California Common | Heavy Steam

Historical Development

Few beer styles have the distinction of being truly American. The ales made in households during America's early colonial period were influenced by English brewing tradition, which was simply most familiar to the settlers. The lager boom coincided with a wave of German immigrants in the early and middle nineteenth century. Even as American brewers explore wild-fermented beer today-one of the more recent additions to craft taplists-the inspiration comes from the Lambic and Gueuze tradition in and around modern-day Belgium.

The California Common was originally an outgrowth of the gold rush in the middle of the nineteenth century. Just as lager beer began to take hold in St. Louis and expand all over the country, around 300,000 people moved west over a span of about seven years looking for gold. That might not seem like much, but to comparing that to today's population, imagine 3.5 million people moving to California today…it was a massive migration to say the least. Many of those people didn't make it big in gold, but all of that panning did make them thirsty (and more than a few of them needed to drown their sorrows too). The warmer climate and lack of commercial refrigeration left brewers in the west with difficult choices: either brew the older English ale styles, which were going out of fashion as lager took a stranglehold on the market, or brew lager but ferment it untraditionally warm. They chose the latter, and when they added the woody, minty hops available to them, the so-called "Steam Beer" was born.

That name, now trademarked by Anchor Brewing, likely came from the early brewing process, when brewers cooled the wort before pitching yeast in large vats that would steam on brewery rooftops. Anchor Brewing has seen its share of hardships since it was founded in the 1870s. Through many changes in ownership and location, it was also destroyed by an earthquake and consumed by fire before finally coming into some good luck during the 1960s. When Fritz Maytag-then a recent graduate of Stanford and heir to a sizeable washing machine fortune-learned that Anchor, who brewed his favorite Steam Beer, was about to close, he bought a majority stake and created one of America's most iconic craft breweries.

We've run into Anchor before (see our post on IPA), and we will a few more times as we explore other styles they've helped create over the years. Today, the California Common-our name for the style after Anchor trademarked "Steam Beer"-has one of the most narrow profiles of any style. It's amber colored, brewed with lager yeast but fermented warm, and most brewers use a single hop-Northern Brewer-to make it.

At Black Flannel, we make a beer that's distantly-related (not by origin but by flavor profile) called the Vermont Common which you can read more about in our upcoming post on Kentucky Common beer.

Modern Evolution

American West Coast original, brewed originally as Steam Beer in the Gold Rush era. Large shallow open fermenters (coolships) were traditionally used to compensate for the absence of refrigeration and to take advantage of the cool ambient temperatures in the San Francisco Bay area. Fermented with a lager yeast, but one that was selected to ferment relatively clean beer at warmer temperatures. Modern versions are based on Anchor Brewing re-launching the style in the 1970s.