Pre-Prohibition Lager: More Nostalgic Than Authentic

Well, Anchor brewed a bottom fermented steam beer and porter (eventually switching to top fermenting ale yeast for the latter), River City Brewing Co., Sacramento, CA. (1980 - same year as SN) River City Gold was a lager - the owner/brewer Jim Schuelter was a former Schlitz brewmaster.

Other early "craft" lager brewers of the 1980s included Cheasbay (VA), Kuefner (Robert Kuefner was German-trained, ex-AB), Vernon Valley (NJ), Kemper (WA), Kessler (MT), Sprecher (W), Stoudt (PA) and Reinheitsgebot (TX).

And, of course, many of the early contract/craft brands were bottom-fermented (since that was the norm in the contractor breweries like Pittsburgh, Matt, Schell, The Lion, etc.), like New Amsterdam Amber Beer, Dock Street Amber Beer, Pennsylvania Pilsner, Manhattan Gold and... oh, yeah - Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

Some of the old line pre-craft brewers were also offering more traditional lagers during the same period - beers like Huber's Augsburger line, Matt's Saranac 1888, Hudepohl's Christian Moerlein beers, etc.

But, in general, I'd say the early craft brewers were more interested in the reviving and offering nearly dead ale and other top-fermented beer styles than "reclaiming" lager.

 

Yet I've had adjunct lagers from places like Japan, and they couldn't be further from some of the examples here. Same with some of the "crafty" options. Is it a matter of type of adjuncts used? Percentages?

Were there any ales that survived prohibition? I recently read of something called "Albany Ale", but fear it went out before anyone alive today was born!

What happened to those breweries, anyway? And what active brewery today comes closest to the "original" American lager(s)? It seems many of those heritage breweries exist east of the Mississippi (which makes sense).

 

I'll throw Brooklyn Lager in there, too. Actually, it was the only beer I can remember that claimed some sort of Pre-pro lineage. The article makes it sound like that sort of thing was so commonplace that he had to set things straight.

 

Percentages and hops- the amount of corn was around 20%, and they were hopped like a Pilsner would be (that's the key, imo). Here's an article on the subject by George Fix, who was a great proponent of these types of beer:
https://www.morebeer.com/articles/Pre-Prohibition_American_Lagers

 

Percentage of adjuncts in the grain bill is indeed a factor. Contemporary AAL beers can be 40-ish% adjunct while the AAL beers before Prohibition would be more like 20%.

And the type of adjunct is also a factor. Rice is more flavor neutral vs. corn (corn grits, flaked corn). Some brewers (e.g., Miller) utilize corn syrup and that would be more flavor neutral.

There are not many commercial breweries that produce Classic American Pilsners. The one brewery/brand that I can recommend is Straub 1872 Pre-Prohibition Lager. I discussed this beer in a New Beer Sunday thread:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/new-beer-sunday-week-678.559974/#post-5884158

Cheers!

 

Yeah, lots of ale brands and breweries were revived after Repeal, though in some cases, it's likely some of the ales were new recipes. In NJ, there was Ballantine (in particular their XXX was an old label with a new post-Repeal formula), Feigenspan, Hensler, Krueger.

In NY Beverwyck (Albany), Utica Club, Genesee and other Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo brewers.

New England was a particular ale-centric area, with countless ale breweries re-opened. (Some of the IPA and Stock Ales can be found at my page, which doesn't even attempt to list beers just labeled "Ale" or the various, lighter cream/sparkling ales of the period).

A couple of the most prominent ales of the pre-Pro era, like Evans in NY and Frank Jones in NH lasted only briefly after Repeal.

 

That tends to be the ratio suggested for modern recipes of CAP's but Wahl & Henius' American Handybook..., under the heading AMERICAN LAGER BEERS wrote:

...and, of course, there were still some brewers making all-malt lagers.

By the early 1890s (according to Cochran) Pabst's "standard" lagers were "...about one part corn meal to two parts malt by weight".

 

Yeah, I skipped Brooklyn because it was mentioned in the OP and, I guess, for me it came slightly after that first wave of craft and contract-craft beers - and, given that it, too, was brewed by Matt, it does fit in with those other ale-like lagers of the contract-brewed craft brands, like NAAB and Samuel Adams Boston Lager which, in reference to having a pre-Pro heritage, Koch claimed "... the recipe for Samuel Adams was actually passed down from his great-great grandfather, Louis Koch (19th century St. Louis brewer)."

 

I shouldn't have implied all used flaked maize but a substanitial proportion did use corn/maize to lighten up the beer. I think the big beer companies started to change their beer to appeal to the largest possible number of consumers, thus any distinctive flavors were to be toned down as to virtually eliminate them. I don't think the addition of corn or rice necessarily caused this

 

Yeah, that's been exactly the dynamic that's been in place for as long as I've been drinking beer (and no doubt longer). To appeal to the most people you start to gravitate towards the lowest common denominator. The hops have definitely declined over the decades, and A-B even acknowledged it a ways back.

 

Ah... these are starting to remind me of the whole "blended vs single malt" discussions.

How much hops are imported from Europe versus grown here (and how many are European in origin vs American)?

I wonder if we'll ever see a return to those numbers.

