glass slides, microscope
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: One (1) box of glass slides
label: Description (Brief)
content: 14 glass slides in a wooden box with slots for each.
label: Description
content: These slides were 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, “Fritz [Maytag] was very technical about measuring every process and documenting everything, and if he had a cell on a slide he was going to write ‘7-day fermentation yeast cell.’ He would document that and put it and reserve it off to the side. That’s why I gave them to you. It's literally—I opened a drawer in the lab and go, oh, yeah, those slides that I haven't thrown away 30 years later, that were probably there 20 years before me. Kind of the beauty of working for an antique, right?” DeVries speculated that the notes on the slides were from Alan Kornhauser, the lab manager who preceded her, or Fritz Maytag III, former owner of Anchor Brewing Co.
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: 2023.0113.39
label: accession number
content: 2023.0113
label: catalog number
content: 2023.0113.39
objectType: label: Object Name
content: box of glass slides
label: Object Name
content: box of microscope slides
label: Object Name
content: box of slides
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 6 3/4 in x 3 1/2 in x 1 1/2 in; 17.145 cm x 8.89 cm x 3.81 cm