All About Beer Magazine

You Say Pilsner, I Say Pilsener

Is this avoidance of the word pilsner perhaps a case of Bohemian brewers’ respect for the unique place in brewing history that Pilsner Urquell has? After all, it was the first golden lagered beer in the world. Hardly, given the growing wave of new Czech craft brewers who are looking elsewhere for their beery nirvana―Kocour IPA Samurai anyone? However, if Petruzalek knows, he’s not saying as we move on to his wheat beer (spicy, herbal, banana).

Eager to discover more, I communicated with Josef Tolar, formerly brewmaster at Budweiser Budvar (Czechvar). I asked him how he would define a pilsner, was it the same as svetly lezak? His reply was short and succinct: “The pilsner style is really svetly lezak in the Czech Republic.” Budvar’s bottles in their home country bear the legend “svetly lezak”; make of that what you will.

If, as is often said, porter was the first beer of the industrial age, you could argue that pilsner was the first beer to really go global (IPA was more of a phenomena of the British Empire). Cross from Bohemia into Bavaria and you’ll be following in its tracks when offered a Spaten Pils; further north the bitter tones of Jever Pilsener will tantalise the palate. Get on the global grid and wherever you order a beer, whether on a beach in Mexico or a bar in Brisbane, a variation on the theme of pilsner will be proffered. Chances are that some of the beers might have rice or corn in the mix, hop extracts as well, and as for lagering or storing, what on earth is that? It is said that the pilsner style (or derivations of) make up 90 percent of the beer sold in the world. The majority seem to have little to do with the beer that first emerged from Pilsen.

Take Australia for instance. According to Eric Walters at Grand Ridge Brewery, whose Brewers Pilsner is dry and sweetish, elegant and yet robust, “Big brewers in Australia have called beers pilsner that don’t even resemble them. This is very sad as it often puts people off inappropriately. However, the surge of new microbrewers has revived big hoppy pilsners in their true form.”

Steven Pauwels at Boulevard Brewing Co. echoes Walters sentiment. “Pilsner is used to describe a wide range of lagers with a low color. For a lot of people, pilsner beers are light, very drinkable beers. Something you drink when you want something more than water.”

His take on pilsner is the rounded and full-bodied American amber lager, which is 100 percent barley malt, including a pinch of Munich malt. “I’m not sure why our pilsner is described as an American amber lager,” he says, “The color is higher than domestic lagers but not out of range for a European pilsner.” The discussion then ranges over to American lagers prior to Prohibition. Would they have been closer to what we recognize as the classic pilsner style now?

“That is a hard question,” he says, “They would have been closer to European versions, not so much the current American lager version. The biggest difference to me is the hop characters that these beers would have had. Adjuncts were used because European immigrant brewers had to work with the high protein six-row barley they had available in the U.S. instead of the low protein they were used to. To be able to get the beer close to what they brewed in Europe, they had to use adjuncts to get the starch/protein ratio right. So in the end, the body of the beer would have been similar to a European version. Brewers [or the brewery financial people] later figured out that adjuncts are a lot cheaper and by using more adjuncts the beers got less flavor, easier to drink, more mainstream, etc. The pre-Prohibition pilsners had a hop character that is lost in domestic pilsners today.”

When he talks about domestic pilsners, presumably he has in mind the high-selling, mass-market beers that 20 years ago would have been the only homegrown beers on sale in the U.S. with the word pilsner in the title. Nowadays, Saint Arnold’s Fancy Lawnmower Beer, Pauwels’ own pilsner and Lagunitas Pils (described as Czech-style) are several that spring to mind instead.