Lew Bryson: "It was pretty much an article of faith that the very Beer Gods were German, with maybe a small antechamber in the pantheon for the Czechs."

The first week of March was difficult.

Seven years on the Brewers of Indiana Guild was a hard habit to break, and while my final BIG conference and annual meeting was wonderful, time before and after it spent in mourning wasn't conducive to writing about beer. Slowly, the recovery has taken hold. Day by day, you know.

I kept this article back, thinking there might be something to say, but Lew doesn't need my supplementary testimony.

I'll add only that these past two or three years has been about rediscovering my inner lager. As in so many other areas of personal interest, freeing my brain from the constant stress of beer wars-laden trench warfare is having an amazingly salutary effect.

We're visiting Tallinn, Estonia in April, with a side excursion to Finland. I've done the research and know which bar and breweries are "craft." They won't be the only ones I sample.

THE HOTTEST NEW THING: LAGERS!, by Lew Bryson (All About Beer Magazine)

 ... Why crown lager with this success in craft beer “culture,” on the craft beer “scene,” in the craft beer “niche”? Could it be lager’s smooth body, purity of flavor, or the way cold-aged lager tastes great at that natural maturation temperature? Maybe it’s the way lager is just good to drink and doesn’t crush your tastebuds with bitterness, or draw up your entire oral cavity with astringent burnt malt character, or pucker you up like a love-struck chimp with acidity and loosen your bowels with bacteria? (Don’t worry, I signed the loyalty pledge: “I, Lew Bryson, love IPAs, imperial stouts, sours and wild ales. They are the bestest.”) Could it be because we just needed another beer to crown as “the next IPA”?

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The PC: "Gordon Biersch: Still Leading with Lager."

The PC: "Gordon Biersch: Still Leading with Lager."

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.


Coming next to the Euro '85 travelogue is the story of my visit to the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen, and since Carlsberg plays a central role in the historical development of lager, a brief sidestep seems merited.

Following is my Food & Dining Magazine column from the Fall 2015 issue (Vol. 49; August/September/October). You also can read the column at issuu, as formatted for the magazine.

Nicholas Landers brews all the Gordon Biersch beers right here in Louisville, and while he is understandably excited to have the leeway to brew a selection of American and Belgian ales, my focus is the lager side of the Biersch portfolio.

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Gordon Biersch: Still Leading with Lager

Brewing comes full circle with locally-crafted beer styles in the Central European tradition

Märzen, known as Oktoberfest in its autumnal guise, is an Old World style of lager beer originating in the German state of Bavaria.

Talk is cheap, so let’s have a sip – strictly for research purposes.

This Märzen is orange-tinged amber, with a rich, malty aroma. There is a toasted, malty sweetness in the mouth, yielding to impeccable balance and dryness in the finish, albeit without discernable hoppiness. The body is medium, and the flavor is clean and crisp, as lager should be, with absolutely none of the fruitiness characteristic to ale.

The elegant Märzen in my glass disappears all too quickly, even as it conjures totemic images of sausages, dirndls, onion-domed churches and festive maypoles.

However, while my brain screams “Munich”, the growler before me calmly reads “Louisville”, as referring to our local 4th Street branch of the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant network.

Here in River City, Märzen is an everyday Gordon Biersch draft, brewed on site by brewer Nicholas Landers, who is a transplanted Cincinnatian who sharpened his skills at Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee after attending Chicago’s Siebel Institute.

Most American brewpubs of a similar capacity (circa 700 barrels per annum) do not specialize in lager styles, which take longer to brew than ale. However, Gordon Biersch, named for founders Dan Gordon and Dean Biersch, has always been something different.

Befitting Dan Gordon’s brewing studies at the prestigious Technical University of Munich, a core of lager styles from the German, Czech and Central European pantheon has comprised Gordon Biersch’s niche since its 1988 inception in Palo Alto, California.

These include Märzen, Export, Pilsner, Dunkel and Maibock, all brewed according the Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law), and all familiar to anyone who has traveled in Bavaria or dined stateside at a good German restaurant like Louisville’s Gasthaus.

