San Francisco: Designated Brewery

Our last stop covered the step between fermenting and bottling, a basement room filled with conditioning tanks. In these, lagers were krausened, ales bunged (brewing has a deliciously esoteric vocabulary) and beer generally allowed to age a bit before being funneled into bottles by the raucous machinery around the corner.

The beer geeks among us fired off a round of exceedingly knowledgeable questions that I barely understood, and then we returned upstairs for the tasting.

The menu featured Anchor Steam and six others: Summer Beer, a refreshing wheat brew; Small Beer, a bitter oddity made with barleywine leftovers; Liberty Ale, a hop-intense pale ale; the oil-black Porter, with notes of chocolate and coffee underneath; Special Ale, the different-each-year Christmas brew, a spiced pumpkin pie of a beer; and the deceptively pleasant Barleywine.

Even in small samples, it all added up. Eventually, somebody had to ask our hosts: Do you get some kind of employee discount?

Yes, the answer went, and a free case of beer a week -- that's our employee allowance.

I took another sip, looked out the window for a moment, and sighed inwardly.

-- Rob Pegoraro

Anchor Brewing Co. is at 1705 Mariposa St. (at DeHaro Street) in San Francisco. Tours are offered weekdays at 1 p.m. Reservations are required; Anchor's Web site (http://www.anchorbrewing.com) recommends calling a month in advance (415-863-8350). The Muni 10, 19 and 22 buses all run from dowtown to the brewery.