The Enegren production team specializes in lager, and their consensus favorite beer might well be the helles.
“We call it The Lightest One because it’s the lightest beer we have,” says Chris Enegren, cofounder and head brewer. There is also a bit of strategy behind it: At bars, people often ask for “the lightest one.” When that happens, it’s natural for the bartender to reach for this one—and that’s by design, Enegren says.
He has a specific idea of what makes a great helles. “With German brewing in general, it’s really asking yourself the question: With as much machinery and technology as you can, how can you take two basic ingredients and get the most amount of flavor out of them?” he says. “How do you [create] complexity without making it overly sweet, to the point where you can’t just constantly be drinking it?”
With those tenets to guide him, Enegren set out to build the perfect drinkable beer.
“Let’s not put a whole bunch of caramel malt in it,” he says. “Other things in the mash can give it that complexity. We do things like a decoction mash to get a little bit more of that Maillard reaction, a sweetness that isn’t like a clean, sugary sweetness, but a body,” he says.
Enegren points out that helles should have a bit more body than pils. “But it’s not a heavy beer,” he says. “Side by side, you don’t have the hop bitterness in the helles, so it makes it feel a bit more malty.
“The result is that, to sour people, to double IPA people, they kind of look at it and say that it’s just a lighter beer,” he says. “But to someone brewing this style, we’re looking at it like, that’s freaking perfect. It’s got everything, perfectly balanced together. You can drink a liter mug, and you’re asking for more of it. You’re not sick of a flavor or wanting something else. That’s German brewing in a nutshell.”
Focusing on Process and Drinkability
Enegren was an engineering major in college and went on to be an engineer at a pharmaceutical company. That helped shape his approach to beer.
“Instead of making complex recipes with a whole bunch of malts and bacteria, the way I make things is to use machinery and work that side of it,” he says. Working on process controls made lager brewing appealing to him.
Enegren was working at Premier Stainless Systems in Escondido while his brewery, opened in 2011, had a three-barrel system. That allowed him to put his engineering background to use, simultaneously designing his own 15-barrel brewhouse from the ground up. Essentially customized to make lagers, that brewery went online in January 2015.
The beer that’s in the glass today didn’t just happen overnight. It was an evolution of learning about German brewing and trying new methods, techniques, and ingredients.
In 2014, Enegren was including some Munich malt in The Lightest One, trying to give it more “beefiness,” he says. The hopping was all over the place, too. “We had some whirlpool hops in the recipe,” he says. “I think we were overthinking it. … In American craft brewing, we can kind of get ourselves caught [thinking] that a beer has to be complex. And over in Europe, they’re making it super easy and basic.”
Enegren says he has a practical, real-world way of evaluating his beer. “We’re tasting the beer off the tank, but the evaluation doesn’t really come until you’re not thinking about beer,” he says. “You’re just sitting out in the beer garden, having some beer, talking to people, and you just kind of notice what’s going on. I’ll get to the point where I think, ‘Damn, this beer is perfect.’ That’s when I know it’s working.”
That moment isn’t always sublime. “Other times, I want something different,” he says. “If we’re sitting out on a nice, beautiful day, why do I need something different? There’s something wrong with this beer that makes me not want to have a second, third, or fourth.”
When he finds his beer less than perfect, it’s always because it’s not as drinkable as it should be. That’s what led Enegren to cut back the Munich I in The Lightest One over time and eventually eliminate it. Today, the beer is 100 percent pilsner malt.
The hopping also saw an adjustment over time. “We started looking at the hopping, and some of the flavors weren’t [right],” he says. “We started stepping back the hops in the whirlpool.” Now, the beer gets only two hop additions—one at 60 minutes and one at 20 minutes left in the boil. The hops are all Hallertauer Mittelfrüh.
One of the original parts of the process that hasn’t changed is filtration. “We were always filtering our lagers because that was something we just always thought was the most important thing, and I still stand by that,” Enegren says.
It’s not things like horizontal lagering tanks that are the key to his process. “Start with filtration first, then work your way back,” he says. “With that delicate of a beer, you don’t want anything else in there to take from that. So, the yeast flavors, the haze particulates, you’ve got to get rid of that stuff. That’s why we filter it.”
The brewery uses a pressure-relief filter packed with Perlite. “It’s a super-fine grade,” Enegren says. He adds that he doesn’t use finings because they might interfere with desirable attributes such as head retention. “We filter out all those tiny things that go against all the work we’ve done on getting the most complexity out of that pilsner malt,” he says.
From Decoction to Spunding
Decoction mashing was another big step for the brewery.
