In celebration of National Lager Day lets talk about a beer style that quite frankly doesn’t get talked about a lot. In 2018 craft beer’s overall share of the beer market accounted for 13.2% and that continues to grow. Part of that success comes from breweries brewing lagers which happens to be the most popular beer style.
Now really it should be International Lager Day because guess what Lagers are not from America they actually came from Northern Europe, which is now Austria and Germany. Now all beers were traditionally brewed with one yeast strain but there were different variations. The traditional yeast that was used was Saccharomyces Cerevisiae (Try pronouncing that one). It is also called “Top-Fermenting Yeast” (Much easier to pronounce) and it has been used for thousands of years.
Lagers use a different but closely related yeast called Saccharomyces Pastorianus which works at a much colder and slower rate and it is also called “bottom-fermenting.” This style of brewing dates back to the Middle Ages. During that time this beer could only be brewed in cold temperatures which were typically September-May. So I’m in Arizona and if that was still the case today we would only be able to brew beers in Northern Arizona and probably only from November-March. In the 1500s, the Germans had a yeast strain suitable for the cool temperatures.
Cervisae was said to be a parent of pastorianus but who was was the other parent? Nobody knew until 2011 when an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America said the parent of Patronianus was Saccharomyces Eubayanus which was native to the Patagonia region in Argentina. Now you guys have heard of the Columbus Exchange so I’m not going to bore you with the details of that but what the history books left out was that this yeast strain was also traded in this exchange as well as some narcotics (I knew it).
Now get this, Lagers were traditionally dark and dark lagers still exist today but they weren’t that pale color that you’re used to seeing today. Now who is responsible for this shift? In the Mid-19th century Anton Dreher out of Austria and Gabriel Sedlmayr out of Munich, Germany came up with the pale color of Lagers. During that time period there was a huge migration of Europeans coming to America.
It is worth mentioning that the Germans were the most successful emmigrants because they brought their industries here to America and of course a major one was beer. Now the reason why Lagers are the most popular beers today is because of Germans emmigrating to America. Thank you Germany and Prost!