Anchor Steam

If you brew beer, the Anchor Steam tour is a must. I've read more than a little bit about brewing beer, and there are a few things that you do not do because your beer will taste like a shoe. Anchor Steam breaks those rules and ends up with one of the most popular micro brews in the country.

They start with an all grain mash which is cooked with hopes and strained into a fermenter. First crazy thing, this fermenter is an open air fermenter like what they use with sewage, only cleaner. This madness encourages oxygenation both of hot wort and wort that has begun fermenting. This can produce lots of diacetyl which causes a buttery to very stale cardboard taste.

The second crazy thing, is that it's lager yeast that they pitch into 70 degree wort. Lager yeast works below 50 degrees while ale yeast works around 70. High temperature brewing produces nasty alcohols that burn the tongue.

After 3 days of fermentation they move it into a normal secondary fermenter through a whirlpool filter. That is followed by 'the crazy' number 3. They mix their beer with another batch that has only fermented for one day to capture lost carbonation. This re-adds a lot of the nasty chemicals they got rid of in the whirlpool filter.

After weeks of fermenting they homogenize it and bottle it. It tastes great which just goes to show that they know more about this stuff than I do.