Piels Beer - coming back to NY

just read the Wiki on you guys, interesting stuff! Are you familiar with Braven? They're doing similar things in Bushwick.

 

i would definitely give your beer a shot for the sake of history and being local.
good luck to you!

 

If you were to brew a beer like the Piels of 1958 (or earlier) I would definitely buy and drink it.

The beer should be brewed with mostly North American six-row malt along with some corn (e.g., 20% flaked corn), Cluster Hops used for bittering and European hops (e.g., Hallertau Mittelfruh) for flavor/aroma.

Some specs provided below:

Piels Real Draft (1958)

OG: 11.6 °P 1.047

FG: 1.011

AE: 3.07

IBUs: 24

SRM: 2.4

http://www.morebeer.com/brewingtechniques/library/backissues/issue2.1/janktable.html#bushwick

If the intention is to produce a more contemporary AAL (e.g., something like Narragansett Lager) I would have absolutely zero interest in drinking a recreated Piels beer; there are already more than enough watery yellow fizzy beers out there.

Cheers!

 

Without clicking I can guess that's Ben Jankowski's Bushwick Pilsner article ; very nice one. I'm all aboard that train. The interest will be there if enough care is taken to recapture that bit of history. But if it's just another character less beer with an old name attached there will be disappointment.

From the sound of the op, though, it looks promising.

 

Do you have access to actual brewing logbooks? That would be the best source of information to reconstruct a 'back in the day' Piels beer.

I would also encourage you to not constrain yourself to just using a NY contract brewery. It is likely that a brewery like F.X. Matt could produce a fine quality historical Piels beer but there are a number of other quality contract breweries nearby:

• Two Roads in Stratford, CT
• Susquehanna Brewing Company in Pittston, PA
• City Brewing (formerly Rolling Rock/Latrobe) in Latrobe, PA

I would suggest that construct a first draft SOW/contract and 'shop around'.

Cheers!

Jack

 

Well, allright then! I plan on being among your first customers. Best wishes and keep us posted here as things progress.

Hopefully whatever success Anchor has had with their California Lager carries over to Piels as well.

 

Ironically I discussed Piels Real Draft two days ago in another thread:

“The first taste of beer I had was a 'swig' (that is what my father called a sip) of Piels Real Draft when I was a child.”

http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/neipa-yeast-experiment.399641/#post-4640069

Cheers!

P.S. @jesskidden, do you have information on Piels beer from the 50's?

 

Good luck to you. I'm sure you know that people (including members of the Liebmann family) have tried to bring back the Rheingold brand at least 3 times with no luck. My advice would be to brew Piels to the oldest recipe you can find. I'll buy a 6er in any case.http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/31/nyregion/bringing-back-a-taste-of-brooklyn-rheingold.html

 

''We'll try to strike a balance between the nostalgia that's inherent in the brand, and making it contemporary and relevant to the younger adult customer,'' said Mike Mitaro, a former executive of Labatt USA, the American subsidiary of the Canadian brewer, who came up with the idea of reviving Rheingold. He is the president of the new Rheingold Brewing Company, which acquired the trademark from its most recent owner, Stroh Brewery Company."

The "contemporary" part is what I personally find unworthy for this latest try to make a business viable Rheingold beer. Beer drinkers will just buy PBR or Miller High Life or... instead of this 'new' beer.

I agree 100% with your suggestion of "My advice would be to brew Piels to the oldest recipe you can find." The first Piels beer was brewed in 1883. Brewing an authentic Classic American Pilsner (Pre-Prohibition American Adjunct Lager) would be ideal here IMO.

Cheers!

 

Piels was my grandmother's beer. I would get a swig or two everyone once in awhile during our nightly 500 rummy games down in Wildwood. For that reason alone I will try it.
Good luck and thanks for giving me an excuse to reminisce this evening.

 

My bar is Bed-Stuy is the first bar in the area, and because of that we have a lot of customers who are new to craft beer. We get many people coming in asking for Bud Light, Coors Light, Corona, etc, etc. For that reason, we have one of our eighteen lines dedicated to lagers/pilsners. It's by far our most popular line. The point is, there is a huge market for non-marco drinkable lagers/pils

 

But if you have Bud Light on that line, it is you number 1 selling beer of the 18 lines?

Cheers!

 

My point is that we make sure to always have an accessible MICRO lager/pils. I'm sure Bud Light would sell, as it would at any bar, but we obviously won't ever serve that. If someone comes in and asks for a Bud Light, we don't want to say no and have them leave. We want to be able to say 'we don't serve Bud Light but why don't you try xxxx'. They try it, they like it, they're converted to craft beer. Maybe next time they'll get a more adventurous beer, even if it's still a lager. For example, right now, we have Flagship Metroplitan Lager right now, along with Evil Twin Mosaic Single Hop IPL.

 

Do you have bottled/canned beers like Bud Light that you can sell to your customers?

Cheers!

 

Well said, agree 100%

 

we have Narragansett cans for $5, 18 lines of craft