Reflections on lager (Part 3)

How lager came to Britain: First, not at all. Then very slowly. Then rapidly, and in the worst possible way

In the mid-19^th century, lager was still virtually unknown outside of German-speaking Europe (and even there, it was not ubiquitous). By the early 20^th century, it had conquered the world, establishing itself as the “default beer”. With a global market share of around 90%, that is what it remains to this day. Ask 1,000 randomly selected people to picture a beer – just “a beer”, without any further specification – and at least 900 of them will think of a lager.

In Britain, this process of lagerisation took an unusual form. For a start, it happened remarkably late in the day. Britain resisted lagerisation for longer than probably any other beer drinking nation in the world. In the early 1960s, when the rest of the beer-drinking world had already fully lagerised, Britain still clung to its bitters and milds, with lager only accounting for about 1% of total beer consumption. But then from about 1970 onwards, Britain overcompensated, lagerising rapidly, indiscriminately, and in the worst possible way. This article – the third and final instalment in the lager trilogy – tells the story of how this happened.

1833 – 1868: The first failed attempt – how lager almost came to Britain

In 1833, a small delegation of Bavarian and Austrian brewers visited Britain to study industrial brewing methods. Britain, as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, was a generation ahead of most of the continent in terms of industrial development at the time, so the visiting brewers thought they could learn a few tricks here. That turned out to be correct.

Two of them, Gabriel Sedlmayer from Munich and Anton Dreher from Vienna, ended up in Edinburgh, where they spent some time working at John Muir’s Calton Hill Brewery. The methods they used were a bit dubious, bordering on what we would nowadays call industrial espionage. But there was something in it for Muir as well: Sedlmayer and Dreher told him how to make lager.

After his return to Munich, Sedlmayer sent Muir a sample of the lager yeast he was using, which Muir used to brew what was, for all we know, the first-ever lager brewed on British soil, in 1835. Muir seemed to have liked it, but sadly, it remained a one-off. Yeast was not yet well understood in those days, and Muir’s sample quickly deteriorated. Had the yeast lasted, maybe British lager could have taken off there and then.

Lager was not new anymore even at the time. There are surviving documents from Bavaria from more than 400 years earlier, which already describe what seems to have been a proto-version of lager. I had a quick look at a German-language newspaper archive to see when the word Lagerbier first appears. The oldest entry I have found was a little advert in the Hamburger Relations-Courier, published in October 1751, which says:

“This serves as a friendly notification that at the Rödingsmarkt, at Scharmberg’s widow’s, a nice good Lagerbier is available at all times.”

No further explanation is provided, so Scharmberg’s widow, or whoever placed that ad on her behalf, must have assumed that readers would know what a Lagerbier is.

Another advert, in the Hamburgische Adreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten from March 1767, offers “Lagerbier, 12 marks a barrel”.

And in November 1793, the Grossherzoglich Badisches Anzeigeblatt announced:

“After finally having completed the establishment of the newly set up beer brewery and vinegar distillery at Gruenwinkel, […] vinegar and brandy, as well as simple beer and Lagerbier, of good quality, are now available at a cheap price”.

I have also found several adverts which are not for the beer itself, but for buildings with an ice cellar: this is how lager was made before mechanical refrigeration. For example, in August 1803, a baker from Tübingen, Georg Ludwig Weimer, was offering his house for sale in the Schwäbischer Merkur. He emphasised that the house had “…two large, expansive cellars, carved into the rocks, one of which is equipped for Lagerbier”.

And in February 1804, a publican from Heidenheim, Ludwig Friderich Müller, offered his pub in the Stuttgartische Anzeigen, claiming that it had „an optimally equipped large beer brewery, a brandy distillery, 2 good large cellars for white and one very good cellar for brown Lagerbier.“

I have run the same search in an English-language archive. The oldest entry I have found is from 1849, when the Baltimore Sun offered:

“Lager beer – from the celebrated Joint Stock Brewery in Philadelphia, always to be had by the Glass, Bottle and Barrel, at Henry Wittich’s Shakespeare House […]

This beer is much used in Philadelphia and N. York, and has not only a very agreeable taste, but also the property of promoting the digestion and of keeping the stomach in good order. It is a pure article, being mixed neither with drugs nor any other noxious substance. All those who drink it will save the trouble and expense of taking medicine, Come [sic] and try it.”

