Good vienna lagers

The sierra nevada one Is damn good. But I've only seen it once in a 2014 variety pack? It was delicious. However Great Lakes Elliot Ness is still the best Vienna I've ever had and it should be available in bulk anywhere in the Midwest - east coast range. I hear some people love Boston Lager, but for me it doesn't touch Elliot Ness. GL may be the best lager brewery in craft beer.

 

It is a very good interpretation of a Lagerbier that you would get in and around Bamberg. One of the two women mentioned on the label is Sabine Weyermann, of Weyermann Malting in Bamberg.

Edit - just agreeing and giving some background. It is not a Vienna or a Pilsner (that is way off the mark).

 

Well in the context of Vienna Lager beers and Vienna Märzen beers the Märzen beers would have had a higher alcohol content due to having a higher original gravity. Whereas a typical Vienna lager beer, or Bavarian lager beer, would typically be around 4.5%-4.8% abv (at a typical 13-14% OG), a Vienna Märzen would be typically around 4.9-5.5% abv (at around 15-16% OG). The degree of attenuation would be similarly low for both kinds of beer.

 

I haven't tried many, but Sierra Nevada's version is the best I've had.

 

If I were able to travel back in time (mid-1800s) to Vienna would there be two types of lager beer available for me to drink: one called a Vienna Lager and the other called Vienna Marzen?

Cheers!

 

Wisconsin Amber and Leinies Red are both good beers whatever you call them. Capital is a very overlooked and underrated brewery in my opinion.

 

Yes, you would be able to choose between say a Schwechater lagerbier or a Schwechater Märzenbier (Dreher's brewery) and you could expect the latter to be higher gravity and lagered for longer than the former. You would also find "abzugbier" from the same brewery (around 3.5-4% abv, 10-11% OG), a beer which to a modern person would be understood to be a lager beer (being bottom fermented and stored cold for several weeks), but back then would be considered a separate type of beer (although belonging to the same family of beer, being descended from Bavarian braunbier, schenk and lagerbier). With the abzug, lagerbier and märzenbier the Austrians had three different strenghts of bottom fermented beer, which also differed in their hopping rate and storage times (lowest to highest, shortest to longest).

 

Well, I would suggest that Vienna in the mid-1800s would have similarities to contemporary beer styles:

· Schwechater lagerbier would be the equivalent of what we could call a Vienna Lager today

· Schwechater Märzenbier would be the equivalent of what we would call an Oktoberfest (Marzen) beer today

Cheers!

 

George Fix wrote about about another, more rural style that he called Viennese Country Beer. It was around 6%, and used malted wheat in the grist.

 

On a conceptual level this is true. Similarly porters are still dark, pilsners are still bitter, American lager beers are still made with adjuncts. So in this sense the old styles still make sense, and commercial breweries take full advantage of this in their marketing ("unchanged since 1867", "we still use the same ingredients today", "we still make the beer the same way it has been made for centuries").

 

@Crusader, do you have information from the brewing logbooks for this 'style' of beer?

Cheers!

 

Can't say that I have. However they didn't have the same restrictions on brewing with different types of grains in Austria Hungary as in Bavaria, breweries were free to use adjuncts if they wished (for example, Ludwig Häcker who wrote about his travels to the US in the 1860s owned a brewery in Hungary which produced beer using corn as an adjunct). After 1855 taxation in Austria Hungary was based on the original gravity (with a different tax rate per percent plato) rather than the malt used, so the government cared about how strong the wort was, not what it was made out of.

 

Would Ludwig Häcker have imported that corn from North America? If so, would this have been an economical transaction (cost of corn and cost of transport)?

Cheers!

 

According to an article written by Häcker in the Bayerische Bierbrauer from 1872, in the year 1864 almost an equal amount of corn and barley was grown in Austria-Hungary.

 

Here is another article from a publication called Zeitschrift für die gesamte staatswissenschaft ("publication for the entire political science") from 1864 which discusses corn and paper made from corn:

"Another use for corn can here be brought to our attention. Since about 9 years L. Häcker in Hungarian-Altenburg is using corn also in beer brewing, and his process has already been adopted in several Austrian breweries. Although corn does not lend itself for malting, it can be used thusly, where a quantity of unmalted crushed corn, which can make up at least 25%, according to a laboratory experiment up to 50%, is added to the barley malt. The Altenburger brewery produces yearly some 24 000 eimer corn beer of the bottom fermented types which are common in Vienna (Märzen, Lager and Doppel beers). These same beers are said to be good, from pure malt beers difficult or not at all possible to distinguish and of very good keeping quality, in any case the yearly growing demand, and the shipments to the Banate, Triest, Schlesien and Galizien speaks to this. For the Austrian agriculture, which currently produces some 43 million metzen corn valued at 83 million gulden, the previously described use of corn is not to be underestimated."

 

I've been a huge fan of Capital for many years, but I can't say all of their beers are favorites. And while a good drinker, Wisconsin Amber doesn't hit the better points of a Vienna Lager like Firebrick does.

As far a Leinie's goes, I really haven't been impressed with their stuff for a very long time. Albeit, I hear some of the Big Eddy stuff is good, but I haven't taken the leap of faith with them yet.

 

Leinies is what it is. Good, but nothing spectacular. Most everything except the shandys, which I think are awful, are very solid and drinkable. My dad had a garage fridge full of Leinies original when I was growing up so I've always been a little biased towards them. Cheers!

 

I had. Devils Backbone Vienna Lager with my pizza it was pretty good as far as taste, but the beer lacked any head what so ever. Sorry I like thick creamy heads on my beers.

 

I think they would only have one beer and it would simply called beer.