Sources: Anchor Brewing to be purchased by Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya

Sources: Anchor Brewing to be purchased by Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya

Mission Local has learned that Hamdi Ulukaya, the 51-year-old billionaire founder and CEO of Chobani yogurt, will be the new buyer of Anchor brewing.

Anchor, founded in San Francisco in 1896 and largely viewed as the progenitor of the American craft beer movement, was shuttered in July by its former owner, Sapporo Breweries.

Ulukaya’s pending purchase of the brewery was yesterday disclosed to officials at San Francisco City Hall. It is slated to be announced publicly this morning.

**The 51-year-old Turkish-born Kurdish businessman has purportedly agreed to buy Anchor lock, stock and barrel, purchasing its square-block factory on Potrero Hill, its West German-made brewing equipment, and the brewery’s intellectual property.** For fans of the city’s signature beer, this will be perceived as a strongly positive development: Anchor had been placed in liquidation by Sapporo, and it was possible that the business would have been essentially stripped for parts.

The emergence of a single buyer harks to Fritz Maytag’s purchase of the moribund Anchor Brewery in 1965.

**Ulukaya was born into a Kurdish dairy farming family in a small Turkish village in 1972. He founded Chobani nearly two decades ago in upstate New York and has since built it up into a business making billions of dollars in sales yearly.** He is an advocate for Kurdish rights, a philanthropist, and has garnered coverage for his generous worker policies at Chobani.

This is a developing story and will be updated as possible.

By Joe Eskenazi, Managing Editor/Columnist.