How The Pilsner Arrived, Survived, and Thrived in America

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Here's our own Monty Montgomery with a story. We Americans enjoy our beer. In 2018, we consumed about 6.8 billion gallons of it. And by far the most popular style we drink is Pilsner. Here's Tom Accatelli, author of Pilsner, How the Beer of Kings Changed the World, with more. Pilsner is the dominant style of beer in the world and has been for well over 100 years. All the major brands you can think of, Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite, Heineken, Pabst, are based on Pilsner or imitations of the Pilsner style. They're everywhere.

They're, you know, every grocery store, bar, gas station, bodega, you name it. It's Pilsner. It was first made in a small, what was then a sort of a mid-sized city of the Austrian empire called Pilsen.

And what's now the Czech Republic. The local aristocrats in Pilsen who had the right to brew and sell beer locally, they were getting tired of their beer, their local beer, getting beaten out of the marketplace by beers from Bavaria just over the border. So the aristocrats in Pilsen are like, we're tired of losing market share to these guys, these Bavarians making these lighter, better beers.

So we got to co-op what they're doing, right? You can imagine, you know, they literally have meeting after meeting, memos and manifestos about how to compete with Bavarian beer and knock it out of the marketplace in Pilsen. So what they do is they hire a Bavarian brewmaster named Joseph Grohl who uses Bavarian know-how, Bavarian recipes, Bavarian techniques. In other words, just sort of imports German technique and style over the border and makes this beer for the burgers, for the aristocrats of Pilsen to sell.

And he ends up making in late 1842. Now it's lost to history whether Grohl himself intended for this to happen, but the specific ingredients he used and the water quality, the local water quality which was very important to brewing then as now, turned out the lightest looking beer anyone had ever seen up to that point. Before that, beer for millennia is dark and it's thick and it's rich, it's like liquid bread and they weren't the color of sunshine. Pilsner was, this lager made in Pilsen in 1842, you know, it looks beautiful, right?

It's bubbly, it's clear, it's crisp when you taste it. It's a beer that's unlike anybody has ever seen. Right from the get-go, Pilsner is extremely unique and it quickly grows in popularity, first in the Austrian Empire, then in Central Europe and then basically all over the world to the present day.

It picked, you know, the best time to be born and the best time to leave home, because it's born in this kind of supernova of technological change and political change, especially in Europe. The technological change, you know, is everything from the mass production of glass, which had never happened before in the history of humanity, because Pilsner looks great in a glass, it looks great poured, it looks great in glass bottles. The technology for fighting bacteria and infection which can be deadly to beer and deadly to beer sales comes along around at the same time. Brewing techniques, temperature measurement, all that is sort of blossoming around the same time as Joseph Peralta is doing those first batches of Pilsner and Pilsen. And then you also have stuff like the railroad for better shipping. The first mechanical refrigeration starts up because Pilsner, like most lager beers, unlike Yale's, tastes better cold.

It's easier to preserve them too. But the political change is really what spurs Pilsner's story from sort of a local legend to worldwide fame. There's all these revolutions and counter revolutions in Europe and a lot of Germans and Czechs fled the turmoil. They were done with these wars and fighting and they settled in the United States, a lot of them. There were about a million Germans emigrated to the U.S. in the 1850s alone.

They find the most opportunity farther inland, so they settled in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis. They take their preference for lighter lagers and lighter colored lagers and lighter tasting lagers to the United States. And of course the dominant style by then is Pilsner.

And so that's how it spread basically. Anywhere you had Germans in the mid to late 19th century, you were going to have beer. And the beer was overwhelmingly going to be Pilsner.

Wherever Germans go, they bring this Jones for the lighter lager. And with the winds of the Industrial Revolution at their back, these immigrants created some of the most recognizable names in the beer industry today, including Anheuser-Busch. Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch were father-in-law and son-in-law and they became business partners. Adolphus Busch basically rescued his father-in-law's business. He had a brewery that was failing, right?

So after the Civil War in the early 1860s, Adolphus Busch begins to build the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company into this mega conglomerate. And he does it largely behind a recipe for Pilsner, imitation, that he gets via a business partner of his who had been traveling in Europe and knew of the popularity of this lighter colored, lighter tasting lager called Pilsner. Brings it back to Adolphus Busch, says, can you make this for me? He does.

And he eventually acquires the rights to it. They name it after a Czech town called Budweiser and that becomes just a sensation from the late 1870s onward. For many of the reasons that Pilsner itself became a sensation is that it just looked good.

It looked modern, it looked good in a glass, it looked good in a bottle. Anheuser-Busch is the biggest bottler of any food stuff at the time in the late 19th century and it just takes off from there. I mean, I don't, you know, there was sort of an arms race in the late 1900s between Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch to have kind of the biggest brewery in the U.S. and perhaps the world.

