Your globetrotting liquor reporter took a quick trip to California last month, and naturally, my thoughts turned quickly to booze.
Flying into San Francisco, I knew it was only a quick trip across the Golden Gate Bridge to reach the vineyards of Sonoma County, with the Napa Valley not much further beyond that.
However, the wines of California are well-known the world over, and your humble narrator is always on the lookout for a new and exciting tipple.
Branching out from the wine that the golden state is known for, I decided to seek out the legendary California Common Beer.
First brewed during the Californa Gold Rush era around 1849, California Common Beer is also sometimes known as Steam Beer.
Brewers had no access to refrigeration at the time, or even naturally cold water, which made brewing lager beers particularly troublesome.
Necessity being the mother of invention, the local brewers transferred the hot liquid wort to large open-topped concrete pans on the roof of the brewery for fermentation, which allowed the cool fog blowing in from the San Francisco Bay to naturally chill the beer to a temperature more preferred by the lager yeasts.
Before we continue, let’s have a quick lesson on the differences between lager yeasts and ale yeasts.
Lager yeasts sink to the bottom after fermentation, and perform best at temperatures between 9-14°C.
Ale yeasts float up to the top after fermentation, and perform best at temperatures between 13-24°C.
As you can imagine, the temperatures that lager yeasts thrive in were not easily found in the 1850’s in California. However, since the drinking public preferred the taste of lager beers at the time, California Common Beer was born.
This type of beer uses a lager yeast, but is fermented at a temperature more suited to an ale, which results in a unique flavour profile that is a combination of both ales and lagers.
This beer is considered a specialty brand today, but back in the days of the Gold Rush, California Common Beer was the most popular brew around.
Made for the working classes, this was a very inexpensive beer, often using only a small amount of barley, then adding lesser grains or even plain sugar to keep the fermentation levels up.
Without refrigeration in those days, beer would spoil quickly in the California heat, so this beer style had a nasty reputation as foul rotgut. However, even a warm and skunky beer was a welcome relief after a day of backbreaking labour while prospecting for gold, so California Common Beer was rarely on the shelves long enough to go bad.
The easiest to find example of this beer style close to home is Anchor Steam Beer, from the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco.
Starting business in 1896, with only brief interruptions due to things like earthquakes and fires destroying much of San Francisco, as well as a hiatus during the failed experiment of Prohibition, the Anchor Brewing Company has been in near-continuous operation for over 100 years, and their flagship beer is remarkably true to the original recipe.
Sure, they use newfangled temperature control and sanitation technologies that did not exist a century ago, but the basic formula of fermenting a lager yeast at a higher temperature in an open vessel is still used.
The beer itself pours a deep amber colour, and normally has a thick and firm white head.
The mouth feel has a breadlike flavour from the barley malt, which is dominant over the light hopping. A bit of caramel on the finish from the use of a small ratio of dark malts gives a nice balance to the beer, and makes it an easy-drinking session lager, with the more robust structure of an ale.
There were dozens of different breweries churning out vast quantities of California Common Beer up until Prohibition began in 1920, but only Anchor Brewing reopened after Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
So, if you would like to sample an authentic piece of history without the effort of staking your claim on a vein of gold out in the hills, pick up a six-pack of Anchor Steam Beer at your local booze merchant, or by the bottle at Chestermere’s own North Taphouse.
