It wasn’t intentional, necessarily, but as Brienne Allan looked back at this six-pack of beers, there was a common thread.
“There definitely is a theme,” she says. “I believe all of these beers involve a cereal cooker and/or a decoction mash. And they’re all incredibly balanced, which is what I look for in beers that I drink.”
Formerly the head of production at Notch Brewing in Salem, Massachusetts, Allan’s passion for the deepest corners of lager brewing continues to drive her. (Her next project: Launching lager-focused Sacred Profane Brewing later this year in Biddeford, Maine.) She is drawn to beers that require effort, attention to detail, and a fine-grained understanding of the brewing process. The challenges involved with brewing exceptional lagers thus offer the perfect allure, and these six showcase their inherent breadth and possibility.
Schlenkerla Helles
(Bamburg, Germany)
“It’s my favorite beer right now, and now it’s available in cans. It used to be so hard to get, and since it was the only rauchbier anyone had ever heard of, craft brewers were afraid to even try to do that back when I first started brewing at Jack’s Abby back in 2011. They made Smoke & Dagger, and that was the first smoked beer I had. Of course, it’s only 15 percent smoked malt, and it’s decocted, and I just absolutely loved it. It was definitely my gateway beer into rauchbiers.
“Schlenkerla came right after that, and it was the holy grail of rauchbiers that no one could ever get. Now it’s my beer of the summer. It’s so funny listening to Chris [Lohring, Notch founder] talk about it. ‘Everyone thinks it’s in the yeast, but some people think it’s the kräusen, and it’s really just the smoked malt.’ There are all these myths about it, and I love a beer with myths. Especially with the pitch-lined beers and people putting lagers into foeders and thinking that’s the same thing. The beers that have those myths and history behind them are so interesting to me—it makes the beer more fun to drink. You never drink a Schlenkerla without someone asking you why you’re drinking it.
“You get the smokiness on the aroma, and not in the taste, which I find pleasant. It really mitigates the meat flavor that is often associated with rauchbiers that are made incorrectly. So, when the smoke is only on the aroma and not the palate, it tastes more like ash or smoked wood more than a meat flavor. For Schlenkerla’s malt character, you can tell it’s decocted. I don’t know if it’s just because I drink so many decocted beers, but you can tell when a beer is decocted and when it isn’t. There’s a beautiful balance of the caramel malt flavors, the pilsner base underneath it, and a hint of ashy smoke on the end that dries it out. It’s only a perception in your mind—the beer’s not dry—but it creates this amazing balance between all the flavors.”
Kozel Černý
(Velké Popovice, Czech Republic)
“A lot of restaurants [in the Czech Republic] will only serve their house-made pale lager if it’s a brewpub. Or, if they don’t make their own lagers, then they’re always serving Pilsner Urquell and Kozel next to each other. They can make these pours called řezané, and that’s where the Kozel is floating on top of a pale lager, so it’s kind of like a half and half. It’s another mysterious beer, because they actually pasteurize it and back-sweeten it before they package it. In the Czech Republic you have to ask, ‘Is this the sweetened version or the non-sweetened version?’
“The unsweetened version is beautiful. Like the Schlenkerla, you can taste the bready pilsner base, but then there’s equal parts Vienna and Munich to get all those different malt characteristics—toastiness from the Vienna, a biscuity caramel-ness of the Munich, and the pilsner balances it all out. I believe they add all the dark malt in the lauter tun, not the decoction, so there’s no roastiness or chocolaty character at all. It’s basically like a black pilsner. So good. I think they double-decoct that.”
Únětické Pivo Filtrované 10.7°
(Únětice, Czech Republic)
“This is a small-batch pale lager. One of the great things about them is that they do a 10° Plato, a 10.2° Plato, and 10.5° Plato, 10.7° Plato—it goes like that up to 12° Plato. You have to pick whichever you want, and the average consumer is like, ‘Are these all just the same beer at different alcohol strengths?’ But they’re not—they all have different amounts of decoction, different mash-temp rests in between, and they’re all open-fermented. Although diacetyl is welcomed in the Czech republic in low quantities, this pale lager had none due to being unpasteurized … and it’s the best one I’ve ever had—my favorite Czech lager.
