SUMMER OF LAGER

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Feature C A M Campaign for Real Lager The day I decided never to use a Dictaphone when writing a story was the day of my first visit to the Budweiser Budvar brewery in České Budějovice, southern Bohemia. After a fascinating tour, I listened back to the recording to write up my notes. I remembered having a great afternoon, but being quite professional about it. Now, my slurred voice came out of the tinny speaker, saying, “When you’re somewhere like this you realise how PURE and NATURAL beer is. It’s only when it gets into our BODIES and into our SOULS that it becomes… CORRUPTED.” I decided that if that’s the kind of observation I was going to make into a Dictaphone on a brewery tour, I’d be better leaving it at home. I’ve never used one since. This embarrassment does mean I have a very strong sense memory of where I was when I recorded it. Deep in the cellars beneath the brewery, the massive horizontal conditioning tanks were kept at a steady two degrees Celsius while the beer matured inside them for ninety days. The flagstone floors had just been washed and were still wet, so the whole, vast room smelled like a fresh summer rainfall. And the beer I’d just tasted was one of the greatest experiences of my professional life: unpasteurized and unfermented, up to about sixty days of its maturation period, it was a revelation. Lager had never tasted so good before. In fact, I struggled to think of beers of any style that had. I think of this moment every time I meet someone who asks what I do for a living, and when I tell them, they say, “Beer writer? Oh, you won’t like me then. I only drink lager.” This idea that lager is somehow not beer is possibly the most colossal misunderstanding in the drinks world, but it’s not difficult to see how it came about, in the UK at least. WORLD BEATER The harder you look at it, the more difficult it becomes to define what lager actually is – but more on that later. For the vast majority of beer drinkers, lager is synonymous with the golden Pilsner style developed in the Czech town of Plzen in 1842. It was swiftly followed by the arrival of two innovations that would transform the way we drank beer: rail travel and refrigeration. Pilsner lager’s fame spread rapidly across the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and because neither the name nor the brewing process were patented, it was copied by brewers everywhere it went. When the war and political turmoil that would ultimately lead to German unification forced many to flee the region, German brewers took the art of lager brewing around the world, especially to the United States, where soonto-be giant corporations like Miller, Anheuser Bush and Coors were founded by German immigrants. Golden lager rapidly became the world’s dominant beer style. But Britain held off. Happy with pale ale, bitter and mild (which were drunk in pubs owned by brewers who didn’t make lager) and curiously late to adopt refrigeration, we didn’t start drinking lager in great quantities until the 1970s, after many failed attempts by brewers such as Heineken and Carlsberg to crack the market. We finally switched to lager thanks to a number of factors including an increase in foreign travel, several long hot summers and some great (for the time) advertising campaigns. Lager was the clever, sophisticated choice of a younger generation compared to boring old ale. In the designer decade of the 1980s, lager went into bottles, with cool, exotic labels pointing outward for everyone to see. We became more sophisticated and knowledgeable about where our lager came from and what it was supposed to taste like – or so we thought. It was reassuringly expensive because it cost more to make: one old Stella Artois press ad with Doppelbock is a strong, winter lager originally brewed by Bavarian monks. Nicknamed ‘liquid bread,’ they survived on it through Lent. This example lives up to that reputation. It’s a hearty beer, full-bodied, complex and fruity, with a smoky dry finish. / Buy at: BE BOHEMIA REGENT DARK, 4.4% A misconception is that lager has to be pale, but lagered beers had been made with darker malts for centuries by the time Pilsner appeared. This classic example of a ‘Dunkel’ still has lager’s