Did Hamdi Ulukaya Save Steam Beer or Doom It?

Continuing my efforts to follow up on my Craft Beer & Brewing “Style School” columns, we arrive today at steam beer. It is of course the signature (and trademark-protected) product of Anchor Brewing, which may or may not exist. I wrote CB&B the article after Chobani-founder and rich guy Hamdi Ulukaya purchased Anchor, seemingly saving it from history’s dustbin. But even then, the old plant had been sitting derelict in San Francisco for months. Instead of putting the brewery and its workers, many of whom were available, back to work, the building remains vacant. It’s a mysterious situation: zero appears to have happened since the sale, and no one even knows who to ask about its progress (I tried!).

Then, less than a week ago, the San Francisco Standard published a follow-up confirming that, nope, nothing seems to be happening and nope, it’s impossible to find anyone close enough to Ulukaya who knows what’s going on. One year since Ulukaya’s purchase, Anchor is further from making beer than ever:

“Since then, the brewery has been quiet, apart from making occasional headlines over noxious odors emerging from its depths. There have been no public announcements on what’s next, and the facility is largely bereft of activity, other than a skeleton crew of maintenance workers. One employee declined to comment when The Standard reached her by phone.”

It is one of the weirder stories in an industry full of them, and it puts one of America’s homegrown beer styles in a purgatory, at once saved and doomed.

Loving Steam Beer to Death

I have written about steam beer and Anchor in the past, but in the CB&B article, I was more concerned with the tension between Anchor’s existence as the great champion of the style and the role it played in stifling and even erasing it. Anchor was the final steam beer brewery on the West Coast (despite San Francisco’s association with the style, it was made up the West Coast all the way to Alaska), so it became the standard-bearer for the style by default. That was itself a major disruption in what had been more a category than a style from the 19th century until Prohibition.

“It wasn’t really a ‘style’ as we understand it today. It was a beer fermented with lager yeast at warmer temperatures, not lagered, and kräusened to produce effervescence…. ‘Mashing methods vary greatly,’ write Max Henius and Robert Wahl in 1901, in their American Handy Book of the Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades. They go on to detail both German step-mashing and British infusion-mashing methods. The grist might include adjuncts, or not, and the beer might be pale or amber.”

When Fritz Maytag bought the brewery in 1965, he set about reformulating Anchor Steam. The brewery had famously been weeks from closure, and had that happened steam beer would have died with the brewery. Instead, it became Anchor’s keystone, saving the style. But in doing so, the “style” became reduced to the single extant example—a big departure from its earlier, wide range of expressions.

“While working on this piece, I surveyed several brewers about whether they thought California common was a style with a range of expressions, or more like a tribute band where every version is, to some degree, an homage to Anchor. They were mostly in agreement: It’s the latter.”

The Name
Anchor owns the trademark on “Steam beer,” which means other breweries can’t use it to describe their beer. But we can. I’ve never understood the deference in the general use of the style to Anchor. We can discuss it without resorting to awkward kludges like “California common,” and that’s why I’m using it here.

One of the people I interviewed in the article was João Alameida, who brewed for Anchor before moving to Almanac—almost directly across the Bay in Alameda. By coincidence, he was working on a version of steam beer at Almanac at the time, and he made no secret about his intention to recreate the beer he once brewed as closely as possible. He later sent me a four-pack of the beer, and it was a dead ringer for Anchor. It was a lovely experience to taste the beer again, like a ghost from the past, but it also seemed a bit like a coda. It’s cool that the US produced such an iconic beer, but the fact that brewers can recreate it with such precision illustrates its limitations as a living, breathing style.

Ulukaya is Either Saving or Dooming Steam Beer

The sale of Anchor deepens the paradox at the center of Steam. In a weird way, it’s like an echo. A rich guy with no background in beer swoops in at the 11th hour (I guess that’s one difference—Ulukaya arrived at the 13th hour) to rescue an old American brewery and prop up the last living individual in a species. If he manages to restart the brewery, one imagines Steam will enjoy a second resurrection. The style will be saved.

This salvation delivers the style a weird kind of life, though. The notion of a style depends on an organic expression of tradition. We don’t say Orval, to take one example, is a “style.” It’s a beer. Whatever Maytag’s intention was sixty years ago (!) when he bought the brewery, the way he protected Anchor Steam meant sacrificing the style of steam beer. Because it was such a legendary beer, it never evolved to meet the preferences of modern drinkers. It tastes of the past, which was a big reason for its commercial decline. This is the beer Ulukaya purchased, with all its nostalgia and history, but no “tradition” to support it. Anchor Steam is a singular beer, for good and bad.

If Ulukaya gets Anchor up and running, he will save Anchor Steam—and in doing so doom steam beer. If the old brewery just slips into memory, it’s possible the style might start cropping back up here and there, but without having to nod to the original beer. The irony is that all this saving of Anchor Steam has ended the steam beer style; Anchor’s death, conversely, may ultimately save it.

These kinds of historic twists and ironies are part of the reason I’ve been able to write about beer for decades. What a strange and wondrous substance!