And they were both racing each other with Pilsners. In Busch's case it was Budweiser, in Pabst's case it was what we now know as Pabst Blue Ribbon. Because of this arms race, they end up just sort of sweeping all before them, competition-wise, and end up as the kings of brewing by 1900, by the 19-teens. And because of that, because of that race, Pilsner gets more and more ubiquitous and more and more unavoidable. And increasingly on the radar of temperance advocates wanting to end the sale and consumption of alcohol in the U.S. Back into the 1900s, right, there's sort of a movement to improve the United States.

You know, in many cases, well-intentioned. And one of the ways to improve it is to cut back on overconsumption of alcohol. Now, the U.S. in the early 1900s was not a beer country. It was whiskey, whiskey and cider. And Americans drank a tremendous amount compared with the rest of the world. European visitors who chronicled their visits to the U.S. always noted how much and how frequently Americans drank. So there was an understandable temperance movement to sort of slow things down.

Then what happens is you have this mass immigration of Germans. And they bring with them a different way of drinking and a different type of drink. They bring lighter lagers, which are much, much lower in alcohol than whiskey. And they drink it in beer gardens, and the beer gardens are family affairs.

And the Germans are still, you know, despite the fact that they drink this beer, noted for their industriousness and their hard work. So it sort of clashes with what the temperance advocates have been telling people for decades. That if you drink, you know, you're going to be derelict and desolate and, you know, not contribute.

You're not going to get up for work the next morning, et cetera, et cetera. German Americans disrupt this narrative. And so the temperance movement has to turn its efforts toward combating beer as well.

And they also have to turn their efforts toward combating the brewers behind the beer. And they have a very tough time of it, but they get a boon from World War I. America's enemy in World War I, of course, was the German Empire. So the temperance advocates seize on American skittishness about German culture. The war ends in late 1918. Prohibition passes in 1919, takes effect in 1920.

I don't think it would have happened with the speed it did without the war and the anti-German feelings that the war engendered. It's just a fascinating slice of life and culture when you realize what happened over those 70 years, you know, and how pilsner and beer is right in the middle of it. And great American storytelling and history through the lens of beer. When we come back, more of this remarkable story of how the beer of kings changed the world.

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Subject credit approval. Terms apply. And we return to our American stories and the story of the Pilsner with Tom Accatelli, author of Pilsner, How the Beer of Kings Changed the World. When we last left off, anti-German sentiment in the U.S. was at an all-time high because of World War I and prohibition went into effect impacting brewers profoundly.

Let's pick up where we last left off. With animosity towards Germans and German culture at an all-time high after World War I, the 18th Amendment was passed, ushering in prohibition. With their market dried up, brewers were forced to set aside beer and make other products to survive.

Pilsner was put on hold. Some of them made near beer. They switched to, you know, alcohol that could be used in machinery. But a lot of them didn't survive. It's a much smaller field of brewers in the United States post-1933 when prohibition ends.

And what that means is the ones who could survive, who could get by, who could skirt disaster, they come out with the ability to grow very fast. Their reach expands and you see this massive consolidation in the industry where the big get bigger and the smaller kind of disappear. Before prohibition became the law of the land, there were over 4,000 breweries in the United States.

By 1975, there were 115. And that's where I think Pilsner starts to have a wider cultural effect. Marketing Pilsner becomes such an acute focus of these bigger breweries that they start to really innovate when it comes to advertising and marketing. So you get the quirky beer jingles. You get the cartoon characters.

You get the sports partnerships. Any number of things that we all know today and we can probably remember our favorite taglines like taste great, less filling, all you ever wanted a beer and less. I mean all those, you know, the champagne of beers, et cetera, et cetera. That comes about after prohibition and helps Pilsner grow its reach wider and helps these breweries get that much bigger. The Budweisers, the Millers, they grew and grew and grew.

Pilsner becomes so big you couldn't get away from it. The first big change comes when the Miller Brewing Company, which had recently been acquired by Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, they were laser focused on growing from, I think they were the eighth or ninth biggest brewery in the country. They wanted to be number two behind Anheuser-Busch. They know that they're not going to be number one. Anheuser-Busch is so far ahead of any brewer, maybe, except for Heineken, in the entire world.

And how do they do that? They introduce Miller Lite. And this is the one I'm holding on to. Lite beer from Miller. It has a third less calories than a regular beer, it's less filling, and it tastes terrific too.

I also love the easy-opening can. Miller Lite kind of changes the game. There had been Lite beers before, but they, you know, the marketing had always been toward people who maybe wanted to diet or to lose weight.

