At the end of the day, all lagers are some combination of hops, water, bottom-fermenting yeast, and grains. It sounds simple, but truthfully, the vast world of lagers is anything but. Depending on what country you’re in — and in some cases, what part of a country you’re in — the beer style can take on many different forms.
There are dozens of beers that technically qualify as lagers, whether or not “lager” is even in the name: pilsners, modern-day porters, bocks, dunkels — the list goes on. When it comes to the category’s origin story, almost all roads lead back to Germany. That said, most lagers made outside Germany and the Czech Republic are simply German and Czech styles that either employ different regional hop varietals or various adjuncts like corn, rice, and other cereal grains.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll focus on some of the most widely acclaimed lager-producing nations, specifically the ones that have put their own unique spin on the ancestral mother styles. From the highly carbonated and distinctly American to the dry, quaffable rice lagers of Japan, here are the different lager styles to explore from all over the globe, broken down by country.
Germany
Germany is where lagers first originated, specifically in the German state of Bavaria. Sometime in the 1400s, brewers developed the practice of brewing beer in the winter months, then storing their barrels in caves where a cold-tolerant, bottom-fermenting yeast would run its course. Given the consistent temperature in the caves, these beers would keep well into the summer months.
Since then, Germany has developed numerous lager substyles, most of them differentiated by their use and composition of malts, grains, and hops. But there are a few other factors that can also set them apart: Kellerbiers, or “cellar beers,” are traditionally fermented in unsealed casks, resulting in a beer with little to no carbonation. Then there are eisbocks, which are brewed as malt-forward doppelbocks, then partially frozen. The ice is then removed, concentrating the beer’s flavors, body, and alcohol content — similar to the process of “jacking” in the spirits world.
Other German lager styles include Munich helles, märzen (a.k.a. Oktoberfest beers), festbier, bock, maibock, doppelbock, dunkel, schwarzbier, rauchbier, and German pilsner.
Czech Republic
The second most prominent leader in the lager world is undoubtedly the Czech Republic. Compared to German styles, Czech lagers tend to be more rich, fuller-bodied, and slightly higher in alcohol content. This can be attributed to several factors. For one, Czech yeast strains don’t pull off as clean and crisp of a fermentation as their German counterparts. Additionally, Czech lagers are generally fermented at lower temperatures and for longer periods, resulting in an increased ABV and a thicker perceived mouthfeel. Combine that with different approaches to grain-mashing and Czech lagers’ tendency to have trace amounts of diacetyl (a chemical compound that contributes a slight buttery flavor to beer) and you have the rich roundness that separates Czech lagers from other styles. Within the genre of Czech lagers, substyles are generally broken down by both gravity and color, whether that be světlé (pale), polotmavé (amber), or tmavé (dark).
The Czech Republic is also the birthplace of the pilsner, a spicy, hop-forward type of lager made almost exclusively with pilsner malts. As the story goes, in the early 1800s, Czech brewers in the city of Pilsen made a 36-cask batch of lager that spoiled, so they brought in Bavarian brewer Josef Groll to help them hone their skills. Using local malts, water, and a heavy-handed dose of Czech Saaz hops to both increase the beer’s flavor and shelf life, Groll created what is now known as the very first Czech pilsner on Oct. 5, 1842.
Austria
The third and final corner of the European lager hotbed is Austria, and there you’ll find Vienna lager. The Munich märzen and Vienna lager hit the market in 1841 — just a year before the Czech pilsner came around — and the two are close siblings in both style and origin. They were created by brewers Anton Dreher and Gabriel Sedlmayr, respectively, who were close friends and collaborators. Dreher, who pioneered the Vienna lager, was the owner of Austria’s Schwechat Brewery at the time. And Sedlmayr, the mind behind the Munich märzen, was at the helm of Munich’s Spaten Brewery.
Both styles are medium-bodied, chock-full of malty notes and amber in hue, though Viennas skew a bit lighter on the color wheel. Viennas have a drier finish, a lower ABV, and lean a bit more hoppy. Meanwhile, märzens pack a little more booze and finish on the sweet side. Viennas also employ lighter malts, although both Vienna and Munich malts are kilned in a traditionally British fashion, over hot air as opposed to direct heat via an open flame. This helps to impart the lighter colors and more delicate profiles of these styles compared to their counterparts.
U.S.A.
When brewers from Europe immigrated to the states, they brought their brewing techniques and equipment along with them. However, it wasn’t until the mid-late 1800s that distinctly American styles emerged from the fray.