In recent times, brewers like Landers at Gordon Biersch’s 34 company-owned locations have considerably more freedom than before to create seasonal and one-off ale styles, providing guests with counterpoint to the lagers and “guest” beers already on tap.

“We’re holding to tradition with our lagers, but being able to do India Pale Ales now is awesome,’’ Landers says, noting that in addition to his house lagers and certain contrarian German ales (Hefeweizen and Kölsch), he’s also been crafting limited editions of Porter, Stout and even a few Belgian styles.

However, here we must pause, because an important question needs to be addressed.

What is the difference between ale and lager?

It’s fundamental, and the legendary Fred Eckhardt, dean of American beer writers, offers a deceptively simple answer.

Ale and lager are both beers; that is, they are fermented from grain. The major difference between these two beer families stems from the temperature at which fermentation is carried out. And the importance of these differences in temperature is that chemical reactions happen more slowly at lower temperatures.

From the very beginning, mankind has harnessed the natural process of fermentation to produce alcoholic beverages, using grains, grapes, fruits, vegetables and honey. Eons of experience abundantly illustrate that when humans mix water, sugar and yeast in stray bowels or pottery, it takes little time before fermentation gets underway.

However, the story of ale and lager is one of contrasting brewing methodologies, and it is a specifically Eurocentric tale, evolving comparatively recently with the march of science.

Beginning in medieval times, brewers in Central Europe learned through trial and error that cooler fermentation temperatures and lengthier aging (the word “lager” in German means “to store”) made for a crisper, cleaner and mellower end product. But why?

They couldn’t possibly know until the invention of the microscope, which provided the means to view the activity of yeast, the living micro-organism that diligently converts sugars into alcohol. Once yeast’s role was unmasked, science started deciphering fermentation’s perennial mysteries, and by the 1830s lager yeast began coming into common use.

Lager brewing’s cooler fermentation temperatures slow chemical reactions, and by doing so, substantially reduce flavor and aroma by-products.

Conversely, at warmer fermentation temperatures, these flavors and aroma by-products are purposefully enhanced, and remain cherished components of ale’s “fruity” charm.

Like the Beatles much later, lager brewing blossomed at just the right time. By the late 19th century, lager was an international sensation, perfectly suited to burgeoning consumer cultures, industrial economies of scale and a zeal for scientific advancement. Lager consciousness swept the world, and ale was pushed into localized (and stubborn) corners like Great Britain and Belgium.

Inevitably, lager became too perfect. Crisp, clean and mellow yielded to cynical mass-market flavorlessness, which inspired the American craft beer backlash of the present era.

In 1988, Dan Gordon saw the issue from a different angle.

To the Bavarian-trained Gordon, lager wasn’t something to be overthrown and excluded. Rather, lager needed reclaiming and rehabilitation. He would emphasize the flavorful origins of classic lager styles, and localize their production as his new company grew.

Consequently, unlike some other national brewery concepts, all Gordon Biersch house beers right here in Louisville, where chain or not, the company helped launch the Kentucky Guild of Brewers, working alongside the state’s independent small brewers.

“At first, some of them probably wondered who we were,” says Landers, “but we’re all brewers, and we all helped get KGB started.”

Jason Smith is Gordon Biersch’s general manager, and when asked to specify the single most important aspect of his work, he does not hesitate.

“Commitment,” Smith replies, and then elaborates.

“Commitment to the Reinheitsgebot in the brewery, and to locally sourcing food in the kitchen. We’re committed to this community, and to helping local charities. Yes, it may be a company checkbook, but we’re local guys.”

Chain skeptics, of whom the author is one, might yet scoff; after all, 4th Street Live lies at Gordon Biersch’s front door. However, the prevailing evidence illustrates that ample localism is being served alongside the beer and food, owing to the daily commitment of the people working for Gordon Biersch.

Me?

I’m just sitting here finishing this growler of Märzen, watching the craft beer pendulum swing back and forth.

Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant
Open seven days a week at 11:00 a.m.
400 S. 4th Street
Louisville, KY 40202
502-589-8935

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Thirteenth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

It should be clear at this juncture that a fascination with history brought me to Europe in 1985. It might have been about bicycling, but I wasn’t quite there yet. It certainly wasn’t about hooking up (too shy) or drunken mayhem (too cautious).

