APRIL 1998

VOL.3 NO.4

Looking At Lagers

I just got back from a brief sojourn to Philadelphia, where I indulged in a few The Book and the Cook events (an annual festival of cookbook authors, now presented by the Food Network), sampled ten cask ales at a terrific event put together by Beer Philadelphia's Jim Anderson (check him out in print around town and on Philly radio station 1540 AM on Friday afternoons at 1:00) and sampled a few lagers in between. And what made me the happiest were the lagers.

I have long been an ardent advocate of good lagers. When well-made, a crisp and floral pilsner of Bohemian lineage, a refreshingly bitter and quenching Germanic pils or a malty and soothing Vienna can truly be a thing of beauty. Yet all too often, these brews are ignored, or worse, unjustly maligned, simply because certain large scale breweries in North America have taken the name of lager in vain and applied it to all manner of sickly sweet or blandly insipid pap. At times, it makes me wonder if I'm a lager backer simply because of my propensity toward favouring the underdog.

But I know that it's not that. I favour a good lager because, in North America at least, they have in past years become so damn difficult to find. Fine pale ales you can scout by the bushel, palatable porters seem to be sprouting out of the woodwork and spiced and flavoured beers are apparently everywhere these days, even many good ones! But lagers? I've spent a lot of time this decade searching for good, solid domestic lagers.

Which is why I was so pleased to come to Philadelphia. I don't know if it's just an effect of the heritage of most of the population or whether they put something in the water down there, but Pennsylvania seems to be flush with terrific bottom-fermented fare. It seemed as though whenever I turned around I was confronted with another good to excellent lager.

The oldest and most established of the Keystone State craft lager breweries is Stoudt's Brewing of Adamstown, and I'm pleased to report that age has not lost this fine brewery a step. They had better keep it up, however, because Victory Brewing of Downington is hot on their heels with a pleasant export-style Brandywine Valley Lager, a hoppy, fresh Prima Pils and a terrifically flavourful new Munich Dark. Then there are Dock Street's lagers, brewed in the heart of Philly, which have quite evidentially made a comeback following a period of reportedly less interesting times. And stretching a little further afield, Pittsburgh's Pennsylvania Brewing offers yet another line-up of refreshing and flavourful lagers, led by their own tasty dunkel, Penn Dark.

There are others, of course, but my stay was only two days and my assignment was to cover not lagers, but cask ales for a future story in Saveur magazine. Nonetheless, these four breweries and their fine pilsners, exports and dunkels were enough to make me believe that perhaps there is a future for lager-brewing in North America after all.

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