I toured Anchor Brewing Company today with the Bay Area Brew Crew. The free tour is entertaining and informative and well worth the price of admission. It's a fairly standard tour with time spent talking about the history of the brewery and the brewing process and then a walk through the brewery viewing their brewing room, open fermentation chambers, yeast lab, cold conditioning room, bottling and kegging lines, and ending up back at the tap room for a tasting. They had Anchor Summer Beer, Anchor Steam, Liberty Ale, Anchor Porter, and Old Foghorn on tap today.

Some interesting things I learned on the tour:

• Anchor brews five 110-barrel batches a day with only one mash tun, one lauter tun, and one brew kettle.
  
• Primary fermentation lasts only three days.
  
• All of the Anchor beers are cold-conditioned for three weeks at 34°F and Old Foghorn is cold conditioned at 34°F for six months.
  
• Anchor beer is krausened and naturally carbonated in the cold-conditioning tanks using standard ale yeast (lager yeast for Anchor Steam).
  
• All Anchor beer is filtered and flash-pasteurized.
  
• Anchor dries their yeast for storage between uses.
  
• Professional brewers still have boilovers.
  
• When the Anchor brewers run the bar in the taproom, the tasting samples flow freely.
  

This is an excellent tour and is highly recommended. Advance reservations are required and can be made by calling the brewery at 415-863-8350.