Pre-Prohibition Lager: More Nostalgic Than Authentic

I agree that Pre-Pro Lagers were not all malt beers but this misses the point. They can be and many were delicious. They are quite different than modern mass produced American lagers.
- There is a big difference between using 20% corn in a grist and using the 40 - 60% corn as some of the big bland industrial beers are said to use.
- Some Pre-Pro Lagers were pushing 6% ABV and were not whimpy tipples.
- They tended to use some European hops and generally more hops than the current post Pro style.
- 6 row barley doesn't taste bad by any stretch, don't be afraid of it.
I think this style deserves a major renaissance.

 

Corn is bad, mmmmkay?

 

Yeah, I thought noting the use of corn as an adjunct was an odd emphasis, too, given that, to me at least, when people today say "Pre-Pro Lager" they are specifically talking about the use of 6-row malt with corn as an adjunct.

Finishing the article, I noticed that "Reading Beer" was one of his recipe's examples.

"Huh? That beer's still around?" Checked the date on the article - December, 2009.

 

I wonder how you know that they were delicious. Just how old are you really?

 

Couldn't Anchor's California Lager be considered a pre-prohibition lager? No corn in that recipe.

 

“No, the point here is that Pre-Pro Lager is a glossy dream, a wistful look back to a style that largely never existed.” What!?! There were indeed lagers brewed prior Prohibition and while some of the lagers were all malt the vast majority of the lagers brewed used adjuncts. We homebrewers refer to these beers as being Classic American Pilsners. These beers would have been brewed with something like 20% corn/rice, domestic hops would have been used for bittering but they would have used imported European hops (e.g., Saaz, etc,) for flavor/aroma additions.

I am uncertain what Don Russell (aka Joe Sixpack) was trying to accomplish with this article.

Cheers!

 

He was just reinforcing the Craft Beer Mythos (of the time) that anything not all-malt was inferior. Oh, and that's what we were rebelling against.

Again:

 

If I'm not mistaken, you're actually agreeing with him. He's not saying that lagers didn't exist before prohibition, he's saying that the majority used adjuncts. He's accusing* the modern commercial marketing of "pre-pro lager" as being romantic fiction.

*Perhaps I should say "accused" for a decade old article.

 

Hmm, I suppose that could be it?

But the issue here is that it is not a fiction that there were all malt lagers brewed in the US before prohibition. For example, Piels beers before prohibition were all malt - styles like:

• Kapuziner
• Muenchener
• Dortmunder
• Pilsner

Cheers!

 

Missed that -- how did this throwback article get resurrected? And why were there no comments 10 years ago?

 

The article is a bit clumsy, and he clearly thinks that adjuncts make an inferior brew, but I translate it as: "The typical modern commercial pre-pro lager is wishful marketing compared to what most pre-pro lagers were really like."

 

That sounds like a reasonable interpretation.

Cheers!

 

Were all of these threads really around then or were they all really created a few years ago? I thought the latter but I could be ignorant. @rrebold had an interest in it so he/she found it and made their first post on BA.

 

The articles have been around for quite a while. A few years ago they were assembled into an electronic archive which could then be accessed by folks on the site. It appears that each article, back to and including 07, has a button so a reader can comment and create a new thread, etc.

 

We began archiving content from back issues of the magazine (formerly print only) in 2015. With a few exceptions, we republished it online exactly as it originally appeared, including the publication date. Then, in April 2017 we enabled comments for all articles. I hope that clears up any confusion, and I hope you'll agree that the overall quality of our content has steadily improved over time. As always, we appreciate your interest and support.

 

If I was starting a brewery, I would start with two styles. A Classic American Pilsner and American Cream Ale, both styles used flaked maize as an adjunct.

 

Well, some US-brewed pilsners and cream ales, both pre-Pro and post-Repeal, used flaked corn as an adjunct, but both styles were also brewed with corn grits (thus, the need for a separate cereal cooker), corn syrup and/or rice, and there were also all-malt examples of both styles.

 

You know, I was thinking about this some nights ago. Its weird to me that the first craft brewers in the US didn't start with "heritage" lager styles which exist in small pockets across the country. Seeing how popular it is everywhere, you'd think they'd want to "reclaim" that, first.

 

I think the article in the OP is a good example of why they didn't, there was a notion or belief among many that using an adjunct in the recipe automatically made the beer flavorless at best, or even bad tasting. There has also been a lack of understanding as to how brewing standards have changed over time, so that some people seem to think that an adjunct lager beer of today is much the same as it would have been in say the 1950s, 1930s, 1910s, or 1880s. That no major changes have been made to the brewing of beer over this period of time. Those two factors taken together have as far as I can see worked against the brewing of old school American lager beers. Perhaps now we are starting to see a rehabilitation of the idea of using adjuncts in brewing classical styles, but I don't think the process is completed by any means.