potrero view

Mark Carpenter, Anchor Steam’s longstanding brew master, in front of the copper kettles where the beer is produced.

January 2012

San Francisco Breweries Chug Water

Katrina Schwartz

San Francisco has long been home to a good brew.  Two of the City’s biggest breweries are Bayview-based Speakeasy Brewery and Anchor Brewing, in Potrero Hill.  The two breweries may be the largest in San Francisco, but they’re small compared with other craft breweries, like Sierra Nevada, which produces 800,000 barrels of beer a year.   Anchor fashioned 105,000 barrels in 2011; Speakeasy made 13,000 barrels.  Despite their size differences, all three breweries are classified as “craft brewers” since they produce less than six million barrels a year.

Anchor Brewing Company has a long history of making beer differently than other breweries, relying on open fermentation, a process that gives its flagship beer, Anchor Steam, its name.  When Anchor started brewing in 1896 boiling beer would be placed on the roof of its Pacific Street building in shallow troughs to cool, creating clouds of steam.  That pioneering spirit stuck with Anchor as it continued to brew premium beer even when cheap beers, like Miller and Budweiser, started consuming the market in the 1950s.   

After several fires, ownership changes, and new locations, Anchor moved to its current building – formerly a coffee roaster – at Mariposa and De Haro streets in 1979.   Fritz Maytag bought the brewer in 1965, and owned it until last year.  He believed that Anchor beer was superior, and marketed it that way, charging more for his product because he thought it was better than the “yellow beers.”  Maytag’s willingness to make a more expensive beer that had more taste helped launch the craft beer movement.   According to Anchor brew master Mark Carpenter, when craft beers were taking off in the 1970s many of the new breweries would visit Anchor before starting their operations to talk beer and to get ideas on how best to produce it.  

Beer is ninety percent water, and brewing is an incredibly water-intensive process; the tanks must be cleaned between various production stages, and a brewmaster has to constantly be on the lookout to make sure the beer doesn’t get contaminated.  Anchor relies on San Francisco tap water – straight from Hetch-Hetchy – without filtering or adding anything other than Burton salts to give it more hardness, which brings out the beer’s taste.  Carpenter estimated that Anchor uses four to five gallons of water for every gallon of beer produced.  That’s a big improvement over the eight to ten gallons the company consumed when Carpenter began working at Anchor in 1971.   

Water scarcity in California during the 1980s forced Anchor to think about how to conserve. “There’s huge water consumption in cleaning and sterilizing,” Carpenter said. “The easy steps are to really measure the water you are cleaning tanks with. Use final rinse water for the first rinse water on a secondary tank. Things like that to really conserve water,” he explained.

According to Carpenter, if Anchor could conserve more water it would; buying water from the City and paying for wastewater disposal is expensive.  Anchor uses 40,000 gallons of water a day; it’s one of their most costly inputs.  

Anchor’s operational activities are restricted by their limited space and urban location. Sierra Nevada is brewed in Chico, California, and is recognized as a leader in sustainability amongst breweries. Some of the things that Sierra is able to do, like operate their own wastewater treatment facility, are made possible by their rural location and economies of scale.  Sierra found that it could save two to three million gallons of water a year by switching from a water-based lubricant to silicon-based lube for use on their bottle shop conveyor belt.  Anchor tried the silicon lubricant as well. “Our conveyors, because they were crammed into a small space, unfortunately, they have to run faster. And we tried that [silicon lubricant] because we thought that was a good idea, but it just did not work here,” Carpenter said.    

Kushal Hall is the brewmaster at Speakeasy, a brewery launched in 1997. Hall is almost thirty years younger than Carpenter, which matches the upstart nature of his brewing operation.  Speakeasy is known for the hoppy character of its beers, a taste that’s in-fashion with California craft brewers.  Speakeasy uses roughly 5,000 gallons of water a day, of which about one-third becomes beer; the other two-thirds get washed down the drain.

Hall looks for a couple of things in the water he uses to brew. “Beyond just the flavor of the water itself, and I think our water tastes good, pretty neutral, we look at the pH of the water. And ours, at least down here in Bayview, is very high; it’s about nine-point-two, and seven is neutral.“  Water with a high pH will increase the tannins extracted from the grains as they stew, giving the beer a caustic flavor. To counteract the high pH, Speakeasy adds lactic acid to the wort, the stewing grains that will eventually become beer.  

Brandon Borgel, Speakeasy’s director of sales and marketing, said that the brewery tries to make their processes as efficient as possible, but without expensive new brewing and packaging equipment it’s hard to get “whole percentage point” savings.  To increase efficiencies the brewery would have to grow, increasing its profit margin.  Space just opened up in their building, which the company is now using for storage. In the long-term Speakeasy plans to expand its operations.

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