and build a state of the art brewery brewing a modern, tasty, beer. The two men wanted to use the most up-to-date brewing techniques and ingredients while still making it unique and regional. Steltzer had never built a brewery so he visited some of the most modern breweries in Europe to learn the latest technologies. Groll, whose father operated a brewery in the Bavarian city of Vilshofen, was well versed in the cold-fermenting lager beers that Germans had been making for several hundred years by that point. Their beers were dark and smokey at that time due to woodfire dried malt, but the English had just introduced an air-kilning process which produced a pale, smoke-free malt. Sounds like a road trip! Steltzer returned from his visit to England with one of these kilns and, using the local barley, it was soon employed in malting the palest malt ever seen in industrial brewing. Groll sourced spicy Saaz hops from the nearby town of Zatec and the men located a place for the brewery by the Radbuza River where they could dig deep, cold lagering tunnels and the aquifers there supplied a very unique soft water which was very different than the other mineral-rich brewing water of the time.
In 1842, four years after the beer rebellion, the Burger Brauerei, German for citizens’ brewery, unveiled this new beer to the public. Never before had there been such a clear golden-colored beer. The glowing color combined with the liberal use of the spicy, herbal hops, the soft water, the cold fermentation, and the long conditioning period created a crisply-flavored, refreshing, and miraculously translucent beer. It was named pilsner, meaning“ from Pilsen.” The malt being produced with the English kilning method turned out to be far lighter than what the English were producing with it. To this day
the lightest colored malt you can buy for brewing is Pilsner malt. At that time glassware, previously only available to the wealthy, was being produced on an industrial scale. Pilsner’ s golden glow was uniquely suited to being served in glassware and very well might be the reason clear glass began replacing the ceramic mugs and steins in the biergartens.
Word travelled quickly about this new style of beer and it wasn’ t long before the surrounding areas began brewing their own pilsner lagers. German and Austrian brewers were producing their own versions as well, quickly producing their own pale pilsner malts and using their own hop varieties. German pilsners in particular were, and still are, more hop forward. The advent of refrigeration meant that lagers no longer were confined to caves in cooler climates and could now be brewed anywhere. Pilsner quickly became a global style. So much so that the Burger Brauerei and the city of Pilsen itself fought to keep other breweries from using the name pilsner, trying to keep regional status on their pride and joy. Many breweries agreed to shorten the name of the style to“ pils” but the campaign was largely unsuccessful. The genie was out of the bottle and had long been granting delicious and refreshing golden wishes all over the world. Unable to keep the pilsner name for themselves, in 1898 the brewery branded its beer“ Pilsner Urquell” which
Fall 2025 | Jacksonville Progress 25