Before all this IPA business, Americans hadn’t done a lot to contribute to the world’s canon of beers. One notable exception, however, is a frontier-era invention—a lager improvised to ferment along the ice-free parts of the West Coast.
Steam beer isn’t the only minor style that Americans improvised—cream ale, brilliant ale, Pennsylvania swankey, Kentucky common, and others all had their moments. Most of those didn’t survive Prohibition, if they made it that far. Steam beer lasted, however, because a dedicated practitioner kept making it: San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing.
Like any enduring style, steam beer had to survive some close calls and scrapes. The first challenge was refrigeration, which allowed brewers to chill their wort and lager their beer—it threatened to make steam beer obsolete. It was already endangered by the 1910s, despite how cheap it was in the taverns. Then came Prohibition, which wiped out most of the old breweries dedicated to making it. After 1950, only Anchor was left. The story of its rescue, days before it was going to close forever, is legendary—not least because the new owner, Fritz Maytag, became a beacon and mentor to entrepreneurs who would visit him with dreams of starting their own breweries.
Yet there’s one final, strange wrinkle to this story: In 1981, the federal government granted Anchor the trademark on “steam beer.” We know about steam beer because Anchor managed to survive, but this act codified it. (Anchor did finally close in 2023, but—because history rhymes—it was saved once more by a new benefactor: Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya.)
The trademark meant that other breweries could make something in the fashion of the old style, but they couldn’t call it “steam beer.” The industry collectively agreed to call them California commons, but that was always an awkward kludge. It always meant steam beer, but since there was now just one living example, steam beer meant Anchor.
That leaves us to consider the question of what this style was, what it became, and now—with Anchor’s status up in the air—what it could still become.
Frontier Beer
Writers sometimes characterize steam beer as a San Francisco original, but people also brewed it in Alaska, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon, where it was especially popular.
It arrived after 1850, when German immigrants were shifting American brewing toward lager; really, steam beer was just lager beer made quickly and cheaply, without refrigeration. In fact, people just called it lager from the 1850s to the 1870s—so what if breweries couldn’t ferment it cool or cold-condition it? Its virtue was being cheap to make and to drink—a central selling point. The word “steam” came into vogue in the 1860s, when some breweries were still calling the style “lager,” but “steam” didn’t become the default label until the 1880s.
There are various accounts about why people called it steam beer, and for years Anchor favored the explanation that it referred to the coolships that sat atop the breweries—hot wort sent steam out the vents into the foggy San Francisco air. But it’s far more likely that the name has to do with the beer’s carbonation; contemporary sources placed the pressure in the barrel as high as 70 psi. (The carbonation surely varied, but if we assume that pressure at an ambient 72°F/22°C, we could be looking at beer with a Champagne-like five volumes of CO2 when tapped.)
Brewers added kräusen to get secondary fermentation in the barrel. The beer was so effervescent that one company developed a special tap to dispense it. English writer and beer historian Martyn Cornell notes a German-language source from 1871, written by brewer Hemmann Hoffmann, who describes how bars of the era served the beer. Breweries made two versions of it—one flat and one carbonated—and bartenders blended them for customers. The fact that they called the carbonated version steam beer lends credence to the second explanation.
It was a regional drink, but multiple sources documented steam beer during its heyday. It wasn’t really a “style” as we understand it today. It was a beer fermented with lager yeast at warmer temperatures, not lagered, and kräusened to produce effervescence.
“Mashing methods vary greatly,” write Max Henius and Robert Wahl in 1901, in their American Handy Book of the Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades. They go on to detail both German step-mashing and British infusion-mashing methods. The grist might include adjuncts, or not, and the beer might be pale or amber.
It was more of a category—ultimately separate from lager as well as ale, partly because it was much cheaper.
Open fermentors at the Anchor Brewery in San Francisco, circa 2022. Photo: Jamie Bogner.
A Style or a Beer?
João Alameida had a successful career going when his eye started to wander.
