Brewers Yeast Room Sign
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) sign
label: Description (Brief)
content: Blue sign with white writing: "BREWERS YEAST ROOM"
label: Description
content: This sign was displayed in Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, California. Anchor’s approach to maintaining its yeast strain for Anchor Steam Beer was unique. In a 2023 oral history, Andrea DeVries, the brewery’s quality assurance manager, explained, “[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: 2023.0113.15
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.15
objectType: label: Object Name
content: sign
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: metal (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 5 in x 7 in; 12.7 cm x 17.78 cm