The first one was steam beer. When Americans flocked to the West Coast during the California Gold Rush, they naturally wanted to have beer on hand to fuel their escapades. Unfortunately, the hot California climate and lack of refrigeration made it difficult to brew with cold-temperature-loving lager yeasts. Still, brewers trained lager yeasts to ferment at these higher temperatures, and given the lack of available brewing grains like wheat and malted barley, they used grits and sugary cereal grains to feed their yeast. The result? A cheap, medium-bodied, and quaffable lager.
There are a few theories regarding how steam beer got its name. Some attribute it to the style’s high level of effervescence and the amount of pressure it contained. Others suppose that freshly brewed batches were put on rooftops to cool, creating steam due to the temperature difference between the beer and the Pacific breeze. Regardless, San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company — an early purveyor of steam beer — eventually trademarked the term in 1981, so beer classification entities like the Beer Judge Certification Program now use the catchall term “California Common” to describe the style.
The second uniquely American style is the macro lager, a.k.a. American adjunct lager. After the advent of modern refrigeration, stateside brewers were able to use more traditional cold fermentation techniques, but many still continued to use cereal adjuncts like rice and corn in their malt bills. This equates to beers that are crisp, crushable, and not all that complex. The carbonation runs sky-high, and hop flavors take a backseat. Think: Budweiser, Coors Banquet, and Miller High Life.
Mexico
Much as with early American lagers, the arid climate of Mexico prevented its lager industry from coalescing until relatively recently. Many sources point to the 1860s as the heyday of Mexican lagers, as 1864 was the year the French appointed the Austrian archduke Maximilian I to be the emperor of the Second Mexican Empire. He allegedly brought brewers with him to brew Vienna lagers in his new home, though there’s no hard evidence proving this. The real story, as far as we know, is that a railroad line was constructed between Texas and Mexico in the late 1870s, allowing Swiss-born brewer Santiago Graf to import an ice machine down from the States in the early 1880s. Within a few years, Graf started producing lager beer out of Cervecera de Toluca y México. Similar to the American brewing industry at the time, these early Mexican lagers made use of adjuncts like rice and flaked maize in their malt profiles.
Nowadays, there are myriad Mexican lagers on the market, and all of them are basically a recreation of a European style, either with or without adjuncts. For instance, Modelo Negra is technically a Munich dunkel-style lager brewed with barley malt and cereal grains. Modelo itself also describes Modelo Especial as a “pilsner-style lager.” The same goes for Pacífico. Not to oversimplify it, but Mexican lagers are more of a vibe than a bona fide style.
Italy
Of course, Peroni Nastro Azzurro immediately comes to mind as being the unofficial flagship lager of Italy. The Peroni brand was founded in 1846, just a few years after the Munich märzen, Vienna lager, and Czech pilsner came to fruition. But unlike those genre-bending styles, Peroni is basically an old-school, pale Bavarian lager with Nostrano corn, which imparts the beer’s signature dry palate.
Other more modern takes on the Italian lager or pilsner employ a round of dry-hopping with Old World hops for an extra pop of spicy, earthy flavors. Regardless of how one defines an Italian lager or pils, they tend to be unfiltered, light in color, and between 4 and 5.5 percent ABV. At the end of the day, these are essentially pseudo-styles, as very little separates them from traditional German lagers.
France
While we can attribute countless liquid milestones to the French, the lager really isn’t one of them. Still, France is a hop-producing country, and it would be unfair to say a lager brewed with French hops doesn’t qualify as a true French lager. The most widely known French lager is Kronenbourg 1664, which utilizes Strisselspalt hops from the Alsace region near the city of Strasbourg. These hops are known for their distinctly floral aroma with undercurrents of citrus. To France’s credit, hop cultivators in the Alsace region have produced some wonderful new varietals in recent decades such as Aramis, Mistral, and Elixir.
Japan
Relatively speaking, the Japanese brewing industry is a young one. Reports vary slightly, but for all intents and purposes, the origins of Japanese beer trace back to the mid-19th century. At the time, Japan recruited a handful of German brewers to teach them the ways of lager production, and native brewers began applying these techniques to their abundant supplies of high-quality rice. It’s a similar process to that of the aforementioned American adjunct lagers, but in this case, rice is the only adjunct grain used in conjunction with malted barley. Because rice contains fermentable sugars for yeast to eat up without leaving any residuals behind, Japanese rice lagers are incredibly crisp and dry with little to no detectable sweetness. They also tend to be high in carbonation and pale yellow in color. Some examples include Sapporo, Asahi Super Dry, and Kirin Lager.
*Image retrieved from Ozgur Coskun via stock.adobe.com
