PILSNER: CZECH BORN, GERMAN ENGINEERED
BY CHRIS KELLER
The first pale lager, pilsner beer, is a style invented out of desperation. It was created using the most advanced methods known in brewing at the time and is still considered one of the great crowning achievements of brewing. Named after Pilsen, Czech Republic, it is a regional style developed by a foreigner that quickly went global. There’ s hardly a beer-drinking country in the world that doesn’ t produce one. The style uses a simple recipe and an extended production process. The style is practically synonymous with beer! The story of the pilsner is colorful, to say the least, and begins rather ominously: with bad beer.
Anyone who has made beer can tell you that it doesn’ t take much to make bad beer. I’ m not talking about beer you just don’ t like. There’ s plenty of good, well made beers out there that you’ re not going to like. Those aren’ t bad beers, that’ s just preference. I’ m talking about when things go wrong in the process between the farm and your glass that can cause any number of stomach-turning flavors. If barley was grown, harvested, malted, or stored poorly it can make beer taste musty. Hops can get a stinky cheese flavor if not stored right. Take too long to mash and you’ ll draw out tannins, bitter flavors like oversteeped tea. A poor boil can give the beer a creamed corn flavor. Not properly sanitizing vessels and equipment can lead to many bad flavors from contamination. Oxygen exposure starts as wet cardboard and turns sour. These are only a few examples of the many ways off flavors can develop. Nothing that can live in beer can hurt you though, so rest assured if you get a bad one it won’ t make you sick. It’ s just going to taste bad. Maybe a little bad, maybe really bad.
Thanks to a world-wide understanding of farming, malting, refrigeration, fermentation, and microbial contaminants, it’ s pretty easy to find good beer nowadays. I’ ve worked in beer as a brewer, distributor, and a retailer. Every place I’ ve worked we did our best to keep only good, fresh beer in the market. It takes constant diligence and commitment to excellence. Two hundred years ago in Pilsen, Bohemia, now Czech Republic or Czechia, that was not the case. While Bavaria, a German
kingdom just 50 miles to the west, was having a brewing renaissance, Pilsen was stuck in brewing dark ages. The local beer was described as undrinkable, tasting like“ burnt grass,” was sour, cloudy with“ floaties,” and was often contaminated by bacteria and wild yeasts. Travellers to Bavaria came back reporting of the delicious lager beer available there and it wasn’ t long before the locals had had enough. In 1838 the residents of Pilsen revolted and dumped 36 barrels of the awful stuff in the town square, right in front of city hall. The message was received loud, clear, wet, and stinky!
City officials quickly got to work. They decided to start from scratch and commission a public brewery for the city. Since the townspeople were so jealous of Bavarian beer they hired two Bavarians, brewer Josef Groll and architect Martin Stelzer to design 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
26 SUMMER EDITION 2025