“These are all very subtle things,” Enegren says. “The masses may not see them. If you’re grabbing a six-pack and just having a beer outside, people may not be like, ‘Oh, it’s totally decocted! Dang, this is great.’ But it’s something that I’ll notice, and if I notice that, it’s worth every penny to chase that.”
Enegren says it’s his and his team’s responsibility to make the beer as perfect as they can—and if he can find a way to make it better, they’re going to go for it.
At one point, after he decocted a pilot batch, his brother came in and was drinking a liter of the beer. “He says to me, ‘I can’t stop drinking this, there’s something different about it. What did you do?’” Enegren says he played dumb at first, pretending it was the same batch, while further quizzing his brother.
“He told me that it tasted like it had more body to it, but that there wasn’t really any sweetness in it.” Eventually he fessed up, and his brother’s response was, “Don’t ever not decoct a beer.” From that point forward, decoction mashing was standard at the brewery. “It takes a painfully long time to make any beer we have here,” Enegren says. “But you know, it’s worth it.”
He also gives credit to Ashleigh Carter and Bill Eye of Denver’s Bierstadt Lagerhaus as brewers focused on German styles, and as friends. “I learned a ton from them,” Enegren says.
Another important focus area for the brewery is healthy fermentation. The Enegrens’ dad is a retired biochemist who helped them set up an in-house lab, which is important for a brewery that uses the same yeast for up to 10 generations. “We use cell counts, we stain everything, we can tell if our harvests are good,” Enegren says.
Besides monitoring attenuation and pH, among other things, they pay close attention to diacetyl precursors as a guide for when it’s time for a fresh pitch. “A big teller of our yeast is the VDK,” Enegren says. “A good, healthy yeast is going to pull all that VDK back into itself and drop out of solution. So, if we see that we hit our numbers and our attenuation is perfect, but it took us an extra day or two to clear VDK, then we know with the next [generation], it might not work so well, so we’ll end up dumping that yeast.”
Going eight to 10 generations may be the norm, but there are exceptions—they won’t re-pitch from stronger bocks or dark lagers. The brewery also uses only fresh pitches for its hefeweizen, even though it’s more expensive; they don’t like the flavors as much when they re-pitch it. “It’s night and day,” Enegren says.
The brewery uses spunding valves to create natural carbonation for all its beers. Lager fermentation runs in the high 40s °F (8–9°C). In another change from the early days, the team no longer raises that toward the end of fermentation for a diacetyl rest. “Looking at some of the old—and even current—fermentation schedules in German brewing,” Enegren says, “we kind of thought, ‘Why don’t we just let the yeast clear up on its own?’”
Since that fateful decision to go all-in on lagers (plus a hefeweizen), the brewery has grown. A decade ago, it was producing fewer than 1,000 barrels. Last year it reached 5,500 barrels. In 2024, Enegren says he expects them to produce a bit more than 6,000.
That doesn’t mean the team is resting easy. “If you screw anything up in these beers, it’s just shining straight through the beer,” Enegren says. “You can’t hop your way out of DMS or diacetyl on these beers. You’re just screwed.”
Brewing the Lagers They Want to Drink: An Anecdote
Other than drinking its beer, the best way to understand Enegren Brewing’s commitment to lager may be a story from about five years ago.
“Our distributor told us to stop making German-style beer because nobody likes it,” says cofounder and head brewer Chris Enegren. “They told us to make brut IPA because that’s what was popular.”
The suggestion threw him for a loop. “I was like, ‘Get the hell out of here,’” he says. “‘I don’t want to be in this industry anymore. I’m done! I’m going to go back to my job where the bullshit stops at five o’clock, when I can go home and have a weekend. [Not] brewing beer for the masses and a distributor that just wants to sell what is easy to a bartender that has 50 IPA taps.”
For brewers like Enegren, there’s more to the business than chasing after sales or the latest trend. “This job is a nightmare if you don’t like what you’re doing,” he says.
Lucky for him, he wasn’t alone in that sentiment. One of the co-owners, John Bird, had a different idea. He said, “‘That’s it. From now on the distributor is only getting German lager,’” Enegren says. Then, one of two things would happen: Either it would break the company, and they could all move on with their lives … or it might just work out, and the brewery could succeed by selling the beer they wanted to make and drink.
Fortunately, the latter scenario transpired. “Now that we’ve found a niche that we’re 100 percent focused on, it’s been wonderful,” Enegren says. “Brewers who make most of their money on hazy IPA will want to talk for hours about their pilsner. For us, that’s all we do. We’re having fun, our brewers love it. and we’re making all of the beers that we like to drink.”