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 hen a mainstream brand of beer finds itself saddled with the epithet of ‘wife beater’, you might guess that that beer is in trouble. In 2012 it emerged that AB InBev, owners of Stella Artois, hired a PR firm to delete references to its unfortunate nickname from Wikipedia, but it will take more than some surreptitious online editing to solve lager’s image problem. Because in the minds of  image-conscious beer drinkers, it seems that lager just isn’t classy anymore. Somehow, the images of sleek, continental sophistication that lager advertisers have been peddling over the past couple of decades have lost their magic. At some point, sexy ladies and suave gents have been substituted by ‘lads’ and ‘ladettes’ – that special kind of drinker for whom more is definitely more – and lager has become the unofficial drink of the sorriest kind of night out. Its demise has even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, with ‘lager lout’ an officially recognised term for some years now.

This tumble from grace has begun to be reflected in consumer trends. Since the turn of the 21st century we have seen the rehabilitation of ‘old man’ beers such as stout and bitter, while every earnest new brewer has their own take on an IPA. Lager, however, largely remains on the periphery of the ‘craft’ boom, too often dismissed as the tasteless choice of the unthinking masses, and this comes with figures to back it up. According to a report by the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA), sales of artisan and craft beers rose by eight per cent last year – 1.55 million in barrel terms. It may still be the world’s most popular style of beer, but with lager sales year-on-year falling by nearly four per cent according to retail analysts Kantar, it remains to be seen for how long. Beer writers and industry commentators have already begun to sound the death knell.

But not everyone is so quick to shoot lager down. Tim Webb has written extensively on beer, most recently co-authoring The World Atlas of Beer and The Pocket Beer Book 2014, so he knows a thing or two. And he still likes a nice lager. Or, he might say, a real lager, made with precision, patience and considerable expertise. For if lager has taken a battering, thanks to decades of poor-quality, cheap, industrial beer marketed as lager, authentic examples of this beer style do exist.

“Lager largely remains on the periphery of the ‘craft’ boom, too often dismissed as the tasteless choice of the unthinking masses”

Lager’s woes, Webb explains, go right back to the 19th century. The Pilsner beer style, light in colour and hoppy, was only invented in the 1840s, yet by the 1890s imitations were already springing up. A case was brought to court in Munich, arguing that only beers from Pilsen or made in a similarly precise style should be sold as such. But the case was lost and from that point on any brewer could label their beer as ‘Pilsner’, regardless of its qualities, or, indeed, quality, “and they didn’t even bother to fight over the term ‘lager'”. The style has been open to abuse by unscrupulous breweries ever since, happy to sell clear, pale beers under the lager moniker (something made even more confusing by the fact that the traditional lager-producing countries don’t actually use the term ‘lager’), to the extent that many consumers today are probably unsure of what a lager actually is, or should be. 

Perhaps the most common misconception is that lagers are ‘blond’. Colour, in fact, has nothing to do with it. The defining characteristic of a lager should be that it is kept for a period in cold storage. (‘Lager’ is German for ‘storage place’.) Here, a specially adapted strain of yeast, able to operate at low temperatures, continues to ferment, ‘eating up’ impurities and resulting in a beer which is cleaner and crisper than traditional ales – which are fermented more quickly at a higher temperature – and without the latter’s unpredictable quirks. Since the colour of a beer is determined by malt, and has nothing to do with yeast, lagers, can, and do, come in all colours, from very pale to black.

In fact, not only do dark lagers exist, but once upon a time all lagers were dark. Even Pilsner, Webb claims, should be “pretty dark golden, not peroxide blonde”. The idea that lager should be yellow is down to that great purveyor of mistruths, Modern Marketing. “The idea that lager is blond is really just a part of the whole marketing thing, because they were selling it on its appearance, its colour, and it was easier to image with blond film stars and all the rest of it,” Webb says. “There’s no more reason for a lager to be blond than there is for an ale to be blond.”

But it’s not generally the colour of lager that gets the haters hating. What really fuels the anti-lager lobby is the belief that lager ‘has no taste’. Wychwood brewery’s ‘lager boy’ advertising campaign (“Afraid you might taste something, lager boy?”) epitomises the supercilious attitude of some real ale drinkers. Ales, they will tell you, are flavourful and complex, full of character and myriad in variety, whereas lagers all taste the same – that is, of nothing – and are churned out on an industrial scale.

While this may be partially true – beers of questionable quality continue to dominate the ‘lager’ market – a true, high-quality lager, Webb says, is arguably much more difficult to make than an ale. It requires more equipment, more time and a good deal of expertise. Often it involves a process of decoction, in which some of the mash is removed, boiled and returned to the tun two or three times to get the maximum flavour out of the grain. Hops are then added and the beer is slow fermented over a week or so, before being placed in the lagering tanks at a temperature of around 2–3° C, and the best lager brewers will then leave the beer there for around 12 weeks. The result is a beer of exceptional quality and, Webb claims, one that can’t easily be imitated. “Some brewers in the UK and elsewhere are now putting a lot of effort into making  high-quality lagers [but] they’ve got quite a long way to go. They haven’t got it quite right.”

Of course, many mass-produced, industrial ‘lagers’ are not decocted or cold stored, at least not for long, since these processes take time, and time is money. But to dismiss a style of drink on the basis that you don’t like the cheapest, worst examples is hardly a fair comment. Instead, Webb says, try some of the better German and Czech lagers and you will find they are as good as the best real ales and ‘craft’ beers. Indeed, for Ron Pattinson, author of the Shut Up About Barclay Perkins beer blog and of a series of books on beer styles, including Lager!, there is really only one style of beer that can occasionally lay claim to being ‘craft’ brewed, and it’s not an IPA. “I’ve been around lots of ‘craft’ breweries and the things are completely automated. The ones I’ve been round where people have been brewing the beer by hand have mostly been small lager breweries in Bavaria,” he says. “So if you ask me which beer do I think is actually hand-crafted, I’d say [it’s] the lagers, because I’ve been round breweries there [which are] basically like museums.”

“Wychwood brewery’s ‘lager boy’ advertising campaign (“Afraid you might taste something, lager boy?”) epitomises the supercilious attitude of some real ale drinkers”

And so to the final big myth about lager – that it is a newfangled ‘Continental’ drink, a foreign imposter, unlike hearty British ‘real’ cask ale, which is rich in heritage. This last assertion is particularly powerful because it’s stuffed full of puffed-up patriotism, but powerful doesn’t necessarily equate with accurate. “A lot of the stuff that’s talked about real ales and cask condition knows absolutely bugger all history, it’s all tosh,” says Webb. “Our modern cask conditioned real ales at 3.5, 4% ABV were actually invented in the 1950s.” Lager, on the other hand, was being served up in Britain as early as the 1860s. Not only that, but every pale lager in the world owes its very existence to British brewing.

Nevertheless, for Webb, the UK, like the US and most lager-producing nations, remains ‘an imitator’ – a producer of crude copies, with no deep-rooted lager tradition. If lager is to be saved from its current demise, the impetus, he believes, must come from lager’s homeland. “They’re very insular in Germany and it’s taken them quite a long while to realise that [many of them are] still making very high-quality versions of the type of beer that the world sees as its mainstream beer,” he says. “They’ve been dreadful at exporting until recently, and they’re only now starting to eye what’s happening. But some of them are making a million hectolitres a year, and it’s coming out high quality. Those are the people who should be looking across the rest of the world and thinking: ‘We will produce it in this way, and we will dictate what modern lager is.’”

Whether or not they are able to seize their chance and restore lager to its former glory remains to be seen.

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