If you buy this bourbon, you should be [redacted]
Plus: Big Wedding Barn runs into the Tavern League buzzsaw!
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🍺 BEER
Anchor Brewing has a future. Former workers are still fighting to be a part of it. After months of behind-the-scenes footwork, the liquidation process for San Francisco’s iconic, now-idle stem beer brewery has finally kicked off in earnest. Potential bidders had to submit “non-binding indications of interest” to the bank that’ll run the eventual auction by this past Friday. Anchor SF Cooperative, a worker-led group that includes Anchor’s former brewmaster Dane Volek, is still in the hunt, too. The co-op is campaigning to raise $2.5 million from retail investors (*Prestige Worldwide voice* Possibly you?! [not investment advice lol]) to bid on Anchor’s intellectual property. Find more on their never-say-die efforts in my VinePair column from this past Thursday.
The Teamsters claim a big W in negotiations with Anheuser-Busch. Two weeks after Teamster negotiators walked away from the table to protest the macrobrewer’s resistance to eliminating two-tiered healthcare benefits, the union’s bargaining team announced it had managed to secure that concession permanently in a tentative agreement reached Thursday evening thanks to “concentrated pressure.” Said pressure apparently included this kick-ass graphic, which quotes from a certain “beer industry reporter” who has previously covered the negotiations in a certain “independent boozeletter.” What can I say? I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em!
Faubourg Brewing Company (née Dixie) is bailing on New Orleans. The company opened a $30 million plant on the city’s eastern edge in 2020; it was merged into Made By The Water, a private-equity rollup, in 2022. After abruptly closing a pair of Catawba Brewing Co. locations in North Carolina this past summer, the parent company is shutting down the Louisiana facility too, citing high water and tax bills, as well as difficulty staffing nightshifts due to what chief Alexi Sekmakas described to Brewbound’s Jess Infante as “an area [that] was not considered safe” by prospective hires. That can all be true, but it’s hard to read this as anything other than MBTW bamboozling itself with deficient due diligence and/or an overly ambitious business model as drinker preferences shifted.
