The Making of a Classic: Anchor Steam

During this time of pandemic, when we have more time for reading than sampling new beers, I thought it would be a great time to explore some classic, much imitated (but rarely equaled) beers and what makes them tick. Click here to see other beers in the series.

In 1977, when the British writer Michael Jackson surveyed American beer in The World Guide to Beer, he (correctly) found it rather blighted. Although he gamely discussed the extant breweries at the time, only one seemed to interest him as a beer fan: San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing. “The colourfully-named steam beer is produced by the only brewing method invented in the United States,” he wrote. “It is, in that respect, the nation's sole indigenous beer-style.” This was arguably correct—though it both under- and overstates some matters—but more than that, it missed a truth that someone writing in the mid-70s could not know. Anchor Steam forms the connective tissue binding the older American tradition of European brewing and the inventive era of craft brewing that followed. The processes used to make Steam Beer cast backward, but the formulation created the blueprint craft breweries would use when they emerged a decade later.

Steam Beer

Up until the mid-19th century, America wasn’t much of a beer country. Cider was big in the early colonial era, and whisky followed. American ingredients weren’t great and the beer they made was inferior to the stuff colonists got in London pubs back home. But by the 1840s, German immigrants were arriving in large numbers, and more than a few knew how to brew. From coast to coast, German brewmasters set up small lager-brewing operations and ushered in the country’s first real brewery boom.

Some of those migrants eyed San Francisco, which was ballooning thanks to a gold rush. It went from a cow town of fewer than a thousand in 1848 to nearly 100,000 by 1850 —a seething, sweating mass of dreamers and drifters. And, while most of them looked to the rivers for gold, a few saw the opportunity in the miners themselves. One of the most famous was Franconian Levi Strauss, who knew they’d be needing jeans, but a good many of his countrymen figured they’d be craving a beer, as well. Breweries began blossoming throughout the Bay.

By 1900, two dozen were slinging suds to thirsty men. And here is where Jackson got one thing wrong: they were basically classic German lager breweries making pretty standard lager beer—with one exception. They brewed with malt used in pale lagers, and often (but not always) used decoction mashing. As was typical for the time in continental brewing, they let the wort settle in wide, shallow “clarifying tanks”—what we now call coolships. It was a rough-and-ready time, though, and San Francisco—unlike the cities of the upper Midwest that were becoming known for beer—had no ready stores of ice. Instead of fermenting cool and conditioning the beer for weeks, they pitched lager yeast at ale temperatures, and packaged it immediately, without any conditioning. The entire process took less than a week.

Part of the reason this beer was popular was clever (though probably inadvertent) branding: “steam beer” sounded cool. It represented the power and modernity of the dawning industrial age. The origin of the term is obscure, though there are theories. In an important text from the pre-Prohibition era, the 1902 American Handy-book of Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades, Robert Wahl and Max Henius advance this theory: “This beer is largely consumed throughout the state of California. It is called steam beer on account of its highly effervescing properties and the amount of pressure (‘steam’) it has in the packages.” Whatever the name’s origin, Wahl and Henius offer a description of what it might have tasted like: “light in color, hop aroma and bitter taste not very pronounced; very lively and not necessarily brilliant.” Anchor Brewing, which has become the sole caretaker of the style, believes the name comes from rooftop coolships that steamed as the wort cooled, which is also plausible.

Anchor Brewing

Anchor wasn’t one of the founding breweries of the steam beer era—it dates “only” to 1896. It survived prohibition and passed through the hands of a few different owners over the decades. By 1965, however, it was in brewery hospice, just weeks from death. Consolidation and the commodification of beer had reduced the audience, and the beer was by all accounts bad—routinely sour, inconsistent, and available in only a few accounts in town.

Fritz Maytag, a young Iowan who had come to the Bay Area for college, was one of the few people who drank the beer—largely, it seems, because he loved the romance of the story. Just days before it was due to shut down permanently, the young man took a tour of the brewery itself and made a decision to buy 51% of the brewery on the spot—for a mere $5,000 (a bit over $41,000 in today’s dollars). He had the money to do it—his family was the one that made washing machines—but he had no background in brewing or selling beer and faced an enormously steep learning curve.

Maytag spent the next few years learning the business, relying heavily on a friendship he’d formed with family brewer Bill Leinenkugel. He tried to pick up what he could about brewing from Jean de Clerck’s classic Textbook of Brewing. He hired able brewers as well, and managed to clean things up and produce decent enough beer to stay in business. In 1968 he bought the rest of the brewery and a year later bought new equipment and started retooling the formulation and process for making steam beer.