“Their beers are dry, so it has that classic Czech lager taste to it—some of it is the yeast, but the water Únětické has there is really hard, as opposed to Pilsen where Pilsner Urquell is made. I think the water is making the beer taste a lot hoppier and drier than it would if the beer was made in Plzeň. It’s basically Pilsner Urquell, but hoppier.”
Corona
(Mexico and Worldwide)
“It’s my favorite beer in the whole world. It sounds funny, but it goes by the same concept as Czech lagers do. Instead of writing Plato on the labels, they use words like ‘Light,’ or ‘Premier,’ or ‘Extra.’ But that’s really just a modernized way of showing consumers that it has a different starting gravity.
“The reason I respect Corona so much is that you can be anywhere in the world—they brew it at many different facilities—and it always tastes the same and is the best quality. It’s inspiring to me as a brewer who wants to make a consistent, quality lager every single time. It’s romantic.
“Corona is more a mindset and memory for me. I love the commercials, how it’s ‘Find your Beach.’ Every time I have one, I know I’m relaxing and in my happy place. It’s really good marketing.”
Jack’s Abby Smoke & Dagger
(Framingham, Massachusetts)
“It’s one of the first beers I ever brewed, and it’s basically the beer that taught me how to brew and appreciate different pieces of a recipe and how that can affect the outcome—how to create specific balance. It was the first decocted beer I had ever made, and it’s a timeless classic for Jack’s Abby. I love black lagers, and I love smoked lagers, so the fact that they could fuse those two together was mind-blowing to me at the time.
“This one is German-based, but it’s basically the same concept as the Czech dark lager, with equal parts Vienna, Munich, and pils, and then using beechwood-smoked malt. But it’s made using German yeast and German techniques to make it come alive. You can taste the differentiation in where these raw materials are coming from. This one is super soft water, it’s crisp, and it’s naturally carbonated, so it’s not in-your-face large bubbles. It doesn’t fill you up super-fast. The smoke is so subtle that you taste it in this one rather than smell it, and it’s kind of an aftertaste. They definitely put the dark malt in the mash through the decoction, so it has more roastiness than a black lager might normally have.”
Notch Lojko
(Salem, Massachusetts)
“It was the first Notch beer I had, a year or two before I started working there, and it was something that made me want to work there. It’s a dry-hopped, triple-decocted Polish-style lager—and this makes all six of my beers decocted. I can’t drink non-decocted beer—it just doesn’t taste the same. I went to college in Salem, and when I heard there was a brewery opening in Salem, I couldn’t wait to get back to the North Shore. I brought my mother with me, and there was a line down the street to get in. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to work for a hype brewery.’
“We went in, and it turns out it was their Polish festival. The only beer they were serving was Lojko, and they were serving it in liter steinkrugs. I had never seen anything like that. It was the best beer I’d ever had, and I didn’t even realize that they could decoct there at the time. It was definitely the first triple-decocted beer I had, and I could taste the difference. And it was dry-hopped. I hadn’t had another dry-hopped lager like it before. I’d had Jack’s Abby Hoponious Union, but that was very much Citra, Centennial, and Chinook, so it was an American IPL situation where this one blew everything out of the water. I guess I could compare it to Italian-style pilsner, but just better.
“It’s really important to me that when people make lagers and they call it a style that comes from a specific region, that they are actually using techniques and raw materials that come from that region to make that true. Lojko is the only Polish lager that Notch makes, so it’s so interesting to only make it once a year and have parts of the warehouse dedicated to all these Polish ingredients that go into it.
“There’s a Polish veterans club down the street that Chris and I sneak into sometimes, and they have these Polish lagers on there, straight from the country. Lojko tastes exactly the same—it’s a really great experience.”
And the Next Beer?
Allan says she is currently in research mode for her next lager-brewing project, which will undoubtedly involve challenging techniques and intense refinement. She has something to prove.
“Being a female in this industry, when I started brewing, people would tell me, ‘You’re not going to make it,’ ‘You don’t deserve to be here,’ and all this stuff. So it’s my life’s mission to be the best at making the hardest beer in the world. I want to be known as the one who cares the most and makes the best one. That’s what drives me.”