Steam Recap

On Tuesday (April 19th) we brewed St. Croix Steam Beer. This beer is modeled on, and an homage to, Anchor Steam out of San Francisco, CA.  It seems a lot of people aren't familiar with Steam Beer, so a little background. Steam is a style that originated in California in the mid 1800's.  It was unique in that it used the new lager yeast strains that had become popular, but at warmer temperatures.

Why 'steam'? No one knows for sure. From Wikipedia:

"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. 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 ale 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."

Steam Beer is important in American brewing because it is considered the first microbrewed beer. The style was revitalized in the late 1960's when Fritz Maytag bought the aged and ailing Anchor Brewing Co.  At a time when breweries were turning to lighter and more corn-based beverages, Anchor revamped their recipe to make an all malt beer with an assertive hop character. Early microbrewers in California looked to Anchor and its Steam beer for information and inspiration. In fact it could be argued that Anchor created the American microbrewery movement.

St. Croix Steam was brewed with Pale malt and four kinds of Caramel malt (20, 40, 80, and 120) for a complex, layered malt flavor. It's hopped with Cluster, Mt. Hood, Glacier and Willamette for an herbal, earthy hop character. The brew day went off without a hitch, and our starting gravity was even better than I expected.

We brought in a new yeast for this beer- Wyeast 2112 - which is a lager strain based on the Anchor yeast. It's fermenting at around 60 F, as is traditional.

Next post I'll go over tasting notes on the beers so far.