Anchor "Steem"

Having planned a trip to return home for the 2010 World Cup, I decided to brew a few batches before June so that I could come back having left them to ferment for over a month. One of them was this LME (liquid malt extract) kit beer intentionally named Anchor Steem after the famous, and copyright attentive, Anchor Steam out of San Francisco (one of oldest breweries in America, 1849). Yes, if you can imagine, the beer industry too is heavily protective of its image and capital heavy branding (look no further than to my father and my uncle who have been coming up with "new" ways to get their budmiller into the others glass for the last 30 years).

Anchor Steam itself is a very hoppy beer and light as any pale ale. However, my mild bastardization of the original recipe - be it due to the kit's ingredients, or my adding 1 1/2 cups of priming dextrose to the bottling process - the end result after 3 months has still produced a drastically sweeter beer with little to no hop bitterness. The image to the right is of my hop socks after the boil and the yeast starter on the right. The hop socks have brought mixed results. In this beer, I should not have used them as a fuller flavored boiling hop would have extracted more rigorously had it been loose in the pot. With the sock, it balls the hop pellets as they break down, often leaving the inner core of the ball as green as they were in their package. However beers with less hoppy flavors, like stouts, would do well with hop socks because of the desired subtly of bitterness. This beer in particular tasted as if there was little to no hops added.

Because I was not going to check up on the fermentation for about two months, I transferred the beer from the primary into a secondary, as seen at right. The thick layer of brown on the higher carboy is called trub (pronounced: trube), its a build-up leftover from the Kreusening (pronounced: croy-zun-ing) process where fermentation causes the "blow off" of foam, hop resins and dead yeast. This is why you use a larger primary than your secondary, because of the rising level of the material contained in the carboy. This batch had a very low amount of trub which is an indicator of something, not 100% sure of what. The photo at the right makes the beer look much darker than it is. Up close with a back lighting as seen at left during the racking process, you can see just how light this beer is.

I have received largely positive reviews of this recipe, primarily by girls who like lighter and sweeter styles with absolutely no bitterness. I discovered with this batch, just how badass it feels to walk into a party with a growler and pour out the alcoholic fruits of ones labor.