In their laudable quest to improve the quality and availability of craft lagers, American brewers extol certain virtues: Cleanliness. Refreshment. Neutrality. Drinkers respond with enthusiasm, to the point that “crispy” has become something close to a fetish.
If the average beer fan knows anything about lager, it’s that it should be easy to drink, snappy, and—above all else—neutral. A successful lager fermentation often means that the fermentation itself is essentially imperceptible.
But what if it weren’t?
A small but vocal subset of brewers are wondering whether this pursuit of neutrality has left something by the wayside. Certain esters, sulfurs, even biotransformation—eschewing those additional layers of complexity in favor of something squeaky-clean leaves a degree of character and flavor on the table. Further, they argue, it’s not as if the brewers of Franconia and the Czech Republic don’t incorporate fermentation-derived compounds into the thumbprints of their beers.
These American brewers are on a mission to course-correct toward lagers with distinction, nuance, and a little bit of fermentation flair.
Finessing the Flair
“We choose to use lager yeast that is more expressive, that isn’t just a clean lager yeast,” says Chris Lohring, founder of Notch in Boston and Salem, Massachusetts, on a recent episode of the Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® Podcast. “Clean lager yeast is boring to me because I want that yeast to participate in the flavor profiles. I want that yeast to bring an aroma. I want that yeast to bring a flavor.”
Lohring’s view runs contrary to conventional wisdom—and to the preferences of some of the most celebrated lager brewers in the country. For many, the famously clean 34/70 strain is their firm bedrock.
That 34/70 strain “is great at highlighting our raw materials,” says Kevin Davey, the former Wayfinder brewmaster who cofounded Gold Dot in McMinnville, Oregon, with Heater Allen head brewer Lisa Allen. “It is very good at getting out of the fucking way, which, arguably, is the point of lager beer.”
It’s obviously an approach that works for Davey, Allen, and Gold Dot, whose helles scored an impressive 99/100 with our blind panel for this issue (see page 91). “When producing lagers, I am not looking for a yeast that brings a suitcase of flavor,” Davey says. “I am selecting one based on its ability to highlight my ingredients, to operate in my cellar with ease and repeatability, and be predictable. … Selecting yeasts that produce myriad flavor compounds is best left to the Belgian monks.”
Still, for Lohring and like-minded brewers, the path toward a more distinctive fermentation profile begins with the choice of yeast strain—but it doesn’t end there. Managing fermentation can be even more impactful than the strain itself. Besides choosing less common yeasts, they’re also tinkering with other aspects of brewing and cellaring—altering mash schedules, adding kräusen, forgoing CO2 pressure—to coax out desired attributes.
“Good brewers—whether of ales or lagers—don’t just look at ingredient names,” says Moh Saade, regional sales manager with yeast company Fermentis and former director of brewing operations at the Tank in Miami. “They understand that process is a significant factor. You can’t just define a strain—even W-34/70—as having a specific and particular profile if you’ve only tested it within a very narrow set of variables and conditions.”
While the famously neutral SafLager W-34/70 continues to grow in popularity, Saade says, so do the other three lager strains available from Fermentis. Those include the new E-30 strain—marketed as “the optimal yeast to reveal the esters in lager beers”—which the company introduced to meet brewer demand for more fermentation character.
Another example is Lallemand’s LalBrew NovaLager, a hybrid strain introduced in late 2022. It also promises “slight esters” and the expression of a beta-glucosidase enzyme that “can promote hop biotransformation and accentuate hop flavor and aroma.”
At Fermentis, Saade says he’s tracked brewers’ interest in strains that—while still within the lager universe—bring a touch more fruitiness to the table. That’s largely being driven by hop-forward lagers and crisp IPAs fermented with lager strains. Many brewers are looking to thread the needle between a recognizable lager snap and some degree of esters that harmonize with hops.
“The variation between them is still within the lager frame,” Saade says. “If you had a 0-to-10 scale for esters, and you compared a bunch of lager strains, maybe W-34/70 is a 1, and maybe S-189 is a 1.5, and S-23 is a 2. There’s no 10 in there.” These strains, he says, “leave room for effects based on your brewing process and your ingredient selection that could actually alter the profile more.”
These fermentation-driven flavors should be subtle—nobody’s trying to hide a hefeweizen in a helles. At Otherlands Beer in Bellingham, Washington, drinkers generally can’t put their finger on exactly what makes brewer Ben Howe’s lagers different. But he knows his house yeast—a German strain he adopted while brewing in Upper Franconia, though he declines to name its source—and he knows that how he applies it is a huge factor.
“For the most part, 90 percent of people, I think it’s a pleasant surprise,” Howe says. “I like to think that the fullness of character, the expression of yeast makes them say, ‘I’m getting lager beer, but more.’ It makes our beers different.”
Working Backward from the Glass
When Saade hears from craft brewers, they’re often looking for yeast strains that match up with the geographic origin of the style they want to brew. (He says he gets two requests a week for “Mexican lager yeast.”)
Saade says he wishes brewers would work in reverse: Start with the sensory or operational outcomes you’re trying to achieve in your lager—whether a certain degree of sulfur or a hyper-efficient fermentation—and then ask your supplier which strains and conditions might produce those effects.
For one thing, the true origins of those strains are often vague, unknown, or misunderstood. For another, a strain’s perceived origin isn’t useful shorthand for its sensory outcomes. A talented brewer, meanwhile, can manipulate various strains to get results not typically associated with them.
“I like tradition, but I don’t like dogma,” Saade says. “You’ll notice I didn’t say you have to use our strains for any certain style. … It’s about what the final result is, and there are multiple ways to skin a cat.”
