Friday Five: Best Lagers

It’s midsummer (regardless of all the back-to-school stuff): The PGA Championship is underway, baseball’s pennant races are heating up, NFL training camps are in full swing, and you’re about to start choosing your can’t-miss fantasy team. Even if you’re not a sports fan, you’ve noticed the heat index is in the "hot as hell" range. What better way to cool off, than with a nice, cold beer? or five?

All Beers Are Not Alike

Before I discuss my five favorite lagers, we should probably make sure we’re all on the same page, beer-wise.

There are, basically, two types of beer in the world: Ales and lagers.

Ale yeast is the older type of brewing yeast, and ferments at warm temperatures (62-75 degrees Fahrenheit).¹ Ales ferment rapidly–sometimes, in as little as a few days. Once fermentation is complete, the yeasts rise to the top of the brewing vessel and float there in a large mass. So, if you hear a brewer discuss "top-fermenting" he is talking about ale.

Lagers are much younger than ales, dating back only to the mid-1800s, when the lager yeast was discovered in Bavaria. Lagers are often called pilsners (or pilseners); more correctly, though, a pilsner (often shortened to "pils") is a hoppy, golden style of lager. (All pilsners are lagers, but not all lagers are pilsners. Got it?)

Before refrigeration became commonplace, Bavarian brewers fermented their beers in deep, cool caves or tunnels, to prevent exposure to heat. Thus, the lager yeasts evolved to prefer cooler temperatures, generally between 46-56 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike ales, though, once the fermentation is finished, lagers (the word comes from the German lagerung, meaning "to store") age for weeks or months; that aging process is now known as "lagering."

Incidentally, lager yeasts are "bottom-fermenting," as contrasted with top-fermenting ale yeasts. The way I remember which are top- and which are bottom-fermenting, is to remember that "a" in "ale" is at the top of the alphabet.

By the way–as long as I’m educating you about beer–wine is considerably easier to make than beer. For the most basic wine, you need only crush the grapes and allow the juice to ferment (in fact, they can even crush themselves, if piled high enough!). Beer, however, requires malt (generally from barley, although other grains have been used), hops (aromatic flowers, which provide bitterness in varying degrees), the aforementioned yeast, and, of course, water. (There is no water in wine; well, there shouldn’t be, anyway!) Once you have those ingredients, they need to be carefully combined to produce beer…brewing is as much science as it is art. By contrast, wine-making is pretty much all art.

Common Types of Beer

I daresay there are many more kinds of beer than wine (by the way, I enjoy a glass of wine almost as much as a good beer; I’m not anti-wine!). With wines, you have red, or white, and of those, sparkling, or not. (Yes, that is a bit simplistic, but it’s also generally true.) The differences depend on the grapes used, but that’s about it.

With beers, on the other hand, besides dividing them into lagers and ales, you have pilsners, pale ales, India pale ales (not the same as pale ales by any means), Trappist ale, porter, stout, bock, doppelbock, weissbier, witbier (again, while both translate to "white beer" one is German; the other, Belgian), Belgian dubbel, abbey ales, British bitter, schwarzbier…the list is almost as long as the list of regions where beer is brewed. And certainly, many regions are home to many types of beer.

Friday Five: My Favorite Lagers

1. Pilsner Urquell. This is considered by many to be the first true pilsner beer; "urquell" means "the source." This is a wonderful Czech beer and in my not-so-humble opinion, the best lager in the world.

2. Harp Irish Lager. The Guinness Group is, rightfully, most well-known for its signature brew, Guinness Stout (an ale). However, in 1960, Guinness began brewing Harp Lager (rebranded in 1997 as Harp Irish Lager), so called for the image of an Irish harp featured on its label (a smaller version of which you can see on Guinness labels as well). ²

3. Longboard Island Lager. From the Big Island of Hawai’i, Longboard is the signature beer of Kona Brewing Company. I discovered this beer on my first visit to Hawai’i in 2005, and it’s been a favorite ever since. Each time I return to the Islands, one of my first stops is to pick up a couple 6-packs of "liquid aloha." And whether on the Big Island or Oahu, I always insist on a visit to the Kona Brewery Brewpub, where the food is as good as the beer!

4. Blue Paddle. Produced by New Belgium Brewing Company, Ft. Collins, Colorado (probably most famous for its Fat Tire Ale, another favorite of mine), Blue Paddle is a very light-tasting pils (which is not the same as a light beer!), and became a favorite of mine from the very first sip. New Belgium began shipping to South Dakota only this May, and it’s a standard purchase for me at my favorite spirits shop.

5. Löwenbräu (Munich). One of two wonderful beers synonymous with Munich and Oktoberfest (the other, of course, is Hofbrau), don’t confuse this with the former offering from the Miller Brewing Company several years ago. When I lived in Germany (1985-88), this wonderful pilsner shared storage space in our basement with Bitburger, the local regional favorite.

I could go on and on about beers in general, and lagers in particular (by all means if you can find either of the other two German beers mentioned immediately above, you will not be disappointed!), but if you enjoy beer, give any of these (or all of them!) a try. Clearly, I’ve opened a veritable cornucopia of beer topics with this article: I’ve no doubt we’ll be talking about ales, IPAs, and all manner of other brews (and wines!) as time goes on.

Enjoy the weekend, and don’t forget to crack open a cold one!