cleanness on the palate, but combines it with richer, maltier, toffee flavours than you’d expect./ Buy at: BE 1 0 AYINGER CELEBRATOR, 6.7% H<strong>OF</strong>BRAUHAUS MAIBOCK, 7.2% Maibock is a strong, malty lager, traditionally brewed for the Bavarian spring. Hofbrauhaus Munchen is one of Munich’s six great breweries, and their version has notes of toffee, caramel and toasted malt, but still has lager’s clean freshness. / Buy at: BE BROOKLYN <strong>LAGER</strong>, 5.2% Brewed to a pre-prohibition recipe. Taste this side by side with any of the leading commercial lager brands for an object lesson in how lager as a style has been deformed by cost cutting. Now common, when fresh, it’s stunning. / Buy at: ABM BE, RA JEVER PILSNER, 4.9% Just a simple, straightforward German Pilsner with no side, no gimmicks or pretensions. This is what proper lager is all about. Very dry, matured for ninety days, with a hop character that’s assertive for a lager, but still classy. / Buy at: BE, BH, RA BUDVAR TANK BEER, 5% Unpasteurised and shipped directly from the brewery, this fresh beer is as close as it’s possible to get to the miraculous experience of drinking Budvar straight from the lagering vessels in the brewery. Still rare in the UK, but look out for notice of tanks coming to a pub near you. THORNBRIDGE TZARA, 4.8% This Koln-style beer (it can only be called Kölsch if its brewed in the town itself ) is brewed with an ale yeast but lagered to produce a wonderful crisp yet rounded flavour, and has drawn compliments even from Koln itself. / Buy at: BE, BH, ABM, RA CAMDEN IHL, 6.2% It would be easy to roll your eyes at the idea of an ‘India Hells Lager’ and the inevitability of sticking loads of hops in everything, but when your as good at brewing Hells as Camden are, the result is a bona fide new style. The refreshment of lager with the big hoppy hit of an IPA. / Buy at: ABM
Feature R L the headline, ‘”My Shout,” he Whispered.’ carefully explained that the beer was brewed according to the rheinheitsgebot (the famous Bavarian brewing purity law mandating only lager, water, malted barley and, later, yeast) used traditionally floor-malted barley and whole female Saaz hops, and enjoyed a long maturation period. RISE AND DECLINE But lager’s popularity eventually became its undoing. In the mid-nineties it became ubiquitous, and synonymous with lad culture. What had once been cool became boorish. As the balance of sales moved to supermarkets, which competed on price, and the cool ads fell victim to tightening regulation and a collective loss of direction among the leading brands, lager became commoditised. Brand loyalty disappeared. And all this time, cutting costs to meet tumbling prices meant such things as long maturation times and whole hops became unaffordable luxuries. Lager became bastardised and debased, allowing ale to eventually make its celebrated comeback in a declining beer market. “No other country makes quite as bad a job of lager as we do,” says Thornbridge’s head brewer, Rob Lovatt. “British lager has no resemblance to any other lager I know of.” Lager is a style that’s close to Lovatt’s heart. He worked previously for Meantime, and studied in Germany with his brewing hero, the American Eric Toft, who has devoted himself to championing traditional German styles and the preservation of the rheinheitsgebot. “There’s so much more within lager than people are aware of,” says Lovatt, who has successfully brewed traditional European styles for Thornbridge including a Kölsch-style beer, a Bamberg-style smoked lager and a Doppelweizenbock. “Brewers in Bavaria will specialise in a particular style such as Pilsner or Helles, and devote themselves to it. They reach an incredibly high standard, and it’s hard for a craft brewer who works across loads of different styles to get anywhere close to their degree of excellence.” “For me it’s all about the subtlety,” says Jonathan Smith, head brewer at longstanding British craft lager brewer Freedom. “When you give it the full maturation period of four weeks you get this delicacy and balance. We taste throughout the maturation period, and the palate softens. Sulphury notes and DMS (Dimethyl Sulfide, a compound that creates a flavour similar to cooked corn) disappear, and the subtle hop character