Good luck getting an ad like that past the Advertisement Standards Agency and the anti-alcohol lobby today!

If we narrow down the results to UK publications, the first entry we find is from April 1855, when the Manchester Weekly Times and Examiner reported:

“[A] reporter was sent […] to make inquiries at No. 91, Chatham-street […]

[T]he reporter found it was a rather dingy looking fourth-rate German lager beershop. The room was filled with Germans drinking large mugs of beer, smoking, conversing, and otherwise amusing themselves. The ceiling of the room was low, and the walls garnished with dirty-looking pictures of very questionable artistic merit.”

Sounds like a great place! Shame there are no Untappd reviews.

Note, though, that this place was in the British colony of Nova Scotia, present-day Canada. There is no indication that anyone was drinking lager back in the British motherland.

In June 1855, the Times reported from San Francisco:

“[T]he consumption of English ales and porters is much lessened by the use of an imitation of Bavarian beer, called “lager beer”, brewed here, of which there are already 12 breweries in San Francisco. This lager beer is much used by beer drinkers”.

Note how the reporter explains what lager beer is, clearly not assuming that the reader will be familiar with it.

Similarly, in January 1858, the Glasgow Herald reported from New York:

“In walking up Broadway by day or by night […] the stranger cannot but be struck by the great number of “Oyster Saloons”, “Oyster and Coffee Saloons,” and “Oster and Lager Beer Saloons” that solicit him at every turn to stop and taste. These saloons […] are, like the drinking saloons in Germany, situated in vaults or cellars”.

I have found a few more articles from that period which mention lager, but I don’t want to bore you. What is worth noting is that they are all written by foreign correspondents reporting from North America, and that they talk about lager in a way which suggests a lack of familiarity with it. Quite clearly, lager was not yet a thing in Britain.

I will end this section with a quote from the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, published in February 1868, which complains about widespread drunkenness in England, and which finds an antidote in… German lager:

“In Germany, […] where beer is the favourite beverage, and where […] the flagon is never from the mouth, men are rarely found in that state of beastly intoxication which is […] the actual condition of many Englishmen every day of the year. Now, could not some of our great brewers […] manufacture an article […] as palatable to the Englishman, and as little intoxicating, as […] lager beer, or the other wines or beers of which the people of France and Germany drink so freely without getting drunk? If we cannot abolish our beverages, can we not improve them?”

1868 – 1914: Lager gains a foothold in Britain… but then stagnates at a low level

The first news reference I have found to people drinking lager on British soil is an article in the West Briton paper from September 1868, which said:

“German beer promises to become a favourite with the London thirsty ones. A beer Keller or Lager [sic] has been for some time prospering in the city. A like establishment was opened last week at the West-End, with ice-cold, three-inch thick of froth Lager-beer in the native German glass.”

Now we’re getting somewhere!

A few days later, the Liverpool Mercury wrote about one Charles E. Becker, “a German by birth [who had] opened a zoological garden in connection with a lager beer saloon at 141 and 143, North Ninth-street.”

In October 1868, the Daily Telegraph claimed that “all Continental beers are, to a certain extent, mawkish and insipid”, lacking “either the strength or the flavour of English beer”. But they also say that “Vienna beer, […] which has recently been introduced into this country, is a delicious beverage [emphasis added].”

In December 1868, the Guardian ran an advert offering “GENUINE BAVARIAN LAGER, Erlanger, Vienna, and Bock BEER, imported by J. Comann, Bavaria Beer Hall, 204 Oxford Street. Sold from the barrel, and in bottles, quarts, pints, and half pints”.

Not everyone was a fan of these newcomer beers. In January 1869, the Daily News complained about the “audacity […] of foreigners attempting to import their native beer and to sell it at a profit in the capital of England. […] It is natural […] that Austrian beer should run the gauntlet of bibulous criticism when vended openly in Oxford-street and the Strand [emphasis added]”. Somewhat paradoxically, the Viennese lagers sold in London are simultaneously described as “inferior in quality and unreasonably higher in price”, but also as “the rival introduced to supplant [English beer]”.

