I was advised to visit the Anchor Brewing Company when I was in San Francisco last week, as they make a popular beer called steam beer. In fact, the brewery tour is so popular that tickets are sold out months ahead, so that tour will have to wait until my next trip. I couldn't resist looking up why the beer was called 'steam', though.
Anchor trademarked the name Steam Beer in the 1980s and Wikipedia tells me it is a craft-brewed (I think that means traditional) lager. Steam beer is also an old type of beer that was produced in California in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was brewed using lager yeast and without the use of refrigeration, which meant it was a pretty cheap and ordinary beer, but probably went down well with the men who went to California at around the time of the Gold Rush. Today's steam beer isn't the same thing.
The OED contains the entry 'steam beer', and defines it as "a Californian effervescent beer". The Dictionary doesn't have much on the origin of the word steam, however. It's Old English, but the OED says the origin of the word is obscure.
No-one knows for sure where the word 'steam' in the name comes from. One theory is that carbon dioxide built up during the brewing process and needed to be let off. Another is that the beer used to be cooled in vats on the rooftops so steam would be visible to those on the ground below. There was also once a traditional German ale known as Dampfbier, which translates literally as steam beer, and it is possible that the beer was named after this, especially considering that many of the brewers in California at the time were of German descent. The German Beer Institute has a page giving more information in English on Dampfbier.
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