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In the beginning there was ale...
High in the Bavarian Alps in the Middle Ages, Benedictine monks came up with an ingenious solution to a serious problem.The monks had been happily brewing beer in their hilltop monasteries for centuries, keeping their strength up with fresh ale and fulfilling their requirement to be self-sufficient. But, like brewers all over Europe, they had a problem with summer.
The summer months were a nightmare for brewers in those pre-refrigeration days. Stopping beer becoming infected was tricky at the best of times, but when the temperature rose the chances of keeping microbes out of the sweet, sticky ale were slim. The Prince of Bavaria even laid down the law on the matter, ruling that no beer could be made between April and September.
Keeping beer that was brewed in March fresh and drinkable all through the summer was out of the question. So, with a good few hundred years to wait until the first fridge was delivered, the monks came up with their own way around this pressing problem.
After brewing and fermenting their beer, they began storing it in caves deep in the mountains, some of them filled with ice, where the beer stayed cold enough to keep the bugs at bay all summer long.
Not only did this cold storage prevent infection, but to the monks' delight they found that it also triggered a second round of fermentation, much slower and gentler than the first, creating a new kind of beer that was more subtly flavoured and clearer than usual, and gently fizzing from months of carbonation.
This new process of cold storage quickly became popular with brewers in nearby Munich, who soon found caves of their own and every spring began carting fresh beer up to the mountains to store – or, in German, to "lager". It was a little Bavarian secret, but not for long.
In the early 19th century, steam engines and better transport revolutionised brewing, and the lager brewers of Munich were quick to seize the opportunity. The owners of the Spaten brewery were among the first, introducing steam power to bump up production, plugging into the fast new transport system and digging chambers deep beneath the brewery where they lagered their beers to create the distinctive flavour, cooled by ice first cut from rivers and lakes and later made by machine.
The word about this Bavarian beer began to spread, and soon lager breweries appeared in Vienna, Bohemia, Budapest and Copenhagen. Carried easily around the region on the new railways, the taste for lager started to catch on.
The beers produced by these pioneering breweries would be largely unrecognisable to today's lager drinkers. The key difference was colour. The customers were used to dark beers and that's what they got with lagers - dark brown in Bavaria, red in Vienna, and variations on those colours everywhere else, along with a strong added flavour of the wood used in the fires to kiln the malted barley.
But at a new brewery in the city of Pilsen, in today's Czech Republic, a major step in the development of what we know as lager today took place in the 1840s when the brewer used a coke-fired kiln imported from England and created the world's first golden beer.
Beer-drinkers had never seen anything like it. Beer, including lager, was traditionally dark and served in a mug you couldn't see through, but here, shining out of the new glasses only just available to ordinary people, was a sparkling golden nectar, a delicious balance of malt and hops and the softest water, cold and gently bubbling. They couldn't get enough.
First Pilsen, then the rest of Bohemia, then whole chunks of Europe went Pilsner-mad. The new golden lager became the hottest drink of the day in the fashionable salons of Paris and Berlin, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. By the end of the century, this new style of beer cooked up in a town tucked away in the middle of Europe had crossed the seas with shiploads of emigrants to America and Australia, and was on its way to becoming the world's biggest beer.
In Britain it was a different story. While the Bohemians, Germans and Austrians were using the new technology of the Industrial Revolution to develop pale lager, British brewers were using the same techniques to create the distinctive bitters and pale ales that remain popular today. In the early 1960s only one pint in every 50 sold in Britain was a lager, and in the 1970s a German newspaper said that in Britain lager was drunk only by "refined ladies, people with digestive ailments, tourists and other weaklings."
But in the last 30 years lager has become the drink of choice for most British beer-drinkers. It reached the 50 per cent mark in 1989 and has continued to grow ever since. Although in the past there has been a negative image associated with lager drinkers, consumer tastes are changing all the time, and despite the revival of other styles, lager is the leading beer of Britain and the rest of the world, by a long way. And all because some monks in the mountains couldn't face summer without beer.