I love a pint of lager on a sunny afternoon – just look at this beautiful beast! But do we need more brands on our shelves?
Recently, a few beer geek friends and I have been having a low-key debate on whether there is room for more lager in the South African beer scene. Our craft beer boom launched with lager – something that didn’t escape All About Beer writer Jim Clarke back in 2011. Since then, brewers – and indeed drinkers – have become increasingly adventurous and we can now count on a range of IPAs, stouts, barrel aged brews, buchu beers, rooibos beers and even a couple of beer-wine hybrids. But lager seems to have made a comeback lately – Devil’s Peak brought out a lager a few months back, Citizen have added to their range with a light lager and many new breweries are including a pale lager in their launch lineup.
So do we need more lager? On the one hand, if established breweries are adding it to their range then there is obviously a demand. Citizen’s Twitter account announced that 1200 litres of their test batch of Patriot (the light lager) sold out in 10 days and I’d put money on Jack Black’s lager being the biggest-selling craft beer in South Africa. Producing a good lager is a very difficult thing to do, so perhaps brewers just want to prove they can do it, or quite possibly, they’ve realised that while hops might be where their hearts lie, big ales are not where the money is.
One reason often given is that South Africa has a “lager climate”. I can’t disagree that the weather is great, but then California has pretty pleasant weather as well, yet the beer most often associated with the Golden State is a massively hopped IPA. And South Africa produces no shortage of robust red wines – not exactly the ideal summer’s day thirst quencher yet they certainly sell well. But when it comes to lager, I have to say that there’s a certain large brewery that does the style pretty well. While many craft drinkers shun the big breweries these days, you simply can’t deny that SAB makes a bloody good pint of lager – why try to go head to head with that? For me, the draw of craft beer is the variety. Sure, I love a pint of CBC pilsner on a sunny day and last summer Jack Black’s lager became my go-to pint, but we already have so many craft lagers, do we really need more?
Over to you – what do you think?
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I think we have more than enough lager, South Africa needs more good IPA.
Gauteng in particular.
Even in our “craft beer bars”, you’d be lucky to find 2 or 3 IPA’s on tap.
At some so called craft bars i have been shocked to not even find 1. IMHO you can’t call yourself a craft bar if you do not have at least one IPA on tap.
Hear hear Dean!! Well put.
I think it would be great to see more craft breweries giving us their take on lager/pilsner styles, but I don’t think that it should mean less production of other styles and variety. I enjoy lagers and they do sell, but I also want to see breweries pushing new styles if possible. Use some profit from lager sales to produce some funky/exotic stuff.
I think we have too many fizzy yellow lagers. There are so many different BJCP styles of lagers that I wish would come to the fore in this country. I’ve had a number of people who don’t like dark beers come back again and again for my Schwarzbier lager. I absolutely love a lager with flavour. Just because it has flavour, doesn’t necessarily make it an ale 😉 I had a Striped Horse pilsner some time back, and it was still crisp and refreshing (and yellow!), but it had a beautiful honey nose and flavour that was a fantastic change to the norm. So, I think we need more variations on the standard lager we’re used to.
I totally agree on all fronts Megan. When I refer to lager here, it was the fizzy yellow variety I had in mind. I’d love to see some more breweries doing some of the German lagers as well…
“Lager” is heavily at risk of being type-cast as “bad”, just as “craft” is trying to get type-cast as “good”.
If we get more lager brands but all just being differently dressed manifestations of light american lager. that wouldn’t do much – except possibly for price competition.
If on the other hand we look a bit more broadly at what lager can be, and at what range of colour, weight, aroma, taste etc etc can be done with lager yeasts and temperatures – then bring them on.
PS Sad to see that SAB has discontinued PilsnerUrquell on tap. Maybe even SAB cannot argue with the market!
You’re right Stuart – I should have been clearer that I meant “Standard American Lager”.
And I too miss PU on tap. It’s a GREAT beer.