One of the best-known imitators, a little beer known as “Budweiser,” arrived soon after in 1876. In 1871, Pilsner Urquell was first exported to America, where German immigrants quickly co-opted the style and began brewing the first American-made pils. Within only a couple decades, the new style had spread throughout Europe via countless imitations. Its emergence also happened to coincide with huge advancements in the field of glass manufacture, meaning that pilsner was simply lucky enough to come along at a time when many families could afford glass drinking vessels for the first time-the perfect glassware to display the clarity and brightness of pils. Suffice to say, pilsner quickly became a sensation for its novel appearance, much greater clarity (brought on by cold-aging) and hop-forward flavors.
![a 1 pilsner beer a 1 pilsner beer](https://gasoilporcelainsign.net/upload/1930-s-Double-Sided-Porcelain-Neon-A-1-Pilsner-Beer-Sign-03-rg.jpg)
These advents in malting technology finally arrived from England in the early 1800s, at the same time that the English were using lighter malts to pioneer their own new style, pale ale. Malting and kilning technology had not yet evolved to the point of producing kilned pale or pilsner malts, so brewing a golden beer of any real strength was more or less impossible. One thing that all of these beers had in common, though, was that they were darker in color by necessity. Most of these were somewhat nebulous ale styles that we would find difficult to categorize today, many of which were brewed with gruit herb mixtures instead of hops, but lagers had also been produced in Bohemia since at least the 1400s-predominantly being lagered in subterranean caves, which had the consistently cool temperatures necessary for bottom-fermenting yeast. Beer had been produced in Bohemia for hundreds or perhaps even 1,000 years before the advent of pilsner. This is indisputably the first beer to carry the name, but it was hardly the first beer in the region. Unlike historical ale styles such as porter or pale ale (as already mentioned), the more modern historical record for pilsner presents us with a very clear ur-beer: A classic of the genre still produced today, Pilsner Urquell. Pilsner was unsurprisingly born in the Czech city of Pilsen, in the country’s Bohemia region, in 1842. So hopefully within this piece I can give you a better idea of what “pils” actually means, and what their role is within the modern craft beer landscape. Even after several decades of craft beer booming in the U.S., there are still too many beer drinkers who simply equivocate the word “pilsner” with the likes of Miller Lite, which doesn’t even come close to meeting the guidelines of the style. The classic German and Czech varieties are hoppy, expressive, fascinating lagers that drove the explosion of the beer industry during the industrial revolution, before being dumbed down into a marketing buzzword. It manages to simultaneously be one of the most consumed and controversial beer styles.Īnd that’s sort of a shame, really, because a great pilsner is supposed to be a thing of beauty and deceptive complexity. It’s a style with a love/hate relationship within craft beer itself-you’ll find a seemingly equal number of craft beer fans who either love classic pilsners or simply associate the style with the macro enemies of the craft movement. history been bastardized almost beyond recognition.
![a 1 pilsner beer a 1 pilsner beer](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/113200208200_/A-1-Beer-Phoenix-Arizona-Brewing-1950s-Porcelain-outdoor.jpg)
It’s the most widely imitated beer style on Earth, and yet has at times in U.S. It’s steeped in very well-documented history-certainly much more so than a style such as India pale ale, whose historical record is always fomenting argument. This one style is many things to many people.
![a 1 pilsner beer a 1 pilsner beer](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61DrCQiKOjS._AC_SX466_.jpg)
Writing a general, catch-all piece on the beer style known as pilsner is a fairly daunting task. The latest covers pilsner, of which we just blind-tasted 62 examples. The first month covered the history and modern role of American pale ale, and the next few subsequently tackled Black IPA and Belgian quadrupel. “Let’s Talk Beer Styles” is a monthly feature that accompanies Paste’s large-scale blind craft beer style tastings/rankings.