Pilsener - Pilsner - Pils

Modern Brewery Age, July 19, 1999 by Gregg Glaser

The golden beer that has taken the world by storm

Choose the spelling and pronunciation you prefer. Whatever your choice, a Pilsener is the most famous and most imitated style of beer in the world. Considered to be the first golden-colored, clear, stable lager beer ever brewed, Pilseners are often the first style of beer brewed anywhere in the world that beer is made (with greatly varying degrees of authenticity).

Pilseners originated in 1842 in the town of Pilsen, Bohemia, a region of the Czech Republic. Pilsen (in Czech the word means "green meadow") had been a brewing town since the beginning of the millennium, perhaps longer, but always with dark, top-fermented ales and wheat beers. Before 1842 most all beers (lagers and ales) were brown and hazy - often downright murky. Gabriel Sedlmayer and Anton Dreher had only recently perfected the technique of brewing lagers in Bavaria and Austria. Brewers throughout the region had been trying to come up with the first clear, golden beer, partly because of the recent introduction of mass-produced glassware, which only the nobility could previously afford. Up to this time stoneware, pewter and enamel had been in use in taverns and at home, but the standard beers of the day were unattractive in clear glass. In Pilsen, a combination of the soft, almost mineral-free water and the low temperature kilning of the malted barley from nearby Moravia led to this milestone in brewing.

The new style of lager beer had come about almost by accident. Lager (which means a bed, camp, stockade or storehouse in German) had been developed when Bavarian brewers took barrels of their beers brewed in late spring into the icy caves at the foothills of the Alps. Here the beer was stored (lagered) during the warm summer months when the heat would have spoiled the beer. The cold air in the caves kept bacteria from growing in the liquid and added stability to the brew.

The introduction of the Pilsener style was an immediate and phenomenal success, due in large part to the place and times in which it was brewed. Bohemia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its capitol, Vienna, was a center of arts and culture in Europe. The success of Pilseners in Vienna meant that the beer received wide recognition throughout Europe.

Added to this, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. New and better methods of malting barley and fermenting beer were being developed, breweries were being mechanized, train travel was making wide distribution of beer much easier than before and emigrants were taking their food and drinks to the New World.

According to beer writers and connoisseurs, there is only one town where a true Pilsener can be brewed - Pilsen - and only two breweries there that brew it: Pilsener Urquell and Gambrinus (the later named after the legendary King of Beer, Jan Primus of Brabant). All other "Pilsners" are imitations, some quite good and others quite awful. There are many other breweries in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that make great-tasting beers in the Pilsener style and almost all German breweries brew a Pils. German law states, however, that any beer describing itself in this style must put the town of origin and a hyphen before the word Pilsener, Pilsner or Pils. (This law doesn't carry over into exported bottles.) In Germany the style varies from the North to the South, but most examples are quite good. Some German Pilseners available in the U.S. are DAB, Holsten, Beck's, St. Pauli Girl, Pinkus, Bitburger, Warsteiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Paulaner, Spaten, Lowenbrau, Wurzburger, Tucher, Franz Joseph Sailer and Jever. The Belgian breweries Stella Artois, Maes and Cristal Alken brew Pilsener-style beers, also.

Beyond Germany and the former Czechoslovakia, however, the style begins to lose its meaning. These foreign "Pilseners" are really just ordinary pale or golden lagers, often referred to by beer critics as international pilsners. The Netherlands' best-known exports are Heineken and Grolsch. From Denmark we get Carlsberg and Tuborg. Pilsener-style lagers are also widely brewed in Australia and New Zealand, Asia, Africa and South America. In America, of course, the national and regional breweries all have as their flagship beer a mild, low-malt, low-hops version of a Pilsener - think Budweiser, Miller, Coors, etc. These beers are a long way away from their source, both in distance and taste, but they owe their existence to a style of beer created over a century ago in a small town in Bohemia.