Like Damp January? Sure, if that helps

According to survey data from market-research firm Numerator, less than half of Americans say they made New Year’s resolution for 2026. “Forty-four percent say they intend to partake in the annual practice this year, a 9.3 point decline from last year,” Brewbound reported. Obviously, this is just one data point, and I gotta do the usual expressed/revealed caveat, but a big uptick in the number of people being like “eh, fuck it” seems directionally significant. The national mood is bad, for many good reasons that I’ll save us both the exhaustion of listing here. Resolving to do something? iN tHiS eCoNoMy?! You get it.

My resolution for the past five years, at least so far as Fingers goes, has been to cover the business, culture, and politics of drinking in America with the expertise, rigor, and humor it demands—and to make a living doing it. This, as the media business has collapsed. The rise of AI-generated slop has accelerated this trend over the past few years,³ but it’s been building for much longer. A quarter-century ago, there were 40 journalists for every 100,000 people in this country, compared to just eight journalists for every 100,000 people today, per a 2025 report by MuckRack and Rebuild Local News. Maybe the reason I’m not overly sentimental about the brewers, winemakers, and distillers struggling against and succumbing to stiffening headwinds in the beverage-alcohol industry is because doom and gloom has been my own professional milieu for virtually my entire career and I’ve grown inured to it. What a cool and normal thought!

In spite of the malaise, I’m pleased to say that Fingers had its best year ever in 2025. I did a big thread recapping some of the biggest stories from the past year on Bluesky the other day, and quickly realized that was a fool’s errand. Fingers published a lot of big stories last year! I won’t recap them all here, but two that stand out to me are this original report on how Republic National Distributing Co. was screwing its California employees as it exited that state, and this cultural analysis on the return of Svedka’s sexbot to a national discourse infected by the anti-woke horniness of the American right wing. Where else are you going to find that kind of range?!

As for the “making a living” bit, Fingers has returned to steady growth in both audience and revenue since migrating platforms just over a year ago. I saw modest top line growth and substantial bottom line growth, which was one reason I moved platforms in the first place, so it was nice to see that come through. I think/hope the churn caused by the migration is in the rearview. Since I took a contributing editor gig with VinePair in September 2022, Fingers has been about half my income, not withstanding the occasional freelance project. That remained true last year, though the pie got a little bit bigger—thanks, in small part, to a sold-out first run of hats at The Fingers Shop. I’ll take it!

This being January, when the news is almost as slow as the hospitality business, I’ve decided to take the rest of the month to do some editorial planning, line up some new merch designs, and wrap up a book proposal I put off for most of 2025. (If my agent is reading this, thanks for your patience.) I still expect to publish new reporting as I bring it in, like the items below, but overall, the programming will look a little bit different than normal from now through February. So… like a newsletter Damp January? Sure, if that helps.

Don’t worry, it will be lots of fun. Naming the 2025 Buzzwords of The Week of The Year, for example. Things of that nature. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you are, too.

In the meantime, be sure to enjoy these two fan-favorite seasonal shitposts from the boozeletter’s archives, which are unlocked and free for all to read:

• The Fingers Whiskey Stone Giftee Helpline

• The Worst Dry January Pitch of All Time

And please, keep submitting tips, gossip, photos, etc. via The FingersTip™️ Line. No tip too small, silly, serious, or sizeable!

Thanks for a huge year of independent journalism about drinking in America last year. Let’s all resolve to have another.—Dave.

📬 Good post alert

If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email, or a DM on Bluesky or Instagram.

⚓️ After years idle, there’s action at Anchor Brewing

It’s been two and a half years since Sapporo-Stone Brewing (then Sapporo USA) shuttered San Francisco’s iconic steam brewery, and around a year and a half since billionaire yogurt mogul (yogul?) Hamdi Ulukaya acquired it in liquidation. Hopes ran high that the consumer packaged goods magnate would move quickly to rehire Anchor’s laid off workers—some of whom had mounted a quixotic bid of their own to buy the joint and run it as a co-operative—and fill the tanks again at one of the country’s most storied breweries. Nothing doing: 12 months after Ulukaya’s acquisition, the plant on Potrero Hill was still silent. But towards the end of 2025, your fearless Fingers editor began receiving a flurry of tips about activity in and around the old sandstone brewery.

I haven’t yet been able to confirm whether Anchor has hired a certain brewer from a well-known, recently closed Bay Area brewery to do research and development, as one tipster told me in mid-December. (If you have more info, submit a tip.) But thanks to a couple other eagle-eyed sources in San Francisco and the surrounds, I am able to publish some photo evidence of the action at Anchor:

A local draft system-servicing company, MG Draught, has been posting photos to its Instagram Story of work it has done at Anchor’s brewery and Public Taps taproom; I managed to snag a screenshot of one the other day featuring the hashtag “#IYKYk.”¹ A Bay Area source who tipped me off to the MG Draught account has observed the company’s draft tech going “in and out of that place getting it ready for the last couple months.” MG Draught did not respond to a request for comment.

Being a resident of Richmond VA rather than Richmond CA, my ability to do shoe-leather reporting in San Francisco is, ah, limited. But a third source in the city proper has been keeping an eye on Anchor over the past week or two at my behest. “Someone cleaned up the taproom,” they told me on New Year’s Eve. “[I]t’s maintained, looks less abandoned. Painted over the murals and graffiti that were on the walls.” Just yesterday, they sent me a photo of what appears to be a grain truck pulled up to the brewery’s Mariposa St. frontage to deliver bulk malt. I texted the photo around to a few brewer sources, who all surmised the same thing. “Gearing up for production, by the looks of it,” one texted back. Anchor did not respond to a request for comment.

📉 Booze stocks’ post-pandemic hangover has stuck around

A longtime Friend of Fingers forwarded me the Tuesday morning edition of the Wall Street Journal’s Markets A.M. newsletter, which was headlined “Here’s to Unloved Booze Stocks.”² Here’s reporter Spencer Jakab (emphasis mine):

Jakab noted that by contrast, Altria (née Philip Morris USA) had more than doubled the S&P 500’s returns tracking back 30 years, when more than double the US population smoked. How? “[I]t cut investment to the bone and paid out oodles of cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he wrote. So, y’know: something for booze shareholders to look forward to, I guess. Employees, not so much.

📲 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.)

1  “If you know, you know,” in online parlance. You know?

2  There doesn’t seem to be a way for me to link to this individual edition without exposing the identity and WSJ account information of this reader, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it that the quotes are accurate. I double-checked!

3  Fingers’ standing editorial policy on “generative AI” programs is basically fuck that shit. Here’s the boozeletter’s full ethics statement.