Did you know that the creation of most popular beer style in the world began with a protest?
At the beginning of the 19th century, European beer was in a sorry state. Standards were all over the place, and the results varied wildly. In the Bohemian town of Pilsen (now in the Czech Republic), the citizens were so exasperated by the quality of their local beer that they gathered in front of City Hall and dumped 36 kegs of beer in the street. (If you read last month’s column, you would know that I understand the sentiment of those protestors.)
This act of civil disobedience led to the recruitment of two men from neighboring Bavaria in Germany, which was a place where many brewers of quality beer resided (and still do today). Architect Martin Stelzer was a brewery designer of some repute, having studied breweries throughout Europe to familiarize himself with the latest brewing technologies. Stelzer took everything into account when he built the brewery in Pilsen—from the sandstone rock it was built upon, to the access to soft-water aquifers.
Then they recruited Josef Groll. Groll had learned much from his father and had been brewing lagers from a young age. He also studied techniques and beers in England to round out his knowledge. What Groll did when he got the job made history: He used very lightly kilned pale malt, generous amounts of the spicy Saaz hop, and the incredibly soft water of the area. He then used bottom-fermenting yeast and lagered it underneath the brewery in the cool sandstone caves. This resulted in a strikingly golden and extremely drinkable beer with a soft, malty body and a clean finish.
Not only had the beer-loving citizens of Pilsen been saved; the beer that was produced there became a big hit across Europe and, eventually, the entire world.
This pilsner beer’s notoriety spread with the development of railways and refrigeration to neighboring Germany, where it was made similarly, but with harder water (with high sulfate levels). This made the German versions less malty and more hop-forward. (Mind you, this is relative to the Czech pilsner, so this distinction is somewhat subtle.) Thus, the pilsner began its eventual world conquest.
With German emigration to the New World, the pilsner came along for the ride—but not all of the ingredients could join them. What these brewing emigres found in the New World was six-row barley, and native hop strains like Cluster. The higher protein levels in the six-row barley variant were supplemented by corn to lighten the body of the beer in order to reproduce the pilsners from the old country. Then, of course, Prohibition happened, all but killing this form of the style, outside of homebrewing.
Tons of hops and/or adjuncts can do a lot to cover up sins in some beers, but there is no such refuge for brewers when it comes to the pilsner.
Why are pilsners so well-regarded by brewers and beer nerds the world over? With a style that relies on subtleties, there’s a corresponding necessity to create as clean of a canvas as possible to allow those subtleties to come to life. What this means is that your skill as a brewer is exposed as completely as it can be with a pilsner. Tons of hops and/or adjuncts can do a lot to cover up sins in some beers, but there is no such refuge for brewers when it comes to the pilsner.
After the folly (to put it very lightly) of Prohibition, a pale lager similar to the pilsner was brewed with ever-increasing consistency between batches—creating beer brands that had more differences in marketing than in flavor. This was exported to the rest of the world, and breweries worldwide began making their own versions of what is now known as international pale lager in the Beer Judge Certification program style guidelines (along with its lighter version, of course). Like many things, these beers have become points of pride for the people from the countries where they’re brewed—Heineken for the Dutch, Molson for Canada, Moretti for Italy, Sapporo for Japan etc. (Good luck being able to tell the differences between them if you tasted them blindly, but you know how people get about these things.)
The recent trend in lagers toward pilsners has been welcome, because it makes it so much easier to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to breweries. So many breweries I mention in this column’s confines deftly brew delicate styles like the pilsner. Many also use the pilsner’s subtleties to act as a springboard for other ingredients, especially hops. Hoppy pilsners are one of my favorite versions of the style, like Burgeon Beer Company’s Clever Kiwi (which is one of my picks for a trapped-on-a-desert-island beer), as well as the Green Cheek Brewing versions that I’ve experienced, like their recent pilsner with the most intense and fruity expression of the Riwaka hop I’ve ever had in a beer. The style allows a beer with a delicate malt backbone to really push an added ingredient to the forefront to shine.
That said, finding a nice, crisp, traditional pilsner remains one of the great pleasures in beer-drinking—and I will continue to seek out the best examples.
