Lager is no longer a dirty word!

Here is a beer as dark as a moonless night, smooth and creamy on the palate with suggestions of chocolate and mocha coffee, before finishing dry and crisp. We’re talking a stout, or a porter or just a dark bitter perhaps? A member of the family of ale? Actually no, what I’m describing is a lager, a Czech-style dark lager to be precise, otherwise known as a tmavý ležák.

I drank several of these on a recent trip to Prague, notably at a bar in the grounds of the Břevnov Monastery just outside the city. Here there is a brewery, Břevnovský klášter, and you can drink its Benedict beers in the bar and adjoining restaurant as well as at various venues in Prague. The 11˚ tmavý ležák was gorgeous, soothing and smooth, easy to drink — a lager.

It still surprises me that out and about on my travels I come across beer-lovers who maintain that lager is, in the infamous words of many a CAMRA fellow traveller, ‘fizzy, yellow, industrial muck’. The reason that I remain surprised is that in the last decade or so we have seen many a new brewery (and old hand too) produce lagered beers, using time and cold fermentation to mimic the great beer styles of central Europe.

Meantime were an early advocate when they started in 2000, but now you can drink all manner of lagers from the likes of West, Cotswold (I thoroughly enjoyed their Dortmunder and Imperial Pilsner last year) and newer outfits such as Lost and Grounded, Hartlepool-based Donzoko (whose Northern Helles is a beautiful piece of work) and Braybrooke.

The great thing about this surge in lager production is that the breweries are looking beyond just merely producing versions of Pils/Pilsner and Helles but instead are reaching into the rich storehouse of lager styles. Donzoko, for instance, produced a rich and well-matured Doppelbock, aged with Bavarian cherries; in the middle of nowhere in North Wales, we find Geipel, which makes a Bock; while Tottenham-based Bohem, founded by Czech brewers, are exploring the full gamut of Bohemian beer styles as well as collaborating with the likes of St Austell and the Dutch brewery Kees.

So you can imagine my excitement last year when I heard about a lagerproducing brewery starting to brew just up the road from Exeter, where I live. I say up the road, but it’s about 12 miles away, but still close enough for me to imagine I can smell the aroma on brewing day.

The brewery is called Utopian and is based at a small industrial unit in the middle of central Devon where there are views over the soft and gentle hills before the hard outcrop of Dartmoor begins. It’s a beguiling location — the unit, which was originally used to store swedes, is off a narrow country road and there’s an old church opposite and beyond that a farm that breeds cattle. This is as rural as you can get without appearing in an episode of The Archers.

As well as brewing lager, another unique aspect about Utopian is that it is committed to producing its beers solely with British raw materials, which are used for its flagship British Lager (a Helles style brewed in the Bavarian tradition), as well as a Pilsner, Dunkel and an unfiltered version of the Helles. Meanwhile a collaboration with the Yeastie Boys led to a 11˚ Czech-style pale and there are also plans for a Mai-bock and other lager styles.

I recently visited the brewery and whilst there, Managing Director Richard Archer told me that his rationale for setting up the brewery and concentrating on lager, ‘was that as craft beer was growing, it was all ales and IPAs, which if you drunk them was great but the lager drinker didn’t get so much choice. It felt that there was almost an assumption that lager drinkers didn’t want so much choice — so we wanted to be able to give a more interesting choice of lager.

We want to use classical methods designed for a classical lager brewery and we also aim to be as sustainable as possible.’

Head brewery Jeremy Swainson, who comes from Canada, started off his career at Bolten Brewery (sited between Düsseldorf and Mönchengladbach) and then was at Camden Town before coming to Utopian. He is a great advocate of lager and naturally wants to change drinkers’ perceptions: ‘In the UK many people understand lager as being a style of beer rather than a family of beers — yellow, fizzy, low hop flavour.

‘We brewed a Vienna Lager in collaboration with our friends at Bulletproof Brewing which was amber, rich and malty, and had a delicate carbonation — more akin to a best bitter than a pint of Stella. Lager literally pairs with everything, that’s why it took over the world.’

I regularly drink Utopian’s unfiltered Helles whenever I see it, loving its crisp and fulsome character, soft citrus note mid-palate and the gentle bitter finish; the Dunkel is also delicious. Maybe, just maybe, our perceptions of lagered beer are about to turn and those that currently ask for a pint of lager will soon be saying Dunkel, Bock, Doppelbock, Pilsner or Kellerbier.

Adrian Tierney-Jones

Voted ‘Beer Writer of the Year 2017’ by the British Guild of Beer Writers, Adrian Tierney-Jones is a freelance journalist whose work also appears in the Daily Telegraph, Original Gravity, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, Daily Star and Imbibe amongst many others.

He’s been writing books since 2002 and they include West Country Ales, Great British Pubs, Britain’s Beer Revolution (co-written with Roger Protz) and his latest The Seven Moods of Craft Beer; general editor of 1001 Beers To Try Before You Die and contributor to The Oxford Companion to Beer, World Beer and 1001 Restaurants You Must Experience Before You Die.

Chair of Judges at the World Beer Awards and also on the jury at the Brussels Beer Challenge, Occasionally blogs at http://maltworms.blogspot.co.uk