Style School: Vienna Lager

This elegant beer with Austrian roots has been hiding in plain sight pretty much everywhere except Austria. explains how Anton Dreher’s 19th century creation is poised for a restoration.

A CASUAL BEER FAN

could be forgiven for imagining that the best place to find a style called “Vienna lager” would be— well, Vienna. Unlike some other beers named for their hometowns—berliner weisse, Grodziskie—vienna lagers are not especially rare. In fact, one of the bestselling American beers, Sam Adams Boston Lager, fits broadly within the style.

Nor was Vienna lager a footnote in the annals of brewing. Quite the opposite: One of the world’s first pale lagers, it was for decades spoken of in hushed tones as “liquid amber” and “fire in the glass.” The man who developed it, Anton Dreher, did so by the use of a pale malt that also bears the city’s name—still common today in brewing. He would go on to build one of the largest and most technologically advanced breweries in the world. For decades it was one of the most popular beers in the world.

But here two ironies emerge.

An example of the style is difficult to find in Vienna—or anywhere in Austria— and it has been since just after World War I. Austrians drink a style of lager they call märzen—it’s crisp, golden, and flavorful, something like a German helles. Local breweries have started to try to revive “Wiener lagers” in their hometown but so far haven’t found many takers. The style instead flourished abroad, principally in the New World, where it became a staple of brewing in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet in that second, expatriate life,

Vienna lagers evolved away from Austria. They got makeovers—first by immigrant German brewers, then by American and Mexican brewers in the Industrial Age.

When American microbrewers first began to revive the style, it had been so long since it was Austrian that the connection was severed. When he created Boston Lager, Jim Koch reached deep into the family archives—there are five generations of Koch brewers. Yet the beer he developed is made with German hops, American pale and caramel malt, and not a grain of Vienna malt. I’m not aware that Koch ever described Boston Lager as a Vienna himself, but Americans looked at its amber hue and lager crispness and declared it so. In much the same way, Great Lakes makes its Eliot Ness with similar malts (and no Vienna)—along with American hops.

By the 1980s, Vienna lagers had come to an odd place: They still flourished, but they could not be found in their hometown; where they could be found, they used little or none of the signature malt Dreher had invented when he created the style.

How did we get there?

Anton Dreher

Anton Dreher was the son of a brewer. Despite an affinity for poetry, he went into the family trade as a young man, apprenticing at another brewery. He didn’t inspire much confidence in the brewer there, but he made a friend in another apprentice from another brewing family, Gabriel Sedlmayr of the Spaten Brewery in Munich. The young men were ambitious and decided to go abroad to learn more about their craft—settling on a trip to Britain, which at that time was the most advanced brewing country on Earth.

The story of that trip, which lasted the better part of 1833, would make a spectacular novel or miniseries. Rebuffed by other breweries when they arrived in London, Dreher managed to get a job at Barclay Perkins long enough to study what was then one of the most impressive breweries in the world. The young men then managed

By the 1980s, Vienna lagers had come to an odd place: They still flourished, but they could not be found in their hometown; where they could be found, they used little or none of the signature malt Dreher had invented when he created the style. How did we get there?