Pale lager is a very pale-to-golden-colored lager beer with a well-attenuated body and a varying degree of noble hop bitterness.
The brewing process for this beer developed in the mid-19th century, when Gabriel Sedlmayr took British pale ale brewing and malt making techniques back to the Spaten Brewery in Germany and applied them to existing lagering methods. The result was a more stable and consistent but still dark beer. This technique was applied by Josef Groll, the famous Bavarian brewmaster, in the city of Pilsen, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) using less-roasted grains, resulting in the first pale lager Pilsner Urquell in 1842.
The resulting Pilsner beers—pale yellow or golden colored, lean and stable—gradually spread around the globe to become the most common form of beer consumed in the world today.
History
Bavarian brewers in the sixteenth century were required by law to brew beer only during the cooler months of the year. In order to have beer available during the hot summer months, beers would be stored (lagered) in caves and stone cellars, often under blocks of ice.
In the period 1820–1830, a brewer named Gabriel Sedlmayr II the Younger, whose family was running the Spaten Brewery in Bavaria, went around Europe to improve his brewing skills. When he returned, he used what he had learned to get a more stable and consistent lager beer. The Bavarian lager was still different from the widely known modern lager; due to the use of dark malts it was quite dark, representing what is now called Dunkel beer or the stronger variety, bock beer.
The new recipe of the improved lager beer spread quickly over Europe. In particular Sedlmayr's friend Anton Dreher adopted new kilning techniques that enabled the use of lighter malts to improve the Viennese beer in 1840–1841, creating a rich amber-red colored Vienna-style lager.
Description
Pale lagers tend to be dry, lean, clean-tasting and crisp. Flavors may be subtle, with no traditional beer ingredient dominating the others. Hop character (bitterness, flavor, and aroma) ranges from negligible to a dry bitterness from noble hops. The main ingredients are water, Pilsner malt and noble hops, though some brewers use adjuncts such as rice or corn to lighten the body of the beer.
Depending on style, pale lagers typically contain 4-6% alcohol by volume.
Variations
Pilsner
Pale lager was developed in the mid 19th century, when Gabriel Sedlmayr took some British pale ale brewing techniques back to the Spaten Brewery in Germany, and started to modernize continental brewing methods. In 1842 a new modern lager brewery Měšťanský pivovar was built in Pilsen, a city in western Bohemia in what is now the Czech Republic. The first known example of a golden lager, Pilsner Urquell, was brewed there by Josef Groll. This beer proved so successful that other breweries followed the trend, using the name Pilsner. Breweries now use the terms "lager" and "Pilsner" interchangeably, though pale lagers from the Czech Republic and Germany categorized as pilsner tend to have more evident noble hop aroma and dry finish than other pale lagers.
Dortmunder Export
With the success of Pilsen's golden beer, the town of Dortmund in Germany started brewing pale lager in 1873. As Dortmund was a major brewing center, and the town breweries grouped together to export the beer beyond the town, the brand name Dortmunder Export became known. Today, breweries in Denmark, the Netherlands, and North America also brew pale lagers labelled as Dortmunder Export.
Helles
"" or "" is a traditional German pale lager, produced chiefly in Southern Germany, particularly Munich. The German word can be translated as "bright", "light", or "pale". In 1894, the Spaten Brewery in Munich noticed the commercial success of the pale lagers Pilsner and Dortmunder Export; Spaten utilized the methods that Sedlmayr had brought home over 50 years earlier to produce their own pale lager they named in order to distinguish it from the darker, sweeter or ("dark beers") from that region. Initially other Munich breweries were reluctant to brew pale-coloured beer, though, as the popularity of pale beers grew, so other breweries in Munich and Bavaria gradually began brewing pale lager either using the name or .
Pale lagers termed , , or gold remain popular in Munich and Bavaria, with a local inclination to use low levels of hops, and an abv in the range 4.7% to 5.4%; Munich breweries which produce such pale lagers include Löwenbräu, , Augustiner Bräu, Paulaner, and Hacker-Pschorr, with Spaten-Franziskaner-Bräu producing a 5.2% abv pale lager called .