The author’s fears were, as we now know, wildly overblown: it would take another hundred years for lager to become a serious rival to the more traditional English styles. But the article nonetheless shows that lager was getting noticed – and that there was now a minor Kulturkampf around it.

The Austrians fought back. Four days later, we find two readers’ letters in response to the article. One “A. Videky”, who signs as “One of the Proprietors of the Vienna Beer Saloon, 395, Strand”, writes to “offer an unqualified contradiction” to the charge that the beers are overpriced: “If we […] sell our article too dear, we are confident that before long competition will do its task”. Fair enough.

Another reader’s letter, signed “Andres Brothers, 97 New Bond-street”, argues that the reason for the higher price of Vienna lager in London is that a “heavy duty is levied upon foreign beer”, and that the price has to cover “the cost of ice cellars”. The same name and address appear again three months later, in an ad in the same paper for “DREHER’S VIENNA BEER (the well-known and favourite beverage, which gained the only GOLD MEDAL awarded to Vienna Beer at the later Paris Exhibition. May be had in bottles or casks”. They also sold “Viennese ice-safes” to store lager, “suitable for Restaurants, Clubs and Private Houses”.

These beers were imports. The first news reference I have found to a lager brewed in Britain is from June 1879, when the Buckinghamshire Advertiser, Uxbridge and Watford Journal reported:

“Mrs Healey, of King Street Brewery, Watford, is supplying her houses with a new kind of beer called “Lager beer”, brewed after the Bavarian model. It is stated to be a very refreshing beverage, and has this very important advantage, that it is non-intoxicating.”

I’m not sure about the latter, but three cheers for Mrs Healey anyway!

In May 1883, the Evening Gazette reported how “[a] German named George Crofts was placed in the dock at the South Stockton Petty Sessions […] on a charge of obtaining 2s by false pretences.” (And not just that: he “also tried to get possession of an umbrella”!) The fraudster, whose real name was more likely to have been something like “Georg Kraft”, committed these heinous deeds near a “Messrs Knights, Stocks, and Co.’s brewery, where a number of Germans are employed in the manufacture of lager beer.”

From the mid-1880s onwards, we can regularly find adverts for lager in the British press. For example, in January 1885, the Bristol-based Western Daily Press announced:

“Imported Direct from Germany. Lager Beer. Pilsener Beer. Salvator Beer. A most strengthening tonic for invalids almost non intoxicant.”

A day later, a “WM Merrick, Hertford, Wine, spirit, ale & stout merchant”, advertised a number of drinks in the Hertfordshire Mercury, and then added in smaller letters:

“Also agent for the celebrated German Lager Beer.”

On the same day, several newspapers featured an ad by John Sarson & Son, who claim to have been the “sole agents in Leicester for the celebrated Diamond Brand Pilsener Lager Beer, Acknowledged to be the Best Lager Beer Brewed, delicious in flavour, […] a fine tonic, and can be digested by the most delicate.”

Last but not least, the Isle of Wight Observer also mentioned a “Pilsener Lager Beer” – although, somewhat confusingly, subsumed under “Ales and Stout” – which was available from “J.N. Tarrant, 35, Union Street, Ryde”.

I mention this latter ad for two reasons. Firstly, while I love the Isle of Wight, I would not exactly describe it as the cutting edge of modernity. In the 7^th century, they were the last part of England that still clung to pre-Christian paganism, and in the early 2020s, they still had places which wouldn’t accept card payments. It is fair to say that if lager had reached the Isle of Wight by 1885, it probably had reached most of the UK by then.

The second reason I mention it is that I happen to know the address. 35 Union Street, Ryde, is now a branch of Lloyds bank. The building itself is unremarkable, but there is a Wetherspoons just opposite, and if you are seated near the windows, 35 Union Street is the building you will be looking at. I probably had a Planet Lager by Goddards Brewery there at some point.

And so it continues for the next 30 years. In the late Victorian and the Edwardian period, lager was known in Britain, and available to those who were looking for it. But it was a premium product, it was mostly imported, and its market share must have been less than 1%. It probably had a status comparable to that of sour beer today.