Rather, it was the familiar syllabus of Western Civilization & Culture 101. Copious quantities of classicism were absorbed through daily doses of architecture, art and museum visits. I saw pottery, paintings and panes of stained glass, and remained the wide-eyed student throughout.

In most places, it was very easy to be a tourist and to submit to the efficiently maintained infrastructure of long ago, which obviously was calculated to benefit local economies in the here and now, because when one emerged from the tidily categorized past – usually stooping, given that few medieval buildings were constructed with 6-foot, 4-inch Americans in mind – a panorama of contemporary Europe always immediately reappeared.

Modernity had much to recommend, too, and history kept being placed into context by the same questions.

How had they gotten from there to here?

Why was America so different?

What was there to be learned?

Europe was old, but as I learned quickly, it was relentlessly topical, too. In Istanbul, soldiers with machine guns were watching street corners near the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, and at the youth hostel in Basel, I chanced upon an environmental activist concerned about pollution in the Rhine. I’d been in Greece for a spirited election, and spent time with travelers my age who wanted to discuss Palestinian liberation, nuclear free zones, refugee rights and organic farming.

English-speaking Europeans invariably circled around to current events in the political sphere. After all, the continent was divided into armed camps, and a sizeable chunk of it remained Communist. In 1985, Europe was four decades removed from its uneasy post-WWII settlement, but the various “-isms” still mattered.

As an American, I was expected to answer criticisms of President Ronald Reagan, which I tended to do by agreeing with the arguments of my interlocutors in their entirety.

As the days passed, I could feel the balance of my consciousness shifting. There was a realization that “now” always is no more than a snapshot, and history a continuum, not a postcard. Mozart morphed into Madonna, whose music could be heard daily by the same Viennese who had been alive when Freud still kept office hours near the Ring.

I started thinking less about how things used to be, and more about how they were now, and yet there was a prominent exception: Beer.

In 1985, I did not want European beer to be “modern” and barely drinkable, the way it was back home. It needed to be old-fashioned, and Vienna offered just a hint of the throwback Central European beer culture I was about to enter following a rail journey to Salzburg.

My beer drinking still would be limited by available funds. However, I was ready to indulge and make up for lost time.

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Coming of age in the Ohio Valley in the 1960’s and ‘70’s meant witnessing on a depressing, first-hand basis the very nadir of beer culture in America.

In Colonial times, American beer making and drinking customs reflected English origins. Later, when Germans began coming to the United States in large numbers, their traditions traveled with them and remained intact.

All big American cities and most of the smaller ones had breweries that took procedural, technical and atmospheric cues from the time-tested Central European playbook. It was a lovely thing, while it lasted.

Xenophobic sentiments in World War I did not help matters, and the idiocy of Prohibition sealed the deal, obliterating American beer culture for decades afterward.

Following WWII, the imperial-era American preference for bland, manufactured uniformity forcibly wrenched beer from its fresh, local foundation, rendering it into watery oblivion, and subjecting beer to the multitudinous regulatory irrationalities of Bible Belt superstition.

Nonetheless, during my youth, there remained a dusty patina of vaguely recognizable German character to local legacies and customs of beer and beer drinking.

After all, Oertel’s, Fehr’s and Wiedemann were not names traceable to Guatemala or Japan. Family trees connected them to Germany in a larger sense, and often specifically to Bavaria, the southern region of Germany, where lager brewing and its social vocabulary were first developed.

In 1985, these faint murmurs were as good as it got in the Louisville metropolitan area. I knew almost nothing of the English ale-making tradition, which was being surreptitiously reinvented by a nascent “micro” movement out West.

Belgium was a place for waffles, not Trappists, the latter as yet unknown outside their monasteries of origin.

Fortunately, I worked in a package store, stocked a few imports, and read the early words of the late Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson. These and other educational nuances eventually were supplemented by frequent samplings, accumulating steadily over the years until beer became my life’s work.

However, in 1985, all this was yet to come. Rather, there was the train from Vienna to Salzburg, in Austria’s mountainous Alpine region, located just over the frontier from Munich, otherwise known as Beer Mecca.

