Speaking of New Albion, I now know the UC Davis accession number for the 1977 deposit of their yeast strain. I have been searching for this number as well as the accession number of the strain that became North Coast's production strain, which is known to the home brewing community as Brewtek CL-50 and Wyeast 1450. It's an open secret Mark Ruedrich obtained the strain from UC Davis.
What's interesting about the New Albion strain is that it was originally a Wallerstein Labs strain. I have that accession number as well, but I have not been able to trace the culture's origin any further because whatever data was kept about Wallerstein's culture collection appears to have vanished in the late seventies. Wallerstein was a unit of Baxter Labs in the seventies. Baxter lost Wallerstein in a litigation battle with a Danish company known today as Novo Nordisk (that name should be familiar to diabetics) in the second half of seventies. I contacted Baxter Labs, but they have no historical records of Wallerstein's yeast collection. Wallerstein had a large culture collection, so scoring their catalog would yield a treasure trove of information. Many Wallerstein cultures are held in the USDA ARS NRRL collection. The strain that Anchor uses to brew their "steam" product is a Wallerstein strain that was acquired in the mid-seventies.