Lager during World War I

In January 1915, an ad for Amstel Lager Beer in the Birkenhead News paper clarified that “this beer is brewed in Amsterdam, Holland”. It is not the first ad for Amstel, far from it, but as far as I can tell, it is the first one which specifically emphasises that this beer is Dutch, rather than German or Austrian. Something seems to have happened around that time which dampened the popularity of German and Austrian products.

Indeed, World War I triggered plenty of lager references. A few days later, the Liverpool Echo published a mock-poem, supposedly narrated in the voice of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in that classic mashup of English and faux-German. One verse reads:

“I shust absorbs der lager beer,

Und points mein moustache to mein ear–

Der boss of all der hemisphere–

Meinself vas it.”

Around the same time, the Sunday Dispatch reprinted a letter from the front by a British soldier, telling the story of the famous Christmas Truce:

“The Germans […] shouted over Christmas greetings, and we returned them with a cheer, and then conversations took place, and they said if we did not fire they would not. So we agreed, and not a shot was fired for four or five hours. […] [A] sergeant and a corporal went over and were met by an officer, who shook hands with them and gave them some lager beer and wine”.

The North Mail, Newcastle Daily Chronicle published another satirical poem entitled “Von Hindenburg’s Lager Beer”, which starts:

“The bottled gift in special cars

From Germany to Poland came

Addressed unto that son of Mars –

Von Hindenburg of martial fame

Who thereupon gave his commands

“Go see what has been brought us here,”

Soon ‘twas displayed by eager hands

Five thousand bottles of lager beer.”

The poem is too long to reprint here in full, but the tl;dr is: Hindenburg wants to store the beer, his plan being that once Britain has been defeated, Kaiser Wilhelm II should symbolically crack open a few bottles as he marches victoriously into Westminster. His generals, however, would evidently rather drink the beer themselves. So they try to persuade Hindenburg to open it straight away, coming up with all sorts of spurious excuses why the beer allegedly cannot be stored or transported. While they bicker, a missile lands on the beer crates, and the five thousand bottles of lager beer are gone.

What is interesting about this piece of schadenfreude-poetry is the assumption that nothing would hurt the wartime enemy as much as spilt beer.

The Hull Daily Mail, meanwhile, complained that “It is not very satisfactory to know that German lager beer has up to the present held the leading position in the Indian market, and the natural question is how to displace it.”

Two years later, the mood had hardened, and the Christmas truce was not repeated. In January 1917, the Loughborough Echo commented:

“No hand-shaking this year with Mr Boche. Our greetings to him as he sits round his Christmas tree and drinks lager beer, but – let him keep his distance. Peace and goodwill are excellent in their own way, but that is not what we are here for. When he is chased back to his Fatherland, and we are back in ours, we will think matters over.”

A short notice entitled “Less lager” was published in the Liverpool Echo a month later, which said:

“A telegram from Munich […] states that the Bavarian Minister of the Interior announces that another decrease of 30 per cent on the amount of beer brewed is inevitable.”

Given the circumstances, it is unlikely that this was meant to be an industry report. The assumption (probably correct) must have been that a decrease in beer output would undermine German troop morality.

It is possible that the association with wartime enemies dented the popularity of lager, but this is not so straightforward. I will end this section with a curious anecdote reported in the Observer in February 1917:

“The battle which has waged between the military authorities and the Wrexham Lager Beer Company for the services of Justus Wilhelm Kolb, maltster and brewer, has just ended in the army’s favour. Kolb, a naturalised British subject, was born in Germany and was formerly a corporal in the German army. […] The employers contended that he was indispensable for their introduction of lager beer, and that there was no other man in the country with the necessary qualifications.”

1960 – 1980s: Lager – bitter’s smarter continental cousin

This article is already too long, so I’ll skip over the Interwar Period, I won’t mention the war, and I’ll leave out the immediate postwar period as well, jumping straight to the 1960s instead.

