‘Solidarity Ale' supports Anchor Brewing workers' bid to buy and re-open historic S.F. brewery

In a space no bigger than many home kitchens, Felipe and Wendy Bravo make magic happen.

Normally, it's the kind of magic that results in new and unusual beers, mocktails and fermented foods. But this time, they're trying to brew up a different kind of magic: the kind that happens when workers and communities pull together.

"When we first heard ... that Anchor (Brewing) was closing, the first thought is complete dread," Felipe Bravo said. "If an institution like that can't survive, how are we supposed to survive?"

In some ways, the two establishments couldn't be more different: Fox Tale is a tiny brewery just over a year old that specializes in beers made from unusual combinations of local ingredients. Anchor Brewing has a 127-year history of brewing beer with mass-market appeal that was once distributed nationwide. But at their core, the owners of Fox Tale and the workers recently laid off by Anchor's closure are cut from the same cloth: they love brewing beer.

"The beer industry is a very tight-knit community," Felipe said. "A lot of people know each other."

And that's how it came to pass that the Bravos began talking with workers at Anchor — known as America's first craft brewery — before it closed on July 31. Pedro Mancilla, who ran Anchor's brewery tour program, had an idea for a project that might be right up Fox Tale's alley.

"Our historian, Dave Burkhart, before his retirement — we talked about a beer that was being brewed before prohibition," Mancilla said.

"Corn was available back then as a cheaper alternative for producing beer," Felipe Bravo explained. "We're using malted corn to make something that we think might have tasted like a pre-prohibition beer, like when Anchor was first starting out."

It took a few weeks to come to fruition, but on the day of its release at the start of Labor Day weekend, the Bravos dispensed several kegs' worth of the new beer in just a few hours. Though they'd like to believe it's the crisp, refreshing and well-balanced flavor that made it a hit, they admit it might be something else.

"Maybe a little bit of both, but I think mostly the mission," Wendy Bravo said.

"We're trying to support the workers taking back the power of something they truly are responsible for creating," Felipe explained. "We're standing in solidarity with them, brewing this beer for them, donating money to them, in their efforts to purchase the brewery."

"I wanted to call this beer Solidarity Ale because that's what got us to where we're at now," Mancilla said.

Gathered on the small patio in front of Fox Tale in downtown San Jose, a small group of Anchor Brewing workers sipped glasses of the new brew while talking about their goal: to buy Anchor's buildings and assets at auction and re-open the brewery as a worker-owned co-op.

"One of the few worker co-op breweries," said former Anchor production lead Patrick Machel. "Maybe the only one in the Bay Area."

Machel and his fellow workers, who unionized in 2019 after Sapporo acquired the brewery, say they realize the bid they're launching is an awfully steep mountain to climb.

"It's a huge mountain — like, Mt. Everest huge, basically," Machel said. "But people have climbed Mt. Everest. So we can climb it too."

Fox Tale isn't the only small brewery helping the workers on their uphill journey. In August, Enterprise Brewing in San Francisco launched its own version of Solidarity Ale. And in the open-source spirit of Silicon Valley, the Bravos are offering their recipe to other brewers who want to pitch in — whether they choose to donate 100% of proceeds as Fox Tale has, or a smaller portion.

"Putting this out for Labor Day landed so perfectly," Wendy Bravo reflected. "Because the point of unions, the point of cooperatives, is that people put in labor together, and together, people are extremely strong."