The Pilsner Landscape

There’s a Pilsner for every palate as craft brewers take inspiration from the Old World.

PILSNER IS “A BREWER’S BEER”

style. You hear it again and again when you talk to brewers about their favorite styles or when you ask them what their “desert-island beers” are—it’s the bitter golden lager that they love to drink when they’re off the clock. Pilsner is an easy style to fall for. It can be easily consumed in quantity without fatiguing the palate, but a good Pils also has the complexity to withstand scrutiny. The best examples showcase a remarkable balance between a distinctive hoppy character and a delicate malt flavor. Brewing a Pilsner requires technical skill and flawless ingredients. They are so much more than boring light beer, and the American drinking populace is (finally) catching on. Lager is no longer a dirty word in the craft-beer world, and American brewers, inspired by travels

abroad, are brewing their own visions the perfect Pilsner.

It’s as if the history of Pilsner is repeating. The first Bohemian Pilsners spread across Europe like a viral meme in nineteenth century. The idea of briskly bitter and brilliantly clear golden lager was captivating to thirsty Europeans, and as railroads connected cities for the first time, Pilsner washed over the continent and changed the world’s beer culture forever.

Each new region that adopted Pilsner put its own spin on the style. The Germans used harder water and hops besides the signature Saaz variety beloved in Bohemia. When German immigrants brought the style to the Americas, they used New World ingredients (six-row barley, maize, and American-grown hops), adding further variation to the style. In of America, more railroads and refrigeration helped Pilsner dominate an expanding market, and a shifting, consolidating beer industry led to a homogenization of beer from which we’re still reeling.

The beers that get called Pilsner vary widely, from “the original Pilsner” (Pilsner Urquell) to the leaner, more bitter German-brewed Schonramer Pils to a growing multitude of American craft interpretations that sometimes push the style to its limits, to the insipid, in-nameonly adjunct lagers that are still marketed as Pilsners (Miller Lite). The breadth of different takes on the Pilsner ideal defies an accurate taxonomy.

“The interpretation is kind of in the eye of the beholder,” says Matthew Brynildson of the regional and philosophical differences in Pilsner beer. Brynildson is the acclaimed brewmaster at California’s Firestone Walker Brewery, and his brewery’s sets a bar for American craft Pilsners. He calls the beer a hybrid between German and Bohemian styles, though the lines between those traditions are blurry even in his expert eyes. “The style guidelines lead you to believe that [German and Bohemian Pilsners] are entirely different beers, but the separation happened over time,” he says, adding that today the differences are slight and not as bound by geography as you might expect.

Pivo Pils

“The style guidelines lead you to believe that [German and Bohemian Pilsners] are entirely different beers, but the separation happened over time,” said Firestone Walker Brewmaster Matt Brynildson, adding that today the differences are slight and not as bound by geography as you might expect.