But the problem is, if they're trying to lose weight, they're not going to look to beer at all, whether it's lower in calories or not. So Miller Lite basically presented itself as, quote, a low-calorie beer that tasted like beer. They wanted to be known as just beer, but with low calories. So they came up with the famous tagline, Lite beer from Miller, everything you always wanted in a beer, and less. And it became this kind of sensation, you know, Lite beer. Just a quick aside, you know, this is another example of Pilsner's influence. You know, Miller Lite put a fine Pilsner right on the bottle. You can still see it on the labels today. But, you know, Lite, L-I-T-E or L-I-G-H-T seeped into all sorts of foodstuffs from that point on in the 1970s.

So you had Lite everything. But back to beer. So Lite beer happens and it becomes, you know, Pilsner becomes even bigger and more influential. The United States had essentially become a beer desert. But things were about to change that would lead to a whole new industry being developed by innovating entrepreneurs. You had a growing number of people, mostly homebrewers and their fans, who wanted more variety, who were tired of these beers that all seemed to look and taste the same.

And indeed they did. They start meeting sort of underground because homebrewing was illegal in the United States, just sort of a quirk of post-Prohibition America. The federal government forgot to legalize it. They legalized winemaking coming out of prohibition, but not homebrewing. But then that happens in 1978. There's a push on from California, from some lawmakers and homebrew enthusiasts in California, to have it homebrewing legalized at the federal level. That happens in early 1978 and takes effect in 1979.

But what does that do? That sort of brings these homebrewers out of the shadows. And people begin openly sharing information. And they begin openly selling and sharing materials and recipes. So you have this sort of blossoming of underground entrepreneurial spirit turning pro. And that's where you get the sort of the first proliferation of smaller breweries in the United States.

It's the late 1970s, early 1980s. So you have this infusion of knowledge and you have this counter reaction to the rise of light beer. If you wanted a richer tasting beer in the 1970s, up to that point, you had to make it yourself.

Or you had to, like, chance upon it while, you know, in Europe or something like that. But suddenly you start to see the growth of microbrewing. Pilsner is still dominant and it's still dominant today. But you now have just sort of this kaleidoscope of styles and breweries. Today there are over 8,000 breweries in the United States.

That's over double of what existed before Prohibition. And the big reason why these breweries exist is the Pilsner and its oversaturation in the market during the 1970s. But everything old is new again. And today the Pilsner is having a remarkable resurgence among even the people who tried to get away from it all those years ago. You know, history repeats itself and beer is very much sort of a cyclical, it's a cyclical thing.

I mean, people discover and rediscover different styles and different approaches all the time. And I think Pilsner is just kind of having a moment because craft brewing was a reaction to Pilsner's rise. And now I think the sort of rise of Pilsner within craft brewing is a reaction to craft brewing's rise. The defining feature, the defining characteristic of IPAs is bitterness. You know, the bitterness from hops and so this sort of overwhelming prickly crispness and, you know, alcoholic kick.

So if you want something different, what do you do? You know, you turn to a lighter tasting, sweeter beer and that's Pilsner. You could not have had this counter reaction toward Pilsner without the rise of the bitter IPAs and, you know, the heavier seasonal beers and then porters and ales and all that. Without those you wouldn't have this reaction. But again, you wouldn't have those without the rise of Pilsner originally. So it's kind of funny, they've all sort of intersected.

And there's no end in sight too, that's the thing. Because this, you know, in many countries, federal governments or national governments regulate style and ingredients and proportions of ingredients in wine and spirits. But that's not the case for beer. You can call yourself whatever you want in the U.S. as long as you follow some, you know, guidelines as far as what you put on your label. You have to use a certain proportion of Merlot grapes if you're going to call yourself a Merlot. If you're going to call your wine a Merlot.

You don't have to use a certain proportion or a certain type of hop if you're going to call your beer an IPA. So it lends itself to this experimentation in the marketplace. And I think that's kind of a wonderful thing because it creates this experimental dynamic. And that brings everything full circle too. Because what is Pilsner to begin with? It was somebody 170 years ago experimenting with existing styles and ideas until they came up with something new.

And that's still going on today. And a special thanks to Monty Montgomery for that piece. And Monty's, I believe Monty's passion is beer, sampling every kind possible. Also Tom Acatelli, a special thanks to him. He's the author of Pilsner, How the Beer of Kings Changed the World. And I keep thinking about that line, where Germans go, they bring their Pilsner. And think about that with Italians too and their contribution with food and Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans. And this is what we do here.

We eat each other's food and then we marry each other. The story of Pilsner and the story of so much more American history and American life and culture here on Our American Stories. Tis the season of making the perfect wish list and the perfect playlist with Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds and Headphones. Breakthrough immersive audio uses specialized sound to bring your fave holiday classics to life. And world class noise cancellation ensures a not so typical silent night and an epic holiday party of warmth. It's everything music should make you feel taken to new holiday highs.

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