comes through.” Lager takes its very name from this long, cold maturation period (Lagern is the German verb, to store), and both Lovatt and Smith feel that lager is more of a process than a beer style – a process that helps create a surprisingly wide range of beer styles, some of which are brewed with ale yeasts but are lagers in a sense. But while Freedom follows the classic tradition of maturing its beers for four weeks, many commercial lager brands are in and out of the brewery within a 72-hour period. Ironically, not only is lager far more diverse and complex than mainstream brands suggest; technically, those mainstream brands are not actually lagers at all. Happily then, not only do we have an amazing array of longstanding, traditional craft lagers to choose from abroad, an increasingly number of British craft brewers are turning to lager to prove what they are capable of. “I just love nailing the style,” says Rob Lovatt. “Lager is so delicate and refined, any faults will really show. It doesn’t allow you anywhere to hide.” Lager is not just lager. But when it really is lager, as in, a beer that has been lagered, far from being beer’s dumber, insipid cousin, it can be seen as the epitome of the brewer’s art. PILSNER URQUELL, 4.4 The ‘original’ golden lager may not have been the first golden beer ever brewed, but it certainly defined that style that went on to conquer the world. While there have been some compromises on lagering time since it was bought by SABMiller, it remains an undeniably great beer. WINDSOR & ETON REPUBLIKA, 4.8% This Pilsner-stye beer was originally brewed as a collaboration with Tomas Mikulica, Head Brewer and owner of Pivovarsky Dvur near Prague. Fermented for three weeks and lagered for a further six, it’s no coincidence that it wins heaps of awards. / Buy at: ABM, RA SCHLENKERLA MARZEN, 5.1% Before refrigeration, Marzen beers were brewed in Spring, before it was too warm to spoil. It had to be strong to survive the summer months, and is darker and maltier than other lagers. Added complexity from smoked malts, creates a beer that tastes of bacon more than lager./ Buy at: BE, BH, RA BIRRA DEL BORGO MY ANTONIA, 7.5% Began as a collaboration with Dogfish Head brewery, and has since become one of the highlights of the Italian craft beer revolution. There’s an intriguing depth to the aromas of citrus fruit and cut grass, a beautiful collision of new and old world hops, finishing more like a traditional, clamer Pilsner. KEEP ON DISCOVERING... A beer club like no other HARVIESTOUN SCHIEHALLION, 4.8% So good that the rump of CAMRA’s old guard often insist on calling it a pale ale when they stock it at beer festivals. It has a seductive note of tropical fruit, and on cask especially it presents a silky mouthfeel, full, satisfying body and sophisticated balance. / Buy at: BE, BH, RA KIRIN ICHIBAN, 5% Delicate is not the same as bland, and brewing with rice doesn’t necessarily make for poor beer. This crisp, dry, snappy lager is clean and refreshing, and works wonderfully with fried food such as yakitori as well as sushi. Brewed under license in the UK, but still good. / Buy at: BE ST. GEORGEN BRÄU KELLER BIER, 4.9% Keller Bier is an unfiltered, unpasteurised beer that is matured in open or ‘unbunged’ wooden casks. St Georgen sticks to this traditional method, and produce a lager that’s deep amber in colour, bready on the nose, very smooth with a nice, grassy hop character. / Buy at: BE Desperate to try the beers we feature while you read? Understandable. We teamed up with The Curious Beer Club to provide a front row seat to the revolution. Beers selected by OG% writers. Delivered with Original Gravity edition they’re featured in. curiousbeer.club Look out for this symbol... 1 1
Page 1 and 2: GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE GOOD
Page 3 and 4: MÄRZEN Contents Local hops line up
Page 5 and 6: The Mash Hop OF THE MONTH “Enjoyi
Page 7 and 8: The Mash #8 Anatomy of... LAMBIC Wa
Page 9: Feature Helles, Pilsner, Dortmunder
Page 13 and 14: Photo Essay Head Brewer Miles Jenne
Page 15 and 16: Feature The novice CLONING A BEER T
Page 17 and 18: Beer traveller Beer traveller’s g
Page 19: Your round A selection of reader im

SUMMER OF LAGER

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