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Lager

Amber Lager

Anton Dreher's Vienna lager, brewed a year before Pilsner and largely eclipsed by it. Toasty, bready, faintly sweet, and the ancestor of Oktoberfest beer.

Vienna
Origin
1841
First appears
4.5–6%
Typical ABV
104
In the archive
5.2%
Average ABV here

Built on Vienna malt — kilned hot enough to toast the grain but not to burn it, which is where both the biscuit flavour and the copper colour come from — and traditionally made by decoction mashing, boiling part of the mash separately and returning it to caramelise the sugars. Dreher created it at Klein-Schwechat, NOT at the St. Marx brewery it is often credited to; St. Marx merged into Schwechat seventy-two years later, in 1913. The style then nearly died in Austria and survived largely through Mexico, where Austrian brewers took it in the 1860s.

Covered in Era 5Industrialisation and the Lager Revolution.

01

101 breweries across 14 countries

Amber Lager in the archive

Showing 60 of 104.

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