California Not-So-Common / Extra IPA Update

Incredibly accurate information from an ever-reliable source regarding California Common/"Steam" Beer below, but Fisher and I decided to get the ingredients to brew this on the way to the store. Also took another important step in complete brewing freedom: did a partial mash/partial extract brew.

This basically involves extracting the sugars from malted barley as an eventual food/nutrient for yeast to gobble up and turn into CO2 and ethyl alcohol (and usually some other by-products that give most different beer varieties their flavor profile nuances)

Extract-based brewing basically skips this step, as someone else does it, then dehydrates the product (wort) and sells it to saps like me.

Really excited for this brew, will likely be ready 5-6 weeks out.

The Extra IPA is going into the bottles this week, and will hopefully be ready in about 2 weeks, more-likely 3. Had a medium original gravity, and when racking to the secondary fermenter, used plug cascade hops, and 2 oz of whole Mt. Hood hops for additional aromas. Had a taste today (uncarbonated), but it was really good. Hopefully my best yet. Not as happy with the stout, but more on that later...

On Steam Beer (California Common):

Steam beer may be defined as a highly effervescent beer made by brewing lager yeasts at ale fermentation temperatures. It has two distinct but related meanings:
Historic steam beer produced in California from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s;
Modern California common beer, the official name for the beer family which includes Anchor Steam beer.
Historic steam beer, associated with San Francisco and the U.S. West Coast, was brewed with lager yeast without the use of refrigeration. It was an improvised process, originating out of necessity, perhaps as early as the Gold Rush. It was considered a cheap and low-quality beer, as shown by references to it in literature of the 1890s and 1900s.
Modern steam beer, properly known in the brewing community as California common beer, was originated by Anchor Brewing Company, which trademarked the name Anchor Steam Beer in 1981. Although the modern company has corporate continuity with a small brewery which was still making traditional steam beer in the 1950s, Anchor Steam beer is a craft-brewed lager. The company does not claim any close similarity between it and turn-of-the-century steam beer.
Explanations of the word "steam" are all speculative. The carbon dioxide pressure produced by the process was very high, and one possibility is that it was necessary to let off "steam" before attempting to dispense the beer. According to Anchor Brewing, the name "steam" came from the fact that the brewery had no way to effectively chill the boiling wort using traditional means. So they pumped the hot wort up to large, shallow, open-top bins on the roof of the brewery so that it would be rapidly chilled by the cool air blowing in off the Pacific Ocean. Thus while brewing, the brewery had a distinct cloud of steam around the roof let off by the wort as it cooled, hence the name. It is also possible that the name derives from "Dampfbier" (literally "steam beer"), a traditional German ale that was also fermented at unusually high temperatures and that may have been known to nineteenth-century American brewers, many of whom were of German descent.