When Stone Brewing in San Diego, California, brewed a beer with and for the band Metallica last year, some people were quite astonished. About what kind of beer it was. A Pilsner? Yes, a Pilsner. It's called Enter Night Pilsner and it's a pretty straight Pilsner. Wow. Why wow? Well, for decades brewery founder Greg Koch had been raging about the "fizzy, yellow beers", the American industrial beers, all of them lagers. Bottom-fermented and, to his mind, under-hopped. Underground! Boring, oily and insipid.
Stone countered this with wacky, crass ales. A crazy amount of hops, a crazy amount of alcohol. Always in your face. Always. And even with a collaboration with (of all people!) Metallica, you would have expected it to be full on the twelve. But no, it's a Pilsner. And thus meets the spirit of the times.
A clear countermovement is discernible
For a long time, craft brewers around the world couldn't be wild enough, after the Double IPAs were followed by Triple IPAs, breweries tried to outdo each other in IBUs (International Bitter Units) and vol.-%, after the "wild beers", i.e. spontaneously fermented and thus almost completely unpredictable, complex brews, became the big topic of the beer nerd scene, a clear countermovement can now be recognised.
It doesn't always have to be more of everything - it can also be less, but better.
Quieter lagers are taking the place of shrieking hop bombs, and some breweries are winning more fans with well-made, flawless beers of classic brewing styles than with the most daring anti-purity brew. And this is happening not only in places where one might think that after decades people would tire of craft beer, but also in the heart of Europe, where craft has only been known and called such for a few years.
In our latitudes, the craft beer movement acts a bit like a concave mirror: the enthusiasm for the extraordinary, "new" beers has created - at least among some people, certainly not among the broad masses, one has to be that honest - a new beer consciousness. It has awakened interest in an honest product. Beer does not have to be 08/15 and come from the supermarket, is not automatically an interchangeable industrial product.
Beer is made by people, with hand and heart. Maybe even here in the region. And it doesn't matter whether it's been a start-up for five years or 350. All that is decisive - and not the style of beer.
Craft can be anything from Imperial Stout to Neipa to Pilsner.
Between liver and spleen always, always, always fits a Pilsner
One might reflexively think of the Czech Republic, home of the Pilsner. Or of large, international beer brands that sell Pils in green 0.33-litre bottles in pretty much every corner of the world.
With both, you might feel the same as the American Greg Koch: Boring! Is the first thought. But Pilsner is by no means just Pilsner. There is a lot going on within the beer style! Particularly spectacular and actually only a topic again since the emergence of the craft beer movement: green-hopped pilsner.
