Steam beer may be defined as a highly effervescent beer made by brewing lager yeasts at warm fermentation temperatures. It has two distinct but related meanings:

• Historic steam beer produced in California from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century;
• Modern California common beer, the official name for the beer family which includes Anchor Steam beer.

Historic steam beer, associated with San Francisco and the U.S. West Coast

West Coast of the United States

West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...

, was brewed with lager

Lager

Lager is a type of beer made from malted barley that is brewed and stored at low temperatures. There are many types of lager; pale lager is the most widely-consumed and commercially available style of beer in the world; Pilsner, Bock, Dortmunder Export and Märzen are all styles of lager...

 yeast without the use of refrigeration

Refrigeration

Refrigeration is a process in which work is done to move heat from one location to another. This work is traditionally done by mechanical work, but can also be done by magnetism, laser or other means...

. It was an improvised process, originating out of necessity, perhaps as early as the Gold Rush

California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands , and Latin America, who were the first to start flocking to...

. It was considered a cheap and low-quality beer, as shown by references to it in literature of the 1890s and 1900s.

Modern steam beer, also known as California common beer, was originated by Anchor Brewing Company

Anchor Brewing Company

Anchor Brewing Company is an American alcoholic beverage producer, operating a brewery and distillery on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California. The brewery was founded in 1896 and was purchased by Frederick Louis Maytag III, in 1965, saving it from closure. It moved to its current location in...

, which trademarked the name Anchor Steam Beer in 1981. Although the modern company has corporate continuity with a small brewery which was still making traditional steam beer in the 1950s, Anchor Steam beer is a craft-brewed lager. The company does not claim any close similarity between its present day product and turn-of-the-20th-century steam beer.

Explanations of the word "steam" are all speculative. The carbon dioxide pressure produced by the process was very high, and one possibility is that it was necessary to let off "steam" before attempting to dispense the beer. According to Anchor Brewing, the name "steam" came from the fact that the brewery had no way to effectively chill the boiling wort using traditional means. So they pumped the hot wort up to large, shallow, open-top bins on the roof of the brewery so that it would be rapidly chilled by the cool air blowing in off the Pacific Ocean

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

. Thus while brewing, the brewery had a distinct cloud of steam around the roof let off by the wort as it cooled, hence the name. It is also possible that the name derives from "Dampfbier" (literally "steam beer"), a traditional German beer that was also fermented at unusually high temperatures and that may have been known to 19th-century American brewers, many of whom were of German descent.

Brewing process

In 19th-century California, not only ice, but even sources of naturally cold water, were probably unavailable to brewers. California brewers were forced to use lager yeast at higher ale temperatures.

Final flavors of beer are influenced by the strain of yeast and the fermentation temperature. Lager yeast is best used at temperatures from 55 to 32 °F (12.8 to 0 C). Classic lagering of beers takes place over a period of time from weeks to many months at a temperature of 45 °F (7.2 °C). Lager yeasts are bottom fermenting, which is to say that after fermentation they settle on the bottom of the fermenter.

Ale yeast is best used at temperatures from 55 to 75 °F (12.8 to 23.9 C). Fermentation by ale yeasts produces a beer that has a distinctive ale flavor. Ale yeasts are top-fermenting, that is they settle out on top of the wort after fermenting (fermentation itself takes place in a suspension). Steam Beer uses bottom fermenting lager yeasts at ale temperatures, which results in a very distinctive flavor profile that includes both ale and lager characteristics.

While steam beer is considered a specialty microbrew style of beer today, it was originally a cheap beer made for blue collar workers. Wahl and Heinus's American Handy Book of Brewing and Malting (1902) describes California Steam Beer as “a very clear, refreshing drink, much consumed by the laboring classes.” And while Anchor Steam is an all-barley malt beer, additives were often used in the early days. According to the book, "Malt alone, malt and grits, or raw cereals of any kind, and sugars, especially glucose, employed in the kettle to the extent of 33 percent... Roasted malt or sugar coloring is used to give the favorite amber color of Munich beer."

Steam beer in literature

Jack London

Jack London

John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...

 refers to steam beer in his "alcoholic memoir," John Barleycorn, in a passage explaining how he started drinking in late-1880s San Francisco:

The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper, according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for beer. I said I'd take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale. Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink beer.

As a budding writer, "a wild band of young revolutionists invited me as the guest of honour to a beer bust" and was challenged to a drinking contest.

I'd show them, the young rascals.... These unlicked cubs who thought they could out-drink me! Faugh! It was steam beer. I had learned more expensive brews. Not for years had I drunk steam beer...

