Lager than Life
Pilsener

With the warmer weather on its way our preference turns to the cool, crisp lager that we brewed during winter's cooler weather.

What is lager, why is it different from ale, and why is it so important in the history of brewing?

The answer to the first two questions may, at first, seem obvious, but, considering the importance of lager in the history of brewing, the answers become somewhat more complex, and considerably more interesting.

So, its time to blow away a few spiderwebs and misconceptions and attempt to make sense of why lager and specifically pilsener style has become the most popular style of beer in the world.

Take a look at the information on the sidebars and please make any comments or ask any questions.

Happy Brewing!

Steve.

Historical Perspective

The confusion arises in the mid nineteenth century, when, according to popular belief, a new strain of yeast "saccharomyces carlsbergensis" came from the depths of Bavaria, made its way to Vienna and Bohemia, and the rest, as they say, is history, or is it ?

The Yeast

Lets have a look at this yeast.

Certainly by 1842 brewers and scientists knew that yeast was an important part of beer making (quite an advance from the days of The Reinheitsgebot where yeast is not even mentioned) though they were uncertain as to its function.

The renowned chemist of the time Justus von Liebig believed that fermentation was a chemical reaction triggered by the death and decomposition of yeast, whereas Theodore Schwann considered that fermentation was a living process involving the reproduction of yeast cells. It was not until Pasteur's experiments at the end of the 1870's that Schwann was shown to be correct.

The brewers did know that different breweries' yeast affected beer in different ways. In fact Sedlmayer and Dreher (more on them later) travelled around Europe and Britain around 1830 carrying a specially commissioned metal tube with a hidden valve with which they "stole" samples of fermenting wort, yeast and all.

The most probable answer to all this is that brewing practices in Northern Europe, particularly the British Isles, where the yeast was skimmed from the top of the ferment contrasted with the southern German practice which involved fermenting and lagering at low temperatures(beer was not made in the summer).

Thus we have two strains of yeast, one adapted to live well in warm, open conditions and another adapted to cold conditions, where the yeast would sink to the bottom during the storage period.

Fermentation, after all, occurs throughout the wort, not exclusively at the top or bottom !
The yeast used in Bavaria at the time was probably a mixed strain of S,Cerevisiae and S.Carlsbergensis (now S. Uvaram). S.Uvarum was first isolated as a single cell by Emil Hansen at the Carlsberg Brewery in Denmark in 1883.

The Carlsberg Brewery was founded by Jacob Jacobsen in 1847. Jacobsen had studied under Sedlmayer and it is believed that his yeast came from Sedlmayer's Spaten Brewery in Munich.

The Beer

The beer drunk prior to the 1840's was generally dark and cloudy, as, by some reports, were the drinkers.

Improvements in brewing practice were to change greatly the face of beer, and, of course its drinkers. This was the industrial revolution, and with it came changes, not only to the way we worked but the way we moved, ourselves as well as produce. It was the Age of Steam. The easy movement of raw materials (barley) and finished product (beer) meant that beer need no longer be brewed on the premises.

This was the beginning of the mega-brewery. Gustav Sedlmayer of Munich and Anton Dreher of Vienna were two brewers who travelled extensively throughout Europe and the British Isles, visiting breweries to examine and learn how others made their beer.

Importantly, they discovered that the British malsters used much gentler kilning, thus producing paler malts than the direct heat, higher temperature kilning used by Bavarian malsters. They also bought back a Saccorometer (hydrometer) from Britain.

Much time was spent by Sedlmayer examining the techniques of making Porter, and it was these techniques that he took back to Munich intent on brewing a copper-brown beer of great clarity to be drunk from the now popular glass vessels.

Two dates are given for the introduction of modern "lager". The first is the Oktoberfest of 1841 when Sedlmayer and Dreher intoduced bright, copper coloured beers. For the second we travel to Bohemia, and the city of Plzen.

Plzen had had a proud history of brewing, going back to its foundation as New Plzen in 1295 by King Wencelas II of Bohemia who gave the 260 citizens the rights to brew and sell beer from their houses. As New Plzen was located on the Radbuza River near the confluence of the rivers Mze, Radbuza, Uhlava, and Uslava it was a focal point of trade routes, so the license to brew and sell beer was valuable and guarded.

The Bohemians too, travelled, and gained much from the brewing practices of the Austrians and Germans. In 1838 a number of brewers joined together to form the Mestansky Pivovar (Citizens' Brewery), the brewery was later renamed Plzensky Prazdroj, meaning "original source of Pilsener" in Czech.

Another confluence , this time of ingredients, the pure, soft water from a well beneath the brewery, the particular type of Barley grown in nearby Moravia, the spicy hops from the nearby Zatec region and yeast possibly from the Spaten brewery in Munich created the world's first golden beer Plzner, created by the Bavarian brewer Josef Groll.

Legend has it that the malt master, topped up with the local product fell asleep and let the kilning fires go out, creating the mildly kilned malt so necessary for this type of beer, though it is more likely that the practice was introduced as a result of the British malting techniques.

This new, clear and sparkling beer soon swept the world. Strangely, the brewers of Munich and Vienna, the original lager makers were greatly opposed to the light coloured beer, and it was not for some 30 years that the style Helles (lighter) began to be brewed in any volume in Bavaria.

At the same time refrigeration became available to the brewers, thus allowing them to brew year round.

So, there we have it, pilsener style lager, the universal beer, first brewed in the now Czech Republic, created by a Bavarian using British malting techniques and made famous by the Americans (that's another story).