All About Beer Magazine

In an hotel room in the Czech Republic, I roll out of bed, make myself some coffee, and check my e-mail. It is there again: that question.

A lager suggests a beer that has a cold maturation; the term has nothing to do with draft versus bottled or canned beer.

It is a question of style. Every day, I am asked questions about beer: by email about 25 each morning; by other journalists, radio and television hosts, and in casual conversations, another couple of dozen each week. On this morning in Prague, that question, the persistent one, is close to home: “What’s the difference between lager and pilsner?”

The questioner does not tell me where he lives, but the idiom of the preamble sounds American. If you had such a question, who would you ask? The obvious place to direct such a query would be a brewery. That course was taken a few years ago by the columnist William Safire, in the Sunday magazine of The New York Times. Some readers know Safire as a political analyst, writing from the conservative viewpoint. Others are more familiar with his column about the English language, in which he looks at contemporary usage

Safire wanted to know what “lager” meant. He called a major brewery and was told that lager was the German word for the verb “store.” His informant explained that it thus referred to barrels in a cellar. A brew tapped from barrels was therefore described as a lager beer. In short, lager meant “draft.”

That explanation began well, then ran off the rails. Beer is lagered at the brewery, not the pub. The original lagering cellars contained ceiling-high wooden tuns, not barrels. Today, the lagering vessels are most often made of stainless steel, and are even larger, often towering outside the brewery. A lager suggests a beer that has a cold maturation; the term has nothing to do with draft versus bottled or canned beer.

How did the language maven manage to publish such nonsense in a newspaper that takes itself extremely seriously? I suspect he talked to a person in public relations or marketing. Or perhaps he asked a brewer who had always worked in the United States. When I started researching the world’s beers, in the mid 1970s, I soon discovered that many brewers had no real understanding of what went on in other countries. In so far as style terms were used, there was a great deal of confusion about their meaning.