Frank Norris

Frank Norris

Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. was an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague , The Octopus: A Story of California , and The Pit .-Life:Frank Norris was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1870...

's 1899 novel McTeague

McTeague

McTeague is a novel by Frank Norris, first published in 1899. It tells the story of a couple's courtship and marriage, and their subsequent descent into poverty, violence and finally murder as the result of jealousy and avarice...

, set in San Francisco, sets the stage with a reference to steam beer in its opening paragraph:

It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.... By and by, gorged with steam beer, and overcome by the heat of the room, the cheap tobacco, and the effects of his heavy meal, he dropped off to sleep.

When he marries, his wife convinces him to adopt more refined habits:

She broke him of the habit of eating with his knife, she caused him to substitute bottled beer in the place of steam beer, and she induced him to take off his hat to Miss Baker, to Heise's wife, and to the other women of his acquaintance.

California common beer

According to the Beer Judge Certification Program

Beer Judge Certification Program

The Beer Judge Certification Program or BJCP is a non-profit organization formed in 1985 "to promote beer literacy and the appreciation of real beer, and to recognize beer tasting and evaluation skills." It has been described in the press as a "hands-on ... study program designed to teach aspiring...

, the term California common beer, designated style 7B, is "narrowly defined around the prototypical Anchor Steam example", and other commercial examples include Skyscraper Brewing Company

Skyscraper Brewing Company

Skyscraper Brewing Company is an American craft brewery located in Los Angeles County in the city of City of Industry, California. Skyscraper was established in 2007 by brewer and owner Phil Sutton...

 Lug Nut Lager, Southampton West Coast Steam Beer, Old Dominion Victory Amber, Flying Dog Old Scratch Amber Lager, and Eagle Steam Beer. The style "showcases the signature Northern Brewer hops (with woody, rustic or minty qualities) in moderate to high strength", is fermented with "a lager yeast, but one that was selected to thrive at the cool end of normal ale fermentation temperatures", and was traditionally fermented in open fermenters.

Other kinds of "steam beer"

Kentucky Common Beer

Kentucky Common Beer

Kentucky Common Beer is a once-popular style of ale from the area in and around Louisville, Kentucky, that is rarely brewed commercially today. Cheaper than imported beers, it was popular among the working class....

 was brewed in and around Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

 from mid-19th century until Prohibition. Roughly 80% or all beer brewed in Louisville at the time was of this type.

A British brewery, the Lincolnshire Steam Beer Co., derives its name from the steam-powered brewing machinery.

When Canadian brewer Sleeman

Sleeman Breweries

Sleeman Brewery Ltd. is a brewery located in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. John H. Sleeman originally began brewing beer in 1834. By 1933 the Sleeman brewery had ceased operations when their liquor licence was revoked for bootlegging, specifically, smuggling beer into Detroit, Michigan. The brewery was...

 introduced a product called Steam Beer in Canada in 1999, Anchor sued for trademark infringement, since it had trademarked the term "steam beer" in Canada ten years earlier. Canadian courts dismissed the suit and subsequent appeals, ruling that Anchor's Canadian trademark was invalid, since the beer had not been marketed in Canada up to that time. After Sapporo bought Sleeman in a $400-million takeover in 2006, Sleeman's production of Steam Beer was discontinued.

In Richmond, Virginia the remains of a former Yuengling

D. G. Yuengling & Son

D. G. Yuengling & Son is the oldest operating brewing company in the United States, established in 1829. It is one of the largest breweries by volume in the country, and is the second largest American-owned brewery after the Boston Beer Company, makers of Sam Adams beer...

brewery along the James River were once called "David Yuengling Jr.'s James River Steam Brewery" and are located at (or near) 912 East Main St.

St. Louis guide for citizens and strangers (http://books.google.com/books?id=PoUSAAAAYAAJ&dq=st.%20louis%20guide%20for%20citizens%20strangers&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q=steam%20beer&f=false) shows advertising copy for J.F. Boyd & Co. St. Louis Ale, Porter and Lager Beer Steam Brewery.

"Adam Wood Steam Brewery" is listed as having been founded in 1859, at: http://pittsburghsigns.org/archives/2004/05/otto_milk_1.html

External links

• http://byo.com/component/resource/article/1442-steam-beer - Detailed historical article by Martin Lodahl from Brew Your Own magazine
• California Steaming - Article about the beer style in Brewing Techniques magazine
• Anchor Brewing Co. Official web site of the Anchor Steam Beer brewer