In July 1960, Liverpool Daily Post (Merseyside ed.) thought they had spotted a trend:

“Ale […] has been developed to the pitch of perfection in this country over the years, while lager and lager-type beers have been the choice of Continentals and North American drinkers. Now something of a revolution is taking place in the drinking habits of the British. The British are taking to lager.”

This was, as we now know, premature. Lager’s market share would increase by six percentage points over the course of the 1960s (from 1% to 7%), but that hardly constitutes a “revolution”. What is interesting about the article, though, is that one gets the impression that lager is almost a bit fancy.

OK – “fancy” is probably not quite the right word. The idea that beer can be “fancy” is a relatively novel one; it is a product of the craft beer revolution of the 2010s, which was still half a century away. If you could travel back to any time before the craft beer revolution, and try to explain the concept of “a fancy beer” to people, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. They would tell you that only wine, cocktails and upmarket spirits can be fancy – not beer.

Still, there were differences in degree. The aforementioned article in the Liverpool Daily Post points out that lager is “popular […] in the sophisticated bars of New York”, and that it is available on various cruise ships.

The article was no outlier. In his book Man Walks Into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer, the beer writer Pete Brown describes the lager breweries’ advertising strategies of the 1970s as follows:

“Lager was more expensive, so it needed a more premium image. […] Lager drinkers were just a bit sharper than bitter drinkers, the humour slightly more clever (although we are talking small degrees here) than the cheerful, old-fashioned blokeishness of bitter ads. […] The lager drinker was one step ahead.”

The beer bloggers Ray Bailey and Jessica Boak agree:

“Lager was chic. Lager was beer’s answer to Swedish cutlery, Danish chairs, and Italian scooters. There was no suggestion of soot or grit in lager […]

Lager was smart. And so were lager drinkers.”

They also point out that British brewers had a habit of giving their lagers foreign-sounding names, so in that sense, there is nothing new about the “Madrí” phenomenon.

There has been some research about how political preferences correlate with consumer preferences, a correlation which is sometimes remarkably strong. For example, if you like HP Sauce, Birds Eye Food, Cathedral City Cheddar, PG Tips tea and/or Richmond Sausages, you are a Brexiteer. You just are. I am not aware of similar research for the 20^th century, but I suspect that in the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Community, ale drinkers were more likely to vote Leave, and lager drinkers were more likely to vote Remain. James O’Brien would not have been a lager drinker, but he would have tolerated them. Brendan O’Neill would have suspected them of sneering at decent, hard-working, patriotic, salt-of-the-earth ale drinkers.

1980s – 2010s: On lager louts and loutish lagers

I don’t know when, why and how lager’s social demotion from the drink of smart young Europhile professionals to the drink of oiks and hooligans happened. That would be topic for an article in its own right. All I can say is that by the late 1980s, the process had been fully completed.

In July 1987, a Jeffrey Bernard complained in the Sunday Mirror about how “Cross-channel ferries are usually bursting at the seams with pot-bellied, lager swilling louts” (although Mr Bernard was lucky in this regard, because his own ferry was “happily lout free”).

In June 1988, the Independent reviewed a theatre play with (how edgy!) Marxist themes. One character is “Brian, this lager-swilling lout”, who is “intended to represent the debased state of the lower classes in the present climate”. Is lager a ruling-class ploy to distract the proletariat? Novara Media should investigate the idea.

In September 1988, the Daily Mirror ran an article entitled “Lager louts boost crime”, in which they reported:

“Lager-swilling louts were blamed yesterday for a chilling rise in violent crime. […] Home Office Minister John Patten blamed the increased violence on what he called “the Friday night and Saturday night lager cult”.”

Patten must have had some regrets about this statement, because a month later, he felt obliged to partially retract it by describing lager as a “Very good drink – I drink it myself”, now trying to make “Vodka Vandal” a thing instead (Guardian, October 1988). But the horse had bolted. The term “lager lout” was now everywhere. A selection: “Crackdown on ‘lager louts’!” (The Chester Chronicle, October 1988); “Lager louts to be driven off streets” (Cheshire Observer, October 1988); “Home Secretary Douglas Hurd was in Madrid yesterday to discuss the problem of “lager louts” with […] the Spanish Interior Minister” (Birmingham Evening Mail, November 1988); “Lager-swilling British yobs” (Cheshunt and Waltham Mercury, November 1988); “The lager louts are running free in Beverley” (Hull Daily Mail, December 1988); “A gang of British lager louts were desperately trying to get home from Spain today after an airline refused to allow them on board” (Yorkshire Evening Press, August 1989); “Is Coventry winning its war against lager louts?” (Coventry Evening Telegraph, October 1989); “War on the lager louts” (Grimsby Evening Telegraph, January 1990), etc.

