Zoiglhaus' Speedy Lagers

How long does it take to put a proper pale lager in a can or keg? You might start backward from the lagering time, which is often pegged at around a month, add in the slow, cold fermentation time and a day or two here or there to come up with a figure like 35-40 days. Many brewers will hedge when you ask about June production time and knock a week off. Maybe they can get it out of the brewery in a month.

That’s a standard range, but it can go much longer. When I visited Budvar in Czechia, Adam Brož told me the classic way to ferment a beer was at the very languid pace of a day per point of Plato, which works out to around twelve days for their flagship svetlý ležák. Then Budvar famously lagers the beer for three months, which boosts the time up to over a hundred days. The Czechs are famous slowpokes, however, so perhaps that’s not fair. No matter how you slice it, conventional wisdom holds that lagers take time and the good ones can’t be rushed. As lagers steadily gain in respect and popularity, that slow pace has become a key marker of quality.

So how would three weeks, mash-in to canning, sound? Improper? Tell that to Zoiglhaus’ Alan Taylor.

He has been brewing professionally for the better part of 30 years, making mostly lagers over that span. He learned how to brew in Germany, which is a good place to learn about lager brewing—but in Berlin rather than Bavaria, where lagers were born. And the method VLB taught him was a speedier version.

“I would say the northern Germans are a little more pragmatic, a little bit more open to experimentation and then the southern Germans,” he told me. “The northern Germans are like, ‘what are we trying to do here?’ And that’s where I get really pragmatic, too. What are we trying to do here? Are we trying to create a really clean lager that has no acetaldehyde, no diacetyl, that has a nice snappy finish, that doesn’t have a bunch of autolyzed yeast?”

If so, the VLB taught him, do a modified version of the classic long lagering period and you’ll make fine beer in half the time. The process Alan uses may surprise a lot of drinkers, but it’s more common than many of them realize.

Years ago, Alan told me he brews his lagers fast, no shilly-shallying, and I have long wanted to follow up to find out what method he uses. A couple months back, he gifted me a six-pack of Hopped to Helles, a beer I loved, and it seemed like a good time to get to the bottom of this. (I regret it’s taken me so long to get this post up—the seasonal Hopped to Helles is probably mostly gone now, alas—but I had some scheduling complications. You’ll have to try it next year.)

Fast lagers may seem like a contradiction or a bad idea. That cold fermentation produces a bunch of weird-smelling and -tasting stuff, so says conventional wisdom, and brewers use a lagering period (a German word that literally means “to age”) to clean it all up. This is what all the books and websites say. And that can be true. To return to the Czech Republic, I once had a taste of Pilsner Urquell that had been lagering just two weeks and it was an atrocious concoction of sulfur, fruity esters, and other noxious chemicals I did not stop to identify.

But there are many variables, and this is by no means guaranteed. The strength of the beer, fermentation temperature, pitch rates, aeration, and especially the choice of yeast strain, will all factor in. Breweries that want a clean, crisp lager may choose a process that takes forty days, but they don’t have to.

By coincidence, I was recently reading Jack Hendler’s newish book Modern Lager Beer, and he helpfully outlines three approaches. One is the traditional longer process. One is a super-fast industrial method that uses pressure to speed fermentation along. And one is a Goldilocks method like the one Alan uses at Zoiglhaus. In a follow-up email, he offered me the notes on Hopped to Helles, a typical beer for the brewery.

“We knocked out at 11.6 Plato at 47 F with around 1 million cells per Plato per ml, let the beer start cranking (it usually takes a good 24 hours to get going well). At around 7 Plato (91 hours in) we let it start free rising to a maximum of 66 F, bung the tank at around 2.5 to 3.0 Plato (163 hours in), letting it naturally carbonate as much as possible. Then we wait until the beer repeats gravity and is diacetyl/acetaldehyde-free. The tank was over 64 F for 6 days before it was chilled to 32 F at 281 hours (12 days). So overall a pretty typical fermentation schedule for a 24-barrel batch size.”

Why would a brewery take extra time when they don’t need to? “I don’t get it,” Alan told me when I asked him that question. “Seriously, I don’t.”

In describing different lager methods in his book, Hendler offers pros and cons for each. The more traditional process is gentler on yeast, which makes re-pitching easier, reduces higher alcohol and ester production (more on that in a moment), and facilitates natural carbonation. It also makes diacetyl harder to get rid of (back to the Czechs) as well as acetaldehyde and sulfur. The Zoiglhaus method, where primary fermentation starts cold, realizes some of the benefits of the traditional method in terms of alcohols and esters. Letting temperatures rise helps clean up the off-flavors. The downsides are weaker yeast that isn’t as robust in re-use, and greater difficulty in natural carbonation. Which, depending on your goals, might not be a factor in any case.

Those are the general effects—but some of them appear to be diminished by yeast selection. One of the most common yeasts in the world is the lager yeast from Weihenstephan generally known as 34/70; it’s the one Zoiglhaus uses. By chance, the Master Brewers Association of America happened to replay episode 216 just this week, and Fermentis researcher Anne Flesch discussed trials they had done on that strain. It was basically foolproof. They tried radically underpitching the yeast, over-pitching it, fermenting at cold, cool, and warm temperatures, and making different strengths of beer (up to 20 P, which is quite strong). Basically nothing they did produced off-flavors of any note. Fermenting it warmer did produce slightly higher alcohol and ester formation, but even in the worst case (strong beers made at warm temperatures), they barely rose above levels of human perception. In other words, using 34/70 further protects a brewery from off-flavors.

For what it’s worth, Alan takes his own advice. He had just brewed a version of his flagship Zoigl-Pils that he plans to lager for six weeks. He tries to keep an open mind. Back in 2017, that beer took gold at the GABF in the pilsner category, so it’s already a pretty good beer. Still, methods matter, even if the differences are subtle, and he’s curious to see if his North German version might get an extra boost from some Bavarian processes. He offered to have me join him for a blind tasting, so we can put the two methods to a final test. I’ll let you know how it goes.