Recently Publican drinks writer Nick Yates wrote a piece “Lager for CAMRA members is a dirty word”- but its not just CAMRA members who think that. From my own experience I know of many people in the trade who have scant regard for what in fact is a great European beer style deserving of the same respect as the English cask ale tradition.
This is not, as some have suggested, a manifestation of classism- cask ale being for “chaps” as opposed to lager for “chavs”. In fact it is the result of international brewers seeking to command the largest global market for their brands that they possibly can. The lager style was the chosen vehicle because it lends itself more than any other to the application of the technology of mutation necessary to achieve this goal.
Real lager beer is the result of a 100 day brewing process which includes a 90 day fermentation period reaching a maximum of 9ºC. Tap lager tanks at one, two and three months, as I have at our Budvar brewery, and you discover how the beer improves with age – ending after 90 days with a mellow clean honey and vanilla character totally absent at one or two months. The technology used by the mass producers has completely changed this pattern of brewing. Modern fermentations tend to be at a higher temperature- nearer 15ºC – and are therefore faster, drastically reducing the lager period to a point where it is questionable whether these products of “warm fermentation”, as the method is known, are lagers or not.
You may have thought that one way to restore lager conditioned beer to its place in the Parthenon of European beers styles would be to persuade the EU to define it according to traditional values and processes. You can forget that. Recently the EU gave beer brewed in the Czech Republic, one of the heart lands of lager conditioned beer, a protected label status. This defines the beer but astoundingly to my mind allows the watering of beer