This was terrible timing. Lager consumption rose in quantitative terms just as it dropped in status. In 1969, lager still only accounted for 6% of British beer consumption: that’s one in 17 beers. By 1979, lager’s market share had shot up to 29%, and in 1989, it crossed the 50% threshold. Britain had finally lagerised. Just in the world possible way.

The dark days of Bad Lager Britain had arrived.

Conclusion and outlook: The case for sneery snob lagers

As mentioned in Parts 1 and 2, in both the UK and the US, the craft beer revolution was initially an anti-lager revolution. Discerning beer drinkers were tired of insipid slop, most of the insipid slop was lager, so discerning beer drinkers thought they were tired of lager. A logical fallacy of sorts, but there you go.

But there were always a few exceptions. In 2013, Adnams Southwold launched their Jack Brand Dry Hopped Lager, a full-bodied, intense, bitter beer. I discovered it in the late 2010s, and I remember commenting at the time:

“You know, it’s a shame that there aren’t more beers of this kind. The craft beer revolution has given us lots of great IPAs and great dark beers, but it has neglected lager. People wrongly think “lager” means “Carling, Fosters and Stella”, but this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If beer snobs shun lager because they think “lager” means “Carling, Fosters and Stella”, who’s left in the lager market? Why, people who drink Carling, Fosters and Stella, of course. If we beer snobs abandon the lager market to people with bad taste, the people with bad taste will be the ones who get to decide what “lager” means. We need to reclaim lager from them! Lager needs a snob revolution!”

This is now happening. That lager snob revolution is in full swing. In Part 1 of this trilogy, I quoted the beer writer Mark Dredge, who says in his book A Brief History of Lager (2019):

“Big breweries […] ruined lager for a lot of people. To most American drinkers, lager means Bud-Miller-Coors, and craft beer became the antithesis of them. Lager was what craft beer drinkers rejected when they started buying flavoursome, impactful IPAs and other styles.”

But that was not a full quote. Dredge goes on:

“[F]or a while lager became a kind of beery swear word, but […] craft beer has gone so far in the opposite direction in trying to distance itself from lager that it’s alienated a lot of drinkers, while at the same time more and more brewers want to make better versions of classic lager styles.”

He goes on to interview a number of American craft lager brewers, one of whom explains:

“There’s a craft lager resurgence […]

There’s no reason that lager has to be this diluted beer. People are learning that you can get high-quality lager with complexity.”

Quite so – and I would add that this is now finally happening in Britain, too. The craft beer revolution has been extended to lager, and the results are impressive so far.

What is different about the current wave of new lagers is that it is far more meritocratic than previous waves. For a long time, lager was perceived as foreign, which both helped it and hindered it. For a while, some people boycotted lager on jingoistic Gammony grounds, while others actively preferred it to traditional British styles because they thought that everything continental European is automatically more sophisticated and urbane than its British counterpart. But as much as the jingoistic Gammon and the naïve Europhile may think of each other as polar opposites, they have one thing in common: they are not judging a product, a style, or an idea, on its own merits. They ask “Where does this come from?” rather than “Is this good?”. The new lager wave is very different. The breweries which make craft lager or lager-adjacent beers today often use German names, such as Keller Pils, Zwickel, Helles or Kölsch, but they are not pretending to be German. They acknowledge the origin, but they don’t go out of their way to make that part of the brand identity. They present themselves as what they are: British breweries which take inspiration from elsewhere, adopting great ideas from a variety of places, and making them theirs. They are engaging in Cultural Appropriation. And so they should.

I am sure Gabriel Sedlmayer, who posted that first batch of lager yeast from Munich to Edinburgh 190 years ago, would wholeheartedly approve.