The facility is spotless, and its huge and gleaming copper kettles almost glow. On the Urquell tour, the precision is visual. Various other flavor elements also cloak flaws in ales in ways lagers cannot. It helped that startup craft operations could make nonlagers a lot more quickly and affordably-pilsners, a primary type of lager, take as many as four more weeks to make than ales-and with a lot less precision (the pilsner process is more technical in order to achieve the desired crispness and clarity). The last thing the producers wanted to be was remotely comparable to Budweiser, which they see as essentially a lowbrow American take on Urquell, so they swung in the other direction toward big, bold, hoppy and cleverly flavored red ales, pale ales, amber ales, brown ales, stouts, IPAs, DIPAs and imperial IPAs.

According to the experts who run tours at the style’s purported birthplace, Pilsner Urquell, outside of Prague in the Czech Republic, 80% of the world’s beer production is pilsner.įor a long time, the style’s ubiquity and the dominance of macro pilsner brewers like Miller and Corona made pilsner the bane of beer nerds and the craft producers who woo them. For millions of drinkers around the world, the reliable, pale, light, yellow, fizzy, easy-drinking pilsner is simply synonymous with beer.

Pilsner beer vs ipa