Pilsner (or pilsener or pils) is a pale, golden lager, originally from the Czech Republic. It revolutionized the brewing world when it first appeared, thanks to its seductive golden glow and crisp, refreshing taste. And thanks to an oversight that meant neither the name nor the recipe was patented, it was quickly imitated around the world. Today, for most beer drinkers, pilsner is simply synonymous with lager. Imitation pilsners today account for 95% of global beer volume—although most of these beers share little of the character of the original.
Like Burton-on-Trent and Munich, the town of Plzeň (or Pilsen) in Bohemia, Czech Republic, is one of those rare towns where nature just happened to leave the perfect combination of ingredients lying around, and phenomenally gifted brewers happened to come along and find them.
The Czechs refer to beer as “Czech Bread”—they have always taken it incredibly seriously and drunk a great deal of it. But for most of beer’s history, the ability to brew beers to a high and consistent standard lagged behind the demands for quality. In the mid-19th century, the citizens of Pilsen were becoming increasingly concerned with the quality of their beer, culminating in 1838, when an entire season’s brew was solemnly poured away in front of the town hall.
Something had to be done, and the citizens came together to build a new state-of-the-art brewery, the Bürger Brauerei (Citizens’ Brewery), uniting their skill and resources—and stealing as many ideas and resources as they could from the neighboring Bavarians. Martin Stelzer was commissioned to design and build the new brewery. He traveled extensively around Bavaria and met the man he knew he wanted as brewmaster, Josef Groll.
At the time, brown Bavarian lager was the most celebrated beer style across Europe, and Groll was briefed to recreate a Bavarian-style lager at the new Bürger Brauerei. He recruited Bavarian brewing assistants and barrel makers and brought Bavarian lager yeast with him.
But what came out of the tanks in October 1842 was not Bavarian beer. The citizens of Pilsen were handed a “golden beverage with thick snow-white foam…[and] the drinkers having tried its sharp delicious taste, welcomed it with such cheers that had never been experienced in Pilsen before.”
Bavarian skill had met Czech ingredients. Moravian barley is sweet, Bohemian Saaz hops have little bitterness but a lot of aroma, and the very soft, sandstone-filtered Plzen water allows these flavors to come through. Soon pilsner beer was being discussed excitedly throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond.
Perhaps as a result of their intoxicated delight, the burghers of Pilsen didn’t get around to trademarking “pilsner bier” until 1859, by which time there were many other beers on the market referring to themselves as pilsner-style beers. Belatedly, in 1898, the Bürger Brauerei registered “the original pilsner” (Pilsner Urquell) as a trademark.
It would be incorrect to refer to Pilsner Urquell as the world’s first golden beer (as the brewery often does) because color is a function of malt. English pale ale brewers had pioneered the use of pale malt decades previously, and Bavarian lager brewers freely admitted to stealing the knowledge to create it. But pilsner was certainly a new style of beer that had not been seen before, and its popularity spread rapidly.
The birth of pilsner lager coincided with the greatest period of scientific innovation in the history of brewing. Railways meant beer could be transported across greater distances, and information traveled faster. Refrigeration meant lager no longer had to be conditioned in cool caves or deep cellars. And the work of Louis Pasteur, and those influenced by him, led to the isolation of single strain yeasts that could guarantee product consistency.
Pilsners are generally distinguished from other lager styles by their more assertive hop character. Within the style, there are two main geographic variants: Czech pilsners (such as Pilsner Urquell or Žatec) tend to be darker in color but delicate in flavor, with floral, grassy aromas, while German pilsners (such as Bitburger, Warsteiner, and Veltins) can be more bitter and earthy and use a variety of European Noble hops as well as the beloved Czech Saaz.
The Netherlands and Belgium are also home to world-famous “international pilsner” brands such as Heineken or Jupiler, and these tend to be sweeter with considerably less hop character.
Pilsner created the template for the industrial golden lager that dominates the global beer market and as such it is often misunderstood. Many so-called pilsners have none of the character that truly defines the style, having had their maturation time cut and flavor-giving ingredients reduced sometimes to the point of extinction. Consequently, the first encounter with a true pilsner can be a life-changing revelation to the drinker who has only previously experienced mass-produced pale imitations.