FOOD & DRINK
Bohemian pilsner from Wiedemann’s Fine Beer P H OTO : P ROV I D E D
Local Lagers Make Summer a Beer-eze Cincinnati brewers have a longstanding history with this quaffable German-style beer. Here are some favorites to try. BY S E A N M . P E T E RS
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ager is a very important style of beer in Cincinnati, both today and more than 150 years ago. Go to a barbecue this summer and you’ll likely see an abundance of lagers in the cooler thanks to this beer’s lightbodied quaffability and often modest
alcohol content. There are many variations of lager, but the brew’s defining feature is the fact that it spends more time in chilly fermentation than, say, an ale: while an ale needs three to five weeks to ferment, a lager is best after six to eight weeks.
That, in part, is one reason Cincinnati distinguished itself as a lager city in the mid-19th century. The Queen City is rife with lagering cellars constructed during that time and used to cool beer before the advent of refrigeration. These underground tunnels and other historic beer sites can be viewed on guided tours of Cincinnati’s Brewing Heritage Trail, curated by local beer historian and author Michael Morgan. His most recent book Cincinnati Beer is a historical love letter to the city’s ongoing reputation for producing some of the best beer in the country. Morgan points to two reasons lager flowed more heartily from Cincinnati than from other beer hubs: first, a large influx of German immigrants (lager is a German beer), and, subsequently, their
brewers’ adherence to traditional German brewing practices. “Immigration brought both consumer demand for German-style lagers as well as skilled brewers who knew how to produce it,” Morgan says. “Cincinnati was the first point on the ‘German Triangle’ that was composed of the cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis and Milwaukee.” Morgan says Cincinnati brewers tended to remain more true to the Reinheitsgebot brewing purity law than other cities. “This meant brewing with nothing but barley malt, yeast, hops and water,” he says. “Many consumers, particularly Germans, looked down on the use of rice, corn or other adjuncts as an adulteration of the beer. Cincinnati lagers were seen as more traditional, more
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