Anchor Steam Beer Yeast
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) jar of beer yeast
label: Description (Brief)
content: Clear jar of "ANCHOR STEAM BEER YEAST LOT #:207-5" with black lid.
label: Description
content: This sample of Anchor Steam Beer yeast was collected from a freezer in the quality assurance lab at Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, California. In a 2023 oral history, Andrea DeVries, the brewery’s quality assurance manager, said, “I don't know the origin of that [yeast]…But that lived in my freezer in the lab for at least 30 years, as long as I've been here. I can only assume when Fritz was here in the early seventies at this location, there were several breweries around here. Even the yeast, Fleischmann's Yeast in the East Bay, he would get samples of yeast and he would make his beer with it. So, my assumption for the sample I gave you is probably —‘cause it's such a powdered form—that he probably got it from one of those locations and put it in a jar. It's been literally in my freezer all these years, so it's kind of a prized possession.”
label: Description
content: Anchor’s approach to maintaining its yeast strain for Anchor Steam Beer was unique. As DeVries explained in the same interview, “[O]pen fermentation is a fermentation process that doesn't cause a lot of stress on the yeast…We could keep producing it and producing it and producing it in generations. I can't even tell you how many generations we probably are at today, but that was so unique to understand that process and realize that most of the brewing industry today is under a condition where they have to buy yeast that's propagated, stored in stressed environments. They are unfortunately committed to purchasing yeast from a lab, because they can only get ten to twelve generations out of a yeast strain. The uniqueness of Steam Beer is we could go on forever as long as we weren't stressing the yeast out.”
label: Description
content: In 1965, Fritz Maytag III had purchased the historic but struggling Steam Beer Brewing Company (later, Anchor Brewing Company). With his entrepreneurial roots and zeal for science, Maytag revitalized the brewery. He perfected the brewery’s recipe for steam beer, an effervescent style that had originated in nineteenth-century San Francisco, and brewed European styles—porter, barleywine, pale ale—then unfamiliar to many Americans. As a self-taught brewer and savvy entrepreneur, Maytag inspired many who dreamed of opening their own small breweries. Historians consider Anchor Brewing Company to have been the first post-Prohibition American microbrewery. Microbreweries, brewpubs, and “craft” breweries proliferated throughout the nation in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. In August 2023, Sapporo USA liquidated Anchor Brewing Company.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Food Technology
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Anchor Brewing Company through Mike Minami
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2023.0113.11
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.11
objectType: label: Object Name
content: jar, yeast
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: glass (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 5 3/16 in x 2 13/32 in; 13.208 cm x 6.096 cm