One of America’s few indigenous beer styles, Anchor Steam  was truly a first for the craft beer industry. Few American beers have a legitimate claim to having helped launch a brewing revolution. Anchor Steam Beer is one of them.

And while calling it an ale wasn’t technically correct, it wasn’t quite a conventional lager either. That confusion is actually part of what made Anchor Steam Beer so interesting.

For generations, the deep amber beer from San Francisco occupied its own strange little corner of the brewing world. At 4.9 percent ABV, Anchor Steam was flavorful without being heavy, with a rich, lightly caramelized malt character balanced by the woody, herbal bite of Northern Brewer hops. It finished crisp and dry, yet carried considerably more personality than the pale American lagers that dominated the country when Anchor began its modern resurgence.

It was also unmistakably San Francisco.

Steam beer dates back to the California Gold Rush era, when German immigrants arriving in the West wanted the lagers they knew from home but faced a fairly significant problem. Lager brewing traditionally requires cold fermentation and conditioning, and refrigeration wasn’t exactly standard equipment in 19th-century California.

So brewers improvised.

They used lager yeast but fermented their beer at warmer, ale-like temperatures. The result was a uniquely American hybrid, technically a lager because of the yeast, but carrying some of the fruitier and more expressive characteristics associated with ales. Today the broader style is generally known as California Common, largely because Anchor eventually trademarked the term “Steam Beer.”

Even the origin of the word “steam” remains a bit unsettled.

One popular explanation holds that early San Francisco brewers cooled hot wort in large shallow vessels, allowing the city’s famously cool air to flow across the beer. The meeting of hot wort and chilly Bay Area air could create clouds of vapor that looked like steam escaping from the brewery. Another theory points to the considerable pressure inside highly carbonated kegs, which supposedly released with a steam-like hiss when tapped.

What we do know is that steam beer was once common throughout the American West. But by the middle of the 20th century, however, most of it had disappeared.

That’s where Fritz Maytag enters the story.

(Courtesy Anchor Brewing)

In 1965, Maytag discovered that the historic San Francisco brewery was close to shutting down. He bought a controlling interest and eventually set about transforming what had become an inconsistent neighborhood beer into something remarkable.

Maytag improved sanitation, upgraded equipment, refined the brewing process and turned Anchor Steam into a consistently distinctive beer. Bottling began in 1971, allowing it to travel beyond a handful of San Francisco bars that had kept Anchor alive.

The timing couldn’t have been more important.

American beer in the 1960s and early 1970s was moving in exactly the opposite direction. Brewery consolidation was accelerating, regional breweries and national brands were increasingly focused on traditional mass-market, lagers designed to offend almost nobody.

Anchor Steam wasn’t about any of that.

It was darker, maltier, hoppier and unapologetically local. The beer tasted “authentic.”

And decades before “craft beer” became a marketing category, Maytag demonstrated that a small American brewery could survive by making something distinctive rather than trying to imitate the giants.

That idea would prove enormously influential.

Anchor Steam became one of the beers that connected America’s nearly forgotten regional brewing past with the craft beer revolution that was about to explode.

That’s why Anchor’s 2023 closure hit the beer community so hard.

Then-owner Sapporo announced that Anchor Brewing was shutting down after 127 years, citing declining sales and difficult economic conditions. For a brewery that had survived earthquakes, fires, Prohibition, ownership changes and decades of consolidation, the ending felt almost impossible.

{Anchor Brewing on Potrero Hill in San Francisco: Courtesy Anchor Brewing)

But Anchor’s story may not be over.

In May 2024, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya purchased Anchor Brewing’s assets, including its recipes, intellectual property and historic Potrero Hill brewery, promising to bring the San Francisco institution back to life.

The revival has moved much more slowly and quietly than Anchor fans originally hoped, but 2026 has brought some encouraging signs.

Anchor received federal approval in 2026 for new labels for Anchor Steam Beer and Old Foghorn, and those labels restore the beloved illustrated artwork of longtime Anchor artist Jim Stitt that disappeared during the brewery’s controversial 2021 rebranding.

Label approval doesn’t guarantee that Anchor Steam will be returning to retail shelves tomorrow, and as of August 2026, Anchor has not announced when brewing will officially resume.

If Anchor Steam does return, it will arrive in a beer world very different from the one Fritz Maytag confronted more than 60 years ago. American craft brewing is now crowded, mature and struggling through one of the most difficult periods in its history.

And in a strange way, that might make Anchor Steam Ale more relevant than ever.