Pale lager is a very pale to
golden-coloured
beer with a well attenuated body and
noble hop bitterness. The brewing process for this beer developed in the mid 1800s when Gabriel Sedlmayr took
pale ale brewing techniques back to the
Spaten Brewery in
Germany and applied it to existing lagering brewing methods. This approach was picked up by other brewers, most notably
Josef Groll who produced
Pilsner Urquell. The resulting pale coloured, lean and stable beers were very successful and gradually spread around the globe to become the most common form of beer consumed in the world today.
The main elements of the lagering method used by Sedlmayr and Groll are still used today, and depend on a slow acting yeast that ferments at a low temperature while being stored. Indeed, the German term 'Lager' means 'storage'. While first marketed as 'Lagerbier' in Austria and Germany, the term is now quite uncommon in the German speaking countries where today one would simply ask for 'helles Bier' (pale lager), 'dunkles Bier' (dark lager or ale) or specific varieties, particularly those with a distinctive character such as Pilsner or Weizenbier (also called Weissbier). In the English speaking world, however, lager is now a general name for any beer made using the lagering method.
In the period 1820-1830, a brewer named Gabriel Sedlmayr II the Younger, whose family was running the Spaten Brewery in Bavaria went around Europe to improve his brewing skills. When he returned, he used what he had learned to get a more stable and consistent lager beer. The Bavarian lager was still different from the widely-known modern lager; due to the use of dark malts it was quite dark, representing what is now called dunkel beer or the stronger variety, bock beer.
The new recipe of the improved lager beer spread quickly over Europe. In particular Sedlmayr's friend Anton Dreher used the new lagering technique to improve the Viennese beer in 1840–1841, creating Vienna lager. New kilning techniques enabled the use of lighter malts, giving the beer an amber-red rich colour.