“When I was working in banking, I would have to work a weekend,” he says. “So, I’d have a weekday off, and at least once a month I’d go on that brewery tour at Anchor.”
He eventually left banking and started leading those tours, becoming the brewery’s taproom manager. Maytag had sold the brewery by then, but a lot of the old-timers were still around.
“I would stay and put in some time after my shift, and have a half-pint or two, and talk to people and see what made the place tick from the inside,” he says. When he had the chance to jump to production, he did, starting on the lowest rung of the brewing ladder.
Not many breweries get that kind of reverence, but Anchor has earned it. As craft brewing went from quirky niche to established segment, respect for Anchor grew. Maytag expanded the brewery’s line, which went on to feature multiple standards such as Liberty Ale, Porter, Christmas Ale, and Old Foghorn Barleywine. Yet always towering above these was the style that doubled as the brewery’s name in many consumers’ minds: Anchor Steam.
While working on this piece, I surveyed several brewers about whether they thought California common was a style with a range of expressions, or more like a tribute band where every version is, to some degree, an homage to Anchor. They were mostly in agreement: It’s the latter.
Firestone Walker’s Sam Tierney puts it best: “It’s a style that went through a very tight evolutionary bottleneck, and basically nobody has been able to popularize any significant deviations from Anchor, as far as I know. We brewed one this year, and it wasn’t a clone but was pretty close.”
Atlas Brew Works in Washington, D.C., may be a case in point. They launched the brewery with a beer called District Common, alluding to the style from the opposite coast. They envisioned it as an approachable session beer that combines crisp lager drinkability with subtle, ale-like esters.
By the time Atlas opened in 2013, caramel malt was already falling out of favor, and they brewed District Common with a grist of one-third Munich and two-thirds pilsner malt. Yet Daniel Vilarrubi, director of brewing operations, says the beer “is among our lower performers. It’s pretty popular among the staff, but I don’t think it’s a crowd favorite.”
They’re proud of the beer, and it has a fervent, if small, fan base. But the market has shifted away from the model Anchor created in the late 1960s.
Where beers made in that style have survived, they’ve moved away from its origins. One of the more enduring versions is Dorothy’s New World Lager, from Toppling Goliath in Decorah, Iowa. The brewery originally brewed it as a tribute to Iowa–born Maytag. Yet this beer has evolved, too.
“As our brewhouse has become more advanced,” says brewmaster Mike Saboe, “we slowly transitioned toward a more traditional lager, with the incorporation of multiple mash rests and colder fermentations.”
The One and Only
Alameida is still brewing in the Bay Area, but he’s moved on to Almanac, where he’s production manager. He says the brewery is planning to produce a California common in 2025, so I was curious about which approach he’d take.
“For myself, I would just try to keep things as much the same as possible,” he says. Anchor used a step mash, open fermentation, and kräusening; Almanac’s system isn’t designed to do everything like that. Otherwise: “It’s basically 40° Lovibond caramel and two-row, and that’s pretty much it. And then, you know, Northern Brewer is the hallmark of steam beer. The things that shine for me with steam beer [are] the mouthfeel, the caramel, the foam. A lot of things are going on there, like the way the esters dance on the nose and such, that velvety foam, and the high carbonation that is a hallmark of that style—oh, and the kräusening practice.”
Northern Brewer hops weren’t around when steam beer was young. (In his book Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer, Stan Hieronymus writes that they used an obsolete variety called, unappetizingly, Large Gray American.) Crystal malt wasn’t around, either, and many breweries were using six-row malt.
But that was old steam beer, not Anchor Steam, which really is the only standard remaining. It’s not usual for a single beer to define a style, but it’s not unheard of, either. My mind turns to Guinness, referenced by every brewery making a 4.2 percent ABV “dry Irish stout.”
If and when Anchor Steam returns, it will resume its place as the archetype. Forty-four years on from the trademark, and 60 since Maytag bought the brewery—roughly half its life ago—Anchor has come to define the style.
For early breweries in the craft era, that may have been because of a trademark. Today, however, it’s because Anchor Steam is all anyone can remember.