The Czech and German hallmarks-“established granddaddies,” in Licht parlance-will continue to please. “There was a dumbing-down of the style over the years so that they weren’t what they could be, but there’s a huge amount of room in the category that will satisfy the masses and people who love fine beer.” “There’s a really good reason that pilsners are the most popular in the world: It’s a great style of beer,” says Licht. He’s the brewmaster at the popular San Jose, California, Hermitage Brewing Co., where he has been making pilsners for a quarter-century. Peter Licht has been tracking it closely. In fact, in United States craft beer circles, the style is flourishing with all sorts of fresh interpretations.
The best news for pilsner lovers is that the craft community no longer scoffs at it. Hundreds of them produce millions of gallons of pilsner every year, in a range of styles, including German (which leans more hop-forward), Japanese (often drier and super clean), Mexican (richer and fuller) and American (typically a little stronger, spicier, citric and creative). At the source, the samples taste a touch more complex, bitter and soft.īut that hasn’t stopped legion brewers from following Groll’s lead.
Today, the Urquell recipe remains the same (and remains secret), and in a quiet corner at the end of 9 kilometers of fermentation cellars remains the only place Urquell can be tried unfiltered and unpasteurized, straight from the barrel. When Joseph Groll developed Urquell’s brewing system in 1842, it was unprecedented. Instead of a slow, cold and closed process, ales are brewed faster-as quickly as two weeks-at room temperature, with open tanks where the yeasts convert sugars to alcohol at the top. That represents the key difference between lagers and ales. The kettles govern a slow, cold-fermented, closed-tank process with yeasts that feed on the bottom. The facility is spotless, and its huge and gleaming copper kettles almost glow. On the Urquell tour, the precision is visual. Various other flavor elements also cloak flaws in ales in ways lagers cannot.
It helped that startup craft operations could make nonlagers a lot more quickly and affordably-pilsners, a primary type of lager, take as many as four more weeks to make than ales-and with a lot less precision (the pilsner process is more technical in order to achieve the desired crispness and clarity). The last thing the producers wanted to be was remotely comparable to Budweiser, which they see as essentially a lowbrow American take on Urquell, so they swung in the other direction toward big, bold, hoppy and cleverly flavored red ales, pale ales, amber ales, brown ales, stouts, IPAs, DIPAs and imperial IPAs. According to the experts who run tours at the style’s purported birthplace, Pilsner Urquell, outside of Prague in the Czech Republic, 80% of the world’s beer production is pilsner.įor a long time, the style’s ubiquity and the dominance of macro pilsner brewers like Miller and Corona made pilsner the bane of beer nerds and the craft producers who woo them. For millions of drinkers around the world, the reliable, pale, light, yellow, fizzy, easy-drinking pilsner is simply synonymous with beer.