And suddenly a great mystery is solved! I had Anchor Steam in 2013 thereabouts and liked it quite a lot. When it became available locally I was happy to get it but it didn't quite taste as I remembered it. As time went on I quit buying it because it just wasn't as good as I remembered it to be.
Might not have had anything changed in the recipe itself. Beer (and cooking) scale weirdly and the flavors you associate with one size of batch change completely when you scale up to larger batches. For beer, it maybe isn't even that surprising given how much living yeast contributes to flavor and yeast is highly susceptible to environmental conditions including size of fermenting container or subtle things like location of fermenting container (even sometimes within the same building).
And suddenly a great mystery is solved! I had Anchor Steam in 2013 thereabouts and liked it quite a lot. When it became available locally I was happy to get it but it didn't quite taste as I remembered it. As time went on I quit buying it because it just wasn't as good as I remembered it to be.
I wonder what they changed in the recipe?