counter, yeast
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) counter
label: Description (Brief)
content: Silver counter with black dial.
label: Description
content: This tool was collected from 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, explained, “I would do a 24-hour cell count [of yeast]. That's pretty much what I learned was the most important process of the fermentation success was, in 24 hours, how was your yeast growing? Using a hemacytometer, where you're literally looking at the yeast structure and the cell division, you can see the health of the yeast. If yeast is round and the babies look good and they're small, round babies, you know you have a good healthy yeast propagation in the open fermentation. It’s growing in the right multiplication it needs to grow in. If I saw yeast stressed, they would elongate. I would recognize that, and I could go back to the brewhouse and say did you change temperatures in the mash temperatures, was there a condition in the cooling rooms? Did something cause this stress because something is stressing the yeast. And we can often pinpoint what it was, make a change, and get back. So the beauty of using a hemacytometer is you're looking at the cells. You literally see the cells as they're dividing and the health of the cells. Where most breweries would use yeast equipment where you're literally putting yeast on a slide and you're seeing an image of the yeast and the viability of the yeast, but it's all digital. It’s just numbers. It's not looking at the individual cells.”
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 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: 2023.0113.37
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.37
objectType: label: Object Name
content: counter
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 1 3/4 in x 1 1/2 in; 4.445 cm x 3.81 cm