Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Food & Drink

Make Lagers Great Again: Why American Craft Brewers are Taking the Style Back

Pat Evans
By

Lagers are having a moment.

It’s a beautiful thing, really. Talk to most brewers and they’ll gush about the complexity of a truly great, well-brewed lager. This is in stark contrast to what most people think about the light lagers that are ubiquitous in bars around the United States. However, craft beer lovers are prone to palate fatigue from all the hops and barrel-aging — it just makes sense to drink a clean, crisp, simple beer every once in a while. Take a look at most brewers’ fridges and you’ll notice some form of a cheap macro lager like PBR, Hamm’s, or Old Style on the shelves.

The word lager alludes to the beer’s origins. Coming from the German word lagern, “to store,” it was born of brewers’ experimentations with storing beer in the cold cellars and using bottom-fermenting yeast, as opposed to top-fermenting yeasts featured in ales.

Stock-Beer-Pouring

There are plenty of reasons the lager style, which includes pilsners and Helles, has taken a good amount of time to become trendy. For starters, light lagers are generally considered the antagonist of the craft beer story. The reason there are more than 6,000 breweries in the U.S. now is a sort of backlash against macro adjunct lagers made by Miller, Budweiser, and Coors. Light lagers are also incredibly hard to brew; they don’t hide flaws, so many of the options you find in taprooms leave a lot to be desired.

Recommended Videos

It’s OK to despise the companies’ business practices, but Bud/Miller/Coors products are incredibly well-made and easily accessible to pretty much every drinker. On top of that, some OG craft breweries have been making stellar lagers for a long time, like Victory Brewing’s Prima Pils, Lagunitas Pils, Brooklyn Brewery’s Brooklyn Lager, and, of course, Sam Adams Boston Lager.

Firestone Lager

Earlier this year, The Manual took a closer look at two major breweries entering the light lager space: Founders Brewing and Firestone Walker Brewing. With Solid Gold and Firestone Lager, respectively, these craft producers are taking big swings at a huge market segment.

The rest of the industry is deviating a bit from the once-normal array of beer in taprooms — blonde ale, amber ale, pale ale, IPA, stout — and entering the world of full-flavored light lagers. Many are made in true European fashion with all malt, but others follow the pre-Prohibition American tradition with adjuncts like corn and rice (which should not be confused with the well-known, watered-down macro lager style).

Some of these breweries are turning to lagers because people love to drink them and it’s a good bet that they’re going to sell. Others have excess capacity with a growing number of brewers and a slower consumer growth rate. And other just plain love the style and the challenges that come with brewing it.

Let’s meet some of the American craft producers who are killing the lager game.

Austin Beer Garden Brewing

ABGB Industry Pils
ABGB

The Texas brewery has been a regular winner at the Great American Beer Festival for its pilsners, first winning gold in 2015 for its American-style, or International-style, pilsner. In the two ensuing years, ABGB has won five medals for its light lager styles.

Pfriem Family Brewers

pfriem single hop pils
Pfriem

This Oregon brewer makes a lot of beer super well, but its pilsner is a standout. Pfriem also makes a great Vienna lager, Helles lager, hoppy lager, Mexican lager, Kölsch-style beer, Japanese lager, and Oregon lager. That’s quite a lager of bottom-fermenting beer!

No? Alright, we admit that one was a stretch too.

Suarez Family Brewery

palatine pils
Suarez Family Brewery

Nestled in the Hudson Valley, this brewery has been the belle of the industry the past year, with its pilsner, Palatine Pils, leading the way. While all the beers are worth gushing over, it’s the pils that’s garnering a lot of attention and what the brewery founders, Dan and Taylor Suarez, want to be “classic.”

Firestone Walker

firestone pivo pils
Firestone Walker

Firestone is certainly one of the best breweries in the nation, even as its grown to be one of the largest. Its full lineup of specialty beers are worth picking up, but it’s the Pivo Pils that is regularly regarded as one of the best examples of American pilsners and for good reason: it’s simply amazing. Firestone even hosts a Pils and Love Festival.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Pat Evans
Pat Evans
Beverage Writer
Pat Evans is a writer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, focusing on food and beer, spirits, business, and sports. His full…
Hallo Freunde: Trumer Pils Brings Austrian Lager to the U.S.
trumer pils california craft beer can

