I once got into a lengthy debate with a fairly prominent member of the brewing community over his claim that lagers, “by and large,” aren’t “intense.” On one level, this is a perfectly logical statement. After all, the most famous and readily available lagers in the world are the mass-produced, pale, fizzy, flavor-fleeing and -fleeting American and Continental pale lagers, and no one would ever call them “intense.”
That view, though, struck me as fallacious: just because by volume there’s a ton of bland lager out there, it doesn’t mean that lagers as a family of beers aren’t intense. If I took the recipe of an average macro lager and simply fermented it with an ale strain, I wouldn’t magically have something bursting with intense flavors; I’d simply have a still-relatively-flavorless beer…with a touch of ester and maybe not even that if I fermented it cooler.
Then there’s this to contend with: some of the most intense beer styles out there are—you guessed it—lagers. What do we make of Eisbock and Baltic Porter? Rauchbier? This new-fangled India Pale Lager? Does the fact that they’re often fermented with a lager strain of yeast somehow make them less intense? Of course not.