Huh! I wonder how they would have fared against their European counterparts, or modern American takes on ales. Is "October ale" even a style? A shame so many are now gone. What was the reason for their lack of success?

 

Well, Wahl & Henius (American Handy-Book of the Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades [1902])
wrote:
"It was Anton Schwarz who first advised the employment of rice and subsequently of Indian corn, which is so abundant in this country. The stubborn perseverance with which he sought to convert the conservative brewers to his ideas and finally succeeded in so doing and, last, not least, the discovery of suitable methods for scientifically applying them, entitle him to be called the founder of raw cereal brewing in the United States."

Most early mid-19th centyr US brewers who used corn or rice as an adjunct were trying to reproduce the Bohemian-style/pilsners that were rapidly gaining popularity in Europe, by using the native US protein-rich 6-row barley malt.

Anheuser-Busch's use of rice in their 1876 creation of Budweiser is probably the most well-known (and studied) US adjunct lager but AB was not a particularly "big beer" company at the time. #32 in the US in 1877, brewing 45,000 bbl. - about 1/3 the size of the largest Geo. Ehret and Pabst. They weren't even the largest in St. Louis - Lemp held that record.

 

As much as "NEIPA" or "Hazy IPA" or even "DIPA" are today, I suppose. "Beer styles" were much more broadly defined in the past with lots of overlaps. A beer marketed as a 'Brown October Ale' would likely be darker but otherwise similar than the same brewer's stock ale or India pale ale.

"Lager beer" - and the preference of most beer drinkers at the time for lighter and lighter beers in general.

But, Ballantine was among the largest breweries in the country from Repeal into the early 1960s - peaking at #3 for most of the post-War/mid'50s period - when ale was still ~50% of their barrelage.

And many other large lager brewers in the northeast had or added ales to their portfolio after Repeal - including Ruppert, Schaefer, Rheingold, Trommers, C. Schmidt, Pabst, Duqeusne, etc.

 

I would agree that the percentage of adjuncts would typically be larger than 20%, from everything I've read the typical ratio appears to be a third adjuncts and the rest malt.

Hantke (page 505) references an article from the Wochenschrift für brauerei:

In Schackhöfer's accounts of brewing in the US by the 1890s he describes some of the brewing methods of Schlitz, among which is for a 12% adjunct lager beer of which he writes:

In the same report he also describes a few different mashing processes with adjuncts of which a few he himself took part in overseeing. The first one used 34.85% adjuncts for a brew of 130 barrels 13.1 degree wort, the grist consisted of 4300 pounds of malt and 2300 pounds of grits. His second example used 40% adjuncts. 10000 pounds of malts was used along with 6800 pounds of grits. This produced 350 barrels of 12.5 degree wort. His third example used 43.1% grits, 7000 pounds of malt and 5300 pounds of grits. This produced 300 barrels of 11 degree wort.

He then describes a general process for using flaked corn, Cerealine, where he writes that typically 40% of Cerealine is used along with 60% of malt. He writes that a larger percentage of Cerealine is not to be recommended since the saccharification will be incomplete, the lautering will be more difficult and the color will be very pale.

 

So do you think the same thing will happen with craft American ales in the future? It might be too early to tell. Seems lagers are favored all around the world, outside of specific Northwest European countries.Which is strange, since they take longer and take more effort to make just right...

 

You might be interested in reading what Ron (@patto1ro) wrote about October beer on his website:

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2008/08/october-beer.html

Cheers!

 

The number 1 selling beer in the UK is Carling Lager.

Cheers!

 

Love reading old craft beer articles to see how perceptions and consumer knowledge have changed over time.

When this article was posted...I could not legally drink beer.

 

While I myself do not have much experience with Japanese beers I will say this. Not all countries' beer markets move in the same exact direction or at the same pace. You will usually find that there is, or has been, a process of standardization when it comes to the mainstream beer style of a particular country, and that the general flavor profile (not the taste itself but the general profile) is usually similar within certain limits. But that standard is not exactly the same inbetween countries, and all countries have not ended up at the same place with the same beer standard.

I remember watching a documentary about Beck's brewery in Germany where they had a clip of a beer tasting by the employees and one of the employees was saying how the flavor preference of different countries wasn't the same, the Japanese liked a slightly bitter beer "to go with their fish dishes". I thought that was interesting, though the three Japanese brands I have had have been mildly bitter, less so than a typical European adjunct lager beer, but more so than the American adjunct beers sold here where I fail to percieve a bitterness at all.

 

Yeah, although the percentage of the adjunct used by most brewers apparently crept up after Repeal into the 1970s, according to the 1977 edition of the MBAA's The Practical Brewer:

"Although some brewers would hesitate to use more than 30% adjunct (on an extract basis), most U.S. brewers are probably closer to a level of 40% with some very successful brewers using a rate as high as 50%."

Schaefer Beer had a reputation of having a high percentage of corn in the industry - but I've never found specific source for that rumor, except for the fact that a 1970s booklet "The Story of Quality - All About Schaefer Beer" twice listed corn as the "second ingredient" after water. Tasted good to me (well, primarily as a draught product).

M. Jackson in the early 1980s put AB's Budweiser at 70% malt and Michelob at 80%.