There is a frustrating lacuna in the historical record here. The pre-Maytag Anchor Steam was apparently a pale beer, fizzy and often soured, and in later years made with sugar and caramel coloring. Based on contemporaneous descriptions, it sounds like it was fairly generic, trading on its history while being, in fact, a standard if poorly-made lagerish beer. I’ve found no mention of how Fritz went about reformulating the beer, but he did the historical research and restored the process. The brewery uses fermenters that are something like a cross between English squares and coolships, which they pitch warm with lager yeast, and they still krausen the beer. All of that is well-documented and celebrated by the brewery. How the beer itself changed is little-discussed—but perhaps worth a closer look.

In the years following the reformulation of Steam, Maytag began releasing beers that seemed like rare exotica—porter, barley wine, and a Christmas seasonal. If you’ve ever had a chance to tour the brewery, you know it as one of the most gracious old breweries in the world, with every bit the romance of a 19th-century British or German brewhouses. Even the hops room looks like something out of Yorkshire or Edinburgh. It’s no wonder Jackson was intrigued both by the oddball brewery—tiny by American standards—and the flagship beer, which while by modern tastes may seem rather pedestrian, must have seemed wildly exotic by American standards of the day.

The First Modern Beer

American beer can be segmented into three: the British-inflected era from colonial times through the 1840s, the German period lasting until 1980, and the current craft era. Anchor has always been unusual in that while it has most of the features of a craft brewery it long predated that era and, with its singular flagship, sparked no imitators. Yet on closer inspection, the formulation of Steam Beer—the stuff the brewery doesn’t talk about—seems to have created the blueprint craft brewers would adopt a decade later.

It’s a simple beer: pale and caramel malts and Northern Brewer hops. In the late 60s/early 70s when the beer was reformulated, there wasn’t much to work with. There was basically one American hop, precious few specialty malts, and a single, typical process for making beer (the German way). Maytag might have been able to cobble together something like the old steam beer breweries would have made with six-row Bay barley or two-row Chevalier, and he could have used Cluster hops. They were locally-grown and would have been cheap and ubiquitous—and were still common in the late 60s. Instead, they remade the beer with ingredients available to them then, including crystal malt. Caramel malts were developed in the late 1800s by the British and it’s highly unlikely steam beers would have been using them. Nor is there any evidence the existing Anchor Steam used it.

In choosing the combination of two-row and pale, Anchor created the blueprint that would dominate craft brewing for two decades. The pale malt available then was so free of character it was often called “sugar” for its capacity to ferment cleanly. The caramel malts provided body (not typical in lagers), sweetness, and flavor. Until well into the 2000s, that was the character of most craft beer.

They chose an old hop variety in Northern Brewer, first grown in England in 1934. This, combined with the open fermentation, gave the beer a distinctly British flavor. When craft breweries started opening up along the West Coast in the 1970s and 80s, they followed this general profile (though open fermentation was not common). And of course, they all knew Anchor—and some had been advised by Fritz. It was a simple formula, but one that delivered balance and flavor, and which was easy to brew on most systems.

Steam beer was never that unusual. It started out as a typical German lager but fermented at warm temperatures. With the Maytag-era reformulation, it became a typical British-style ale fermented with a lager yeast. For most of the past fifty years, everyone has focused on that lager yeast strain as the key element in Anchor Steam. But in fact, the thing that makes Steam groundbreaking is the revisionist American approach to making a British ale. American hops would soon arrive, and in time this prescription would be used to make beers like New Albion and Sierra Nevada. Those bones would form the foundation for American brewing, which would increasingly focus on the American hops. Eventually, caramel malts and the heaviness they create fell out of favor.

Now Steam Beer is an anachronism once again—but a familiar, delightful one. It is a very simple beer, the color of a pint of English bitter, with an aroma to match. There are some darker, earthier flavors along with the smooth, round body and a touch of bitterness on the back end. It’s a full beer—it must have seemed meaty indeed in the early 1970s—but has the nicely crisp finish that creates its famous moreishness. It’s an appropriately San Franciscan beer—just dark and hearty enough for foggy afternoons, but bright and crisp enough for the warmth and sunshine beyond the fog. Very few beers have been in production and selling well for fifty years, and there’s a reason we keep going back to Anchor Steam. Fritz has retired, the brewery is now owned by Sapporo, but the tradition and flavor remain.