot of people, and its demise is emblematic of some of the rot that underpins our dismal endless-growth economic system. Stay mad, dipshits!

7. This is the beauty of live air. If you get going, they can’t really stop you. I’ve been known to get going.