It's official — or at least, official in the way that matters at the County Clerk's office. Hoodline San Francisco researchers reviewing documents from the Office of the County Clerk have found a brand-new fictitious business name (FBN) filing, dated June 3, 2026, registering the name "Anchor Brewing Company" at 1705 Mariposa Street — the brewery's historic Potrero Hill home. The registrant: Potrero Hill SF Brewing LLC, the New York-based entity tied to Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya, who bought the shuttered brewery's assets two years ago and has said almost nothing publicly since.
For a company that has communicated mostly through silence, a piece of paper filed at City Hall counts as a loud statement. A fictitious business name statement — the document a company files before legally operating under a trade name in San Francisco — is not a press release, and it doesn't come with a reopening date. But it is the kind of paperwork you file when you intend to actually do business as Anchor Brewing Company, in San Francisco, at the old brewery. After two years of rumors, it's the most concrete on-the-record signal yet.
Hoodline SF reached out to Anchor Brewing for comment. We will update the story at which time we receive a response.
What the Filing Says
The filing, number 2026-0409551, registers "Anchor Brewing Company" as the business name of Potrero Hill SF Brewing LLC, a limited liability company listing its address at 55 Beach Street, 5th Floor, in New York — in the same Tribeca-Soho orbit where Ulukaya's operations are based. The business address on the filing is 1705 Mariposa Street, the Potrero Hill campus where Anchor brewed from 1979 until its final batch in 2023.
The LLC itself is a known entity. As reported by the Potrero View, the City and County of San Francisco approved an alcoholic beverage license application back in 2024 for "Potrero Hill SF Brewing LLC," operating as "Anchor Brewing Company," at a New York address associated with Shepherd Futures — Ulukaya's family office and the entity that owns Anchor. In February 2025, Shepherd Futures also secured a California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control permit to produce beer and to import and wholesale beer, wine, and spirits, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. License, permit, and now a fresh DBA: the legal scaffolding for an operating brewery is quietly being assembled.
The Timing Is Hard to Ignore
The filing lands just three weeks after the Chronicle published the most detailed look yet inside the mystery, documenting construction crews in hard hats across the Anchor campus, scaffolding and stripped paint on the De Haro Street facade, and work trucks from Kemper Industrial, an Idaho firm specializing in the ammonia and CO2 refrigeration systems large breweries require. The Chronicle also spotted Barnum Mechanical on site — the design-build engineering outfit behind brewhouses for Sierra Nevada, Stone, and Russian River, and which counts Chobani among its clients.
The personnel signals are just as telling. Four Bay Area beer industry sources told the Chronicle that Anchor has hired Shaun O'Sullivan, co-founder of 21st Amendment Brewing, as a consultant — three decades of brewing experience, much of it spent building one of the Bay Area's largest beer operations. Andrea Devries, Anchor's quality assurance manager for 28 years, has been working as the company's director of brewing and logistics since February 2025, per her LinkedIn profile. None of the principals, including representatives for Ulukaya, responded to the Chronicle's requests for comment — continuing a pattern of nearly two years.
A Long Silence, and the People Left Out of It
The quiet has not been cost-free. When Ulukaya's Shepherd Futures acquired Anchor's assets in May 2024 — the recipes, the Potrero Hill facilities, the equipment, the original logos — he pledged a speedy revival and even floated bringing back the Christmas Ale that very holiday season. Hoodline covered the acquisition at the time, when the yogurt tycoon swooped in promising the "magic of rebirth" for America's first craft brewery. Two holiday seasons have since passed without a drop of Anchor Steam on Bay Area shelves.
Former employees have felt the silence most acutely. Members of the brewery's union formed the Anchor SF Cooperative in 2023 and attempted to buy the company themselves; Ulukaya told the Chronicle he planned to rehire as many former workers as possible. But the co-op's board chair, former Anchor employee Patrick Machel, told the paper the group got the cold shoulder despite repeated attempts to connect, and has since moved on. The two-year information vacuum also bred misinformation — including a false report last December that Anchor was leaving San Francisco entirely, a rumor the company itself shot down in a rare public statement, per the Chronicle. The new filing, registering the business name squarely at 1705 Mariposa Street, would seem to bury that rumor for good.
From "Devastating" Closure to Paper Trail of a Comeback
It's worth remembering how dire this story once looked. When Anchor announced its shutdown in July 2023 after 127 years, Hoodline chronicled the devastating closure of America's oldest craft brewery and the run on its remaining steam beer, as then-owner Sapporo moved to liquidate following years of declining sales. By that October, the two-building, 2.17-acre Potrero Hill property was listed for sale, with brokers pitching it for everything from biotech labs to EV charging — futures in which no beer would ever be brewed there again.
The craft beer landscape Anchor would re-enter is, if anything, harsher than the one that killed it. Craft beer production volume fell 5% in 2025 amid record-low U.S. alcohol consumption, the Chronicle reported, and the Bay Area has kept losing institutions — 21st Amendment shut down in November after losing its lender, and Berkeley's Trumer Pils announced in March it was leaving the region. Against that backdrop, a billionaire owner with patient capital and no lender to answer to may be precisely what a revival this slow and expensive requires.
What We Still Don't Know
A DBA filing confirms intent, not capacity. It doesn't say whether Anchor will brew at full production scale or something more boutique, whether the Public Taps taproom will return, whether former union workers will get the call-backs they were promised, or when the first new batch of Anchor Steam might actually pour. Notably, the Chronicle found that Anchor has pulled no building permits with the city — suggesting the current work is mechanical refurbishment rather than structural overhaul — and one industry executive's educated guess put a proper reopening at 2027.
So no, the steam stacks aren't billowing yet. But between the state brewing permit, the construction crews, the industry hires, and now a fresh business name registration planted at 1705 Mariposa Street, the paper trail all points one direction. After two years of reading tea leaves through a chain-link fence, Potrero Hill finally has a document with "Anchor Brewing Company" and a 2026 date on it — and that's the closest thing to a promise this famously silent revival has put in writing.