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Salzburg has fully earned its reputation as a clean, efficient and scenic center of art and culture, especially music. Mozart was born there, and the composer’s image is synonymous with marzipan sold all over town. The “Sound of Music” was filmed in the region. There’s a thousand-year-old castle overlooking the fairy tale facades of the Old Town, and ancient salt mines nearby (“salz” is salt in German).

I toured the castle and was oblivious to most of the rest, having set my sights on the history of just one attraction, the Augustiner Bräustübel, a venerable tavern and beer garden where beer now called Müllner Bräu has been brewed and served for four centuries – or, well before the United States was founded.

On my first day in town, safely ensconced in a friendly Salzburg youth hotel, I embarked by foot upon the search for my chosen beer garden. My course was plotted on an English-language map, because I was still learning to make sense of street signs and other navigational clues in German, even if it was as comprehensible as any language I’d yet experienced.

Eventually the Augustiner acreage came into view. The religious complex inched up onto gently sloping terrain at the foot of a ridge, with the brewery and beer garden … where, exactly?

In a state of excitement and youthful muddle, my first choice of entry doors was utterly mistaken. I stepped across a threshold, and through a partly ajar door, a choir could be seen and heard practicing. Finally one of them saw me, and gestured: Out, to the left.

The adjacent entrance took me inside, down a wide flight of stairs to a long corridor that contained various kiosks vending foodstuffs. Indoor drinking rooms were located off to the side, sumptuously appointed in wood, with tile stoves and stained glass windows.

But it was out in the leafy beer garden that I fell in love with a way of life, one experienced for the very first time. At midday, hundreds of beer lovers were seated at tables, shaded by towering chestnut trees, surrounded by stone walls and stucco, virtually all of them drinking malty Marzen-style lager brewed and aged only yards away.

It was entirely self-service, or so I remember. You went back inside for sausages, salads and loaves of crusty bread, and then joined the line for beer. A cashier took Austrian schillings, as plastic was not negotiable and Euros didn’t exist, and handed back a receipt.

Upon choosing a liter (33.8 ounces) ceramic mug from the freshly washed public stack, you ritualistically rinsed it in a fountain of cold water, handed it and the receipt over to aproned men who were pouring the deep golden beer from a tap embedded in a wooden barrel, and prepared for nirvana.

Teens drank alongside elderly men. There were playing cards, songs for singing, chicken bones and carts filled with emptied mugs. Strangers shared tables and bought rounds. Worldwide languages were spoken. I ate, drank, used the WC, drank some more, and returned the following two nights to do it again, each time walking 25 minutes back to my lodging, feeling perfectly safe and wishing we could do the same back home.

In the decades since, I’ve visited dozens of similar beer gardens in Central Europe. Some proved superior to the Augustiner, but it’s the first time you always remember, isn’t it?

Next was Munich, where there were dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of places just like Salzburg’s Augustiner.

Would I survive?

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Previously:

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

I agree: "Local lagers looming."

During the course of research for an upcoming Food & Dining Magazine column submission, in which I'll survey the Gordon Biersch branch in Louisville, this link turned up.

I'd bookmarked the article long ago, and as is my custom, forgotten all about it.

Watson points to three factors to support his contention that we're about to enter a new era of local lagers: Market Evidence, Capacity Equation and Beer Lover Preferences.

I think he's absolutely right, particularly in the second of these. Eventually, there'll be much excess capacity, and when there is ...

Click through for the details.

LOCAL LAGERS LOOMING, by Bart Watson (Brewers Association)

Although a big part of craft beer’s strength lies in its diversity of styles, there are certainly trends in beer lover preferences that make particular styles or groups of styles rise to the top. In recent years it’s been IPAs. IPAs are still growing 40-50% in scan data on a bigger base than ever.

But what might be the next big thing? Looking out at the beer landscape, I think we’re about to enter a new era of the local lager. Why?

Three rare lagers from the Kout na Sumavě brewery are coming to the Public House.

Kout na Sumavě brewery's Pale 10º, Pale 12º and Dark 18º lagers will be tapped and ready at opening on Monday, December 17.

As Westvleteren 12 mania grips the populace, my attention has been diverted toward the noble brewing heritage of Central Europe, and the manner by which a newer generation of brewers are reclaiming it. Perhaps my choice of reading lately, Joseph Roth's "The Radetzky March," has something to do with it.