That’s the approach preferred by Khris Johnson, head brewer and co-owner at Green Bench in St. Petersburg, Florida. He’s brewed with several strains over the years, including 34/70, but he’s settled on Augustiner as their house lager yeast. He likes it for its sulfur expression and light fruitiness.
Johnson says he had a certain character in mind, “that was what I wanted a core brand, a St. Pete pilsner, to taste like,” and Augustiner fit the bill. The result is Green Bench’s flagship Postcard Pils—an American lager with a touch of sulfur and fruitiness. (It was also one of our Best 20 Beers in 2021, with a recipe at beerandbrewing.com.)
Johnson says the subtle flavor evokes the brewery’s Florida setting and marries well with its floral Mt. Hood hops. “It almost hits as a kind of tropical character to me,” he says. “Not that the fruit [esters] are tropical, but having any sort of fruitiness fits with our climate. That said, it’s also a super-clean beer—it’s not out of bounds or over the top.””
Starting with the target—the desired attributes in the glass—also is how Trace Redmond says he operates as cofounder and brewer at Elder Piper Beer & Cider in Petoskey, Michigan. Redmond—whose brewing career has included stints at Founders in Michigan as well as Highland in North Carolina—says he chooses yeast the way a painter might choose colors. Generally, he’s looking to achieve some degree of yeast expression in his lagers.
Particularly in lagers with more hop character, Redmond says—such as a recent amber lager—he aims to incorporate esters that play up those hops, helping to offset lagers’ inherent tilt toward malt. That may be “a little contrarian,” he says, but those esters can pull the drinker’s attention toward the hops, creating another frame of reference for a malt-forward lager. “It kind of de-emphasizes the malt character, even though it’s an intensely malty beer,” he says. “It’s an interesting and different way of balancing.”
At Otherlands, Howe says he was inspired by the lagers he drank at Brauerei Zehendner in Mönchsambach, Germany. Once he was back Stateside, he spent months trying to find the same strain. He found it in a German catalog, tersely described as “a good bottom-fermenting yeast for producing lager beer with moderate sulfur, and good attenuating.” That description, he says, doesn’t capture the half of it.
“The beers I really fell in love with there—and I don’t know how offended some of my German brewer friends would be to hear me say this—but they remind me of farmhouse beers from Belgium,” Howe says. “Not in the details of the beer and their actual profile, but in that they’re big and expressive.” Until he spent time in Franconia, he says, he had no idea that lager could taste this way. “Instead of this clean thing that showcases your malt and hops, it’s this very yeast-driven, four-dimensional beer that has so much expression to it.”
Those sips outside of Bamberg changed not just Howe’s preferred yeast, but also how he manages the brewing and fermentation to coax out the personality he wants.
Managing Variables for Flavor and Fun
Traditionally, lager fermentation took place in open fermentors, including wide-open vats. Even today, most brewers in Czechia and Germany use modern tanks but don’t seal them, allowing the beer to “breathe” during primary fermentation. However, many American lager brewers have adopted an industrial trick: fermenting under pressure, speeding up the process while suppressing esters and higher alcohols.
Howe prefers to stick with the traditional method, embracing the aromas and flavors that result. He says he picked this up from his time in Franconia, where he never saw brewers ferment lagers under pressure. He loves the results in his own brewhouse.
“There’s this character in some beers I really love from Franconia and Bamberg, like rising dough,” he says, “almost like you’re making sourdough bread at home and you’re letting it proof, and you pull back the lid and it has this rising, yeasty dough character that somehow comes out of the yeast.” He’s able to encourage that flavor in his beers when he lets his house yeast work without pressure.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Redmond says he sometimes likes to manipulate oxygen availability, so that his lager yeast are slightly stressed—a decision he makes based on the particular strain he’s using, and on his desired levels of esters and sulfur in a particular beer. He says he’s aiming for a sweet spot between providing them enough oxygen to do their jobs and stressing them just a bit, so that they’ll throw off those additional by-products.
To hit that sweet spot, he says, he calculates a target parts-per-million measurement of oxygen for each yeast strain, then adjusts his oxygen flow meter accordingly. Fine-tuning this means brewing multiple times with a lager strain to get it right. He adds oxygen and then evaluates cell replication rates over the next few days to see how much growth has occurred versus how much sulfur has been produced.
At Green Bench, Johnson sticks with the Augustiner strain, but he adjusts the fermentation temperature to produce noticeably different sensory results. He prizes the subtle fruitiness in Postcard Pils, which ferments just below 50°F (10°C) until it reaches 4°P (1.016), gets a bump to 60°F (16°C) until it hits 2°P (1.008), then drops to lagering.
However, Johnson and his team tried applying this same schedule to Bench Life, their American light lager with corn. In that beer, they found the fermentation character to be too much—not balanced, in such a light beer. Instead, Bench Life ferments a tad cooler—mostly at 48°F (9°C) before bumping to 52–55°F (11–13°C) to finish. The results are a lot cleaner, Johnson says, and the beer is more integrated.
In his view, it’s a myth that fermentation-driven flavors need to be absent for a lager to be successful or refreshing. “Fermentation character doesn’t make something more or less drinkable,” he says.
How much character emerges in the final beer can be a stylistic choice, personal to each brewer. Johnson uses 34/70 occasionally, particularly for German lager styles, and he says he’s sometimes infatuated with the “the beautiful nothing” produced by that yeast.
Ultimately, however, he likes how the Augustiner strain gives him more options: “I find the versatility of using something like Augustiner—and going through different fermentation techniques, being able to create character so many different ways from one ingredient—is, to me, a far more valuable resource than something that is slightly ubiquitous.”