Most American beer drinkers might look at a Trumer Pils bottle and immediately think "import," but they’d be wrong. Well, sort of.
Sure, Trumer is an Austrian brewery with more than 400 years of history behind it, but since 2004, a sister brewery in California has brewed the pilsner in the U.S.
“There is a little confusion among people who look at our beer and see it as an imported beer,” said Lars Larson, Trumer brewmaster. “We want to let people know that it’s fresh, brewed in the U.S., but tastes the same as over there and we’re happy to work with our sister brewery who generously shared the brewing knowledge and recipe with us.”
As the craft beer movement has matured, drinkers have learned that it's best to drink IPAs as fresh as possible, but often beers like pilsners are left behind. Larson believes it might even be more important to drink pilsners fresh — and that's a big reason why it’s been so beneficial for Trumer Pils to be brewed stateside. For many seasoned beer drinkers, there's nothing quite like the crisp refreshment of a well-brewed, clean pilsner.

“The flavor of beer simply changes when a beer is fresh,” he says. “It’s a pretty dynamic style. Yet when a beer is imported, very often it's a long supply chain and the flavors change.”
To combat the negative aging, brewers who ship beer to the U.S. pasteurize their pilsners, which Larson says essentially pre-stales the beer and dumbs down the flavor by lopping off the top and bottom notes.
Instead, they let the original Trumer Pils ingredients shine. The brewery uses the same ingredients as the European brewery, shipping in malt and hops from Austria and Germany, but only using California water.
Another point of pride for Larson is the extreme difficulty of brewing a clean, delicious lager. There aren’t many hops or dark malts to hide defects behind, so to achieve the clean, crisp drinkability of a perfect pilsner is often more difficult than a tasty IPA or stout.
“To have a good one, there needs to be a balance of the malt profile and aroma and bitters of hops,” Larson said. “Not getting those two things to balance, it’s not quite as drinkable.”

Read more
Boulevard Brewing Brings Tech N9ne’s Caribou Lou to Life as a Craft Beer
boulevard brewing tech n9ne caribou lou bou beer

When two employees at Boulevard Brewing Company thought about brewing a beer for American rapper Tech N9ne, they took matters into their own hands and reached out.  To their surprise, the rapper’s label company, Strange Music, got back to them soon after and they roped in hip hop fan and Boulevard digital marketing manager Pat Mullin to help get the full brewery on board.
“As soon as I heard about it, I made it my goal to see it through and make it happen,” Mullin said. “It was a long process.”

Before too terribly long, however, a meeting of the minds was held and Tech N9ne was visiting the Boulevard brewery and it was time to determine what beer to make.
“We all knew we wanted to make a homage to Caribou Lou, his signature drink, what better than to play off of it,” Mullin said.

Read more
Crack a Cold One and Get Used to It, Because the IPL is Your New Favorite Beer Style
Gate City Brewery's Citras Maximus

India Pale Ales, or IPAs for short, have been the predominant trend in craft beer over the last decade. This beer style promotes extreme hop flavors over everything else, and has been championed by the largest of the craft breweries, with Stone and Dogfish Head leading the way. With that major push, there has been significant trickle down, wherein every brewery no matter how big or small has a signature IPA style.
The IPA has changed along with the times, moving from simply aggressively hopped brews to creative trends like Milkshake IPAs, Session IPAs, and even Black IPAs. Now, though, there is a new spin-off that deserves your attention. It’s time to meet the India Pale Lager.
Ales and lagers are similar beasts that use the same four primary ingredients: water, malt, hops, and yeast. The primary difference is the fermentation method. Ales and lagers use different yeast types, yielding top-fermenting beers (the ales) and bottom-fermenting beers (the lagers). While there can be all types of flavors created within the ale and lager families, many drinkers associate lagers with lighter bodied beers featuring clean, crisp profiles compared to their ale brethren.
So what happens when you blend the big hops of the IPA style with lager yeast and brewing methods? Beautiful, beautiful things. The resulting “India Pale Lager” is ultimately refreshing, bright, and effervescent, and a welcome counterpoint to the hazy IPAs currently trending around the country.
For a specifically solid example of the IPL, search out Gate City Brewing Co’s Citras Maximus. Brewed in Roswell, Georgia, this double dry-hopped beer is packaged in vibrant green, yellow, and orange cans featuring art emblazoned with the brewery’s logo backed by sliced citrus and hop cones. It pours a rich, deep golden color and has a pleasant aroma of pine, grapefruit, and biscuit. The flavors are thirst-quenching, with the Citra hops front and center. Citra provides notes of tropical fruit and citrus, evoking pineapple and orange to complement the delicious base lager. At 5.5% alcohol by volume, it’s a perfect summertime treat. Citras Maximus is easy and enjoyable to drink and a worthy alternative to your current favorite IPA.

Read more