Appropriately, three rare kegs have been delivered to NABC's Pizzeria & Public House. They are imported from Czech Republic by Shelton Brothers, via Starlight Distribution, and are from the Kout na Sumavě brewery: Pale 10º, Pale 12º and Dark 18º lagers.

Without the ability to produce steaming platters of roasted pork and knedlicky (dumplings), we're trying to devise a plan for dispensing these much anticipated beers. Here's the official press release from Shelton Brothers; stay tuned for our plan of action. Don't worry; we'll be quick about it.

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Kout na Sumavě

The once-proud Czech beer culture has taken some massive hits since the fall of communism. The largest national breweries have been swallowed up by mega-conglomerates and countless regional pivovars have been shut down, never to return. The traditional and distinctive Czech pivo -unpasteurized, earthy, soft, and complex- has been replaced with fizzy and bland "international lager"-beer devoid of local character meant to appeal to the mass market.

Thankfully there has been a revolt. Czech beer enthusiasts have let it be known they they want their national drink back. In a trend mirrored around the globe, new microbreweries and brewpubs are springing up all over the country. The entrepreneurial enthusiasts starting up these companies are having little trouble locating eager master-brewers who'd lost their jobs in the corporate purge -brewers who know how real Czech beer should be made.

Kout na Sumavé, a small town in the Bohemian Forest near the German border, was a prosperous center for beer production until it's local pivovar was shut down by Pilsner Urquell in 1969. Years later, Jan Skala, who as a young man had worked in the brewery, hatched a plan to revive beer-making in the town. Skala bought the brewery building in 2003, took two years to clean and renovate it, and in 2006 brought in Bohuslav Hlavsa, a master-brewer in the former Pivovar Domazlice (which had also been also shut down by Pilsner Urquell), to create a new line of traditional Czech beers. It was a huge investment, and the company struggled to survive. The undeniable integrity and quality of it's products has gradually earned Kout followers, and awards, in it's home country and abroad. Kout has won Best Beer medals four times in it's native Czech Republic, and has also received honors in France and Italy. Meanwhile, though not available domestically, the beers have attained a cult following in the US, where afficianados have rated 3 of them as being among the top 10 from the Czech Republic.

Shelton Brothers is extremely excited to announce the arrival, for the first time, of Kout in America. In early November we will be offering a very limited number of 20L kegs-just 40 each- of the Koutska 10º ( 4% ABV, the golden flagship beer, named the best Czech beer in summer 2012), the Koutska 12º ( 5%, the somewhat weightier and hoppier version of the 10º, named Lager of the Year in 2010), and the Koutska 18º ( 8 %, the brewery's rich, dark specialty lager, requiring over six months maturation, which won best Czech beer awards in 2007 and 2008). This is traditional Czech beer, made the old way-according to 200-year-old recipes-with it's own well water and all-local barley and hops, using either double or triple decoction mash. It's also open-fermented and unpasteurized-subsequently it has had to be shipped in cold containers, door-to-door, from Kout na Sumavé to Shelton Brothers, to preserve it's unique quality as a "real lager". We are now taking pre-orders, and hoping to ship all the beer out to accounts immediately following it's arrival in our warehouse.

See photos from Kout and some of the other Czech breweries we visited on our Flickr page.

Inspirational Czech beer video.

There are times when it isn't all about diversity in terms of beer style and available choices, even if nowadays in the Czech Republic, there are many microbreweries producing a broader range of styles than before. A ginger-spiced beer I drank outside Prague in 2006 was perhaps the best such creation I've ever tasted.

The Czech lands remain a place to go and drink golden lagers, many of them sufficiently worthy to be included in the same breath as Budvar and Urquell, and some better. In the 1980's, I could have joyfully consumed these beers on a daily basis for the remainder of my life. In 2010, it gets boring, and fast, but the key to it all -- and why this video made me ache -- is the Czech Republic itself, its people and architecture and landscapes. I have so many warm memories of being there, enough to last forever.

Enjoy the video (in English). Thanks to Joe for the link.

Češi: Národ pivařů