Lagers never did anything to hurt us, but Big Beer sabotaged the lager. This ancient form of beer — the yin-to-yang counterpart to the ale — is brewed with an entirely different species of yeast and fermented for prolonged periods at chilly temperatures of 50 degrees and below for a final taste profile so distinct it has divided the world’s beer drinkers into two factions.
Now, as craft brewers, generally makers of ales and ales only, embrace lagers, they are vaporizing some of consumers’ negative associations with the category — especially the notions that lagers are weak, watery and cheap.
Iron Springs Pub and Brewery is investing about as much time into making lagers as any other craft brewery in the San Francisco Bay Area. On the Fairfax brewpub’s tap list, at last glance, were the Screaming Eagle American Light Lager, the Moonwalker Springs Bock and the Sazz Hands Czech Pilsner. The fledgling brewery Adobe Creek, launched last year in Novato, is also presenting to customers two lagers — the Tamal Lager and Mex-Vienna Lager — in an otherwise IPA-heavy beer list.
While these breweries and others, including Drake’s, Sudwerk, Firestone Walker and Russian River, help to normalize lagers as an acceptable part of craft beer’s repertoire, the division between lager fans and ale fans remains embedded in beer culture. Tom McCormick, executive director of the California Craft Brewers Association, believes lagers have suffered — among craft beer fans, that is — from a negative association with better-known lagers from big brands like Budweiser, Coors, Heineken, Miller and Corona.
“But I think we’re seeing that diminishing, and I would guess that in five or 10 years, that stigma will be erased,” he says.
McCormick likens the appearance of lagers in the craft beer culture to the introduction of cans about a decade ago. He noted that while canned craft beer caused jaws to drop when the phenomenon first began, nobody thinks twice about craft beer in a can anymore. He believes craft lagers are going swiftly down the same road.
The craft beer culture generally embraces variation in flavor and aroma. However, the different flavor profiles of ales versus lagers had the uncanny effect of dividing beer drinkers for decades, socially and even politically. The lager-ale divide goes back, it seems, to Prohibition, when the ban on alcohol killed thousands of American breweries, many if not most of them making mostly ales. When alcohol was legalized again, the beer industry rebounded. As it did, though, it remained consolidated into a handful of large companies that, for whatever reasons, gravitated toward lagers as their flagship products.
By the 1980s, the association of corporate branding — think Bud, Miller and Coors — and that distinct lager taste was firmly established. As craft brewers proliferated, they aimed for a wildly different flavor spectrum — and they naturally made ales, and rarely lagers, for many years. Today, Big Beer and craft beer are polar opposites in the beer culture and market, and we have lagers and ales to thank for this division.
As more and more lagers emerge from craft brewery beer tanks, the assumptions, associations and expectations about these beers, and the division between them, are dissolving. At Iron Springs, one beer in particular demonstrates craft brewers’ newfound acceptance of and interest in lagers — the Head Change India Pale Lager. The hoppy lager is a fusion of craft beer’s trademark style and that which was all but owned by Miller, Coors and Bud for decades. Now, craft beer is taking the lager back.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.
