Best vienna lager free#

They were brewing two versions of the same beer, and both with a single malt-that pale malt that came to be called Vienna.

The modern Schwechat brewery, southeast of Vienna and now owned by Heineken, has a few assorted logs the oldest dates to 1894. In 1841, he brewed the lager that would eventually become synonymous with the city. (At the time, strong pale Edinburgh ales were enjoying international acclaim.) Yet Dreher wanted to make lagers, so he ultimately came up with a clever work-around: he found Viennese taverns with cellar space and sent his young beer there to age. It was an ale brewery then, with no lagering cellars for lagering, and Dreher built production making a Scottish-type ale. Over time, he would modernize it, adding a wort chiller and a new English-style kiln. He took over the family brewery in 1836, but it was old and rustic. It was the latter knowledge that Dreher would use to change the course of Austrian brewing.

Best vienna lager free#

The second was the English practice of using indirect heat to malt barley, producing paler malts free of smoke or roast. One was the English use of the saccharometer, which helped them brew more consistent beer. The young men then managed to befriend Michael Thomas Bass, owner of Burton’s equally legendary Bass Brewery, and thus learned two key innovations that they would take back home. Rebuffed by other breweries when they arrived in London, Dreher managed to get a job at Barclay Perkins long enough to study what was then one of the most impressive breweries in the world. The story of that trip, which lasted the better part of 1833, would make a spectacular novel or miniseries. The young men were ambitious and decided to go abroad to learn more about their craft-settling on a trip to Britain, which at that time was the most advanced brewing country on Earth. He didn’t inspire much confidence in the brewer there, but he made a friend in another apprentice from another brewing family, Gabriel Sedlmayr of the Spaten Brewery in Munich. Despite an affinity for poetry, he went into the family trade as a young man, apprenticing at another brewery. In much the same way, Great Lakes makes its Eliot Ness with similar malts (and no Vienna)-along with American hops.īy the 1980s, Vienna lagers had come to an odd place: They still flourished, but they could not be found in their hometown where they could be found, they used little or none of the signature malt Dreher had invented when he created the style.Īnton Dreher was the son of a brewer. I’m not aware that Koch ever described Boston Lager as a Vienna himself, but Americans looked at its amber hue and lager crispness and declared it so. Yet the beer he developed is made with German hops, American pale and caramel malt, and not a grain of Vienna malt. When he created Boston Lager, Jim Koch reached deep into the family archives-there are five generations of Koch brewers. When American microbrewers first began to revive the style, it had been so long since it was Austrian that the connection was severed. They got makeovers-first by immigrant German brewers, then by American and Mexican brewers in the Industrial Age. Yet in that second, expatriate life, Vienna lagers evolved away from Austria. The style instead flourished abroad, principally in the New World, where it became a staple of brewing in the 19th and 20th centuries. Local breweries have started to try to revive “Wiener lagers” in their hometown but so far haven’t found many takers. Austrians drink a style of lager they call märzen-it’s crisp, golden, and flavorful, something like a German helles. For decades it was one of the most popular beers in the world.Īn example of the style is difficult to find in Vienna-or anywhere in Austria-and it has been since just after World War I.

He would go on to build one of the largest and most technologically advanced breweries in the world. Quite the opposite: One of the world’s first pale lagers, it was for decades spoken of in hushed tones as “liquid amber” and “fire in the glass.” The man who developed it, Anton Dreher, did so by the use of a pale malt that also bears the city’s name-still common today in brewing. Nor was Vienna lager a footnote in the annals of brewing. In fact, one of the best-selling American beers, Sam Adams Boston Lager, fits broadly within the style. Unlike some other beers named for their hometowns-Berliner weisse, Grodziskie-Vienna lagers are not especially rare. A casual beer fan could be forgiven for imagining that the best place to find a style called “Vienna lager” would be-well, Vienna.