“A Heavenly Drink, Like Concentrated Sunshine”: Vienna Lager Past and Present

A few years back, the beer world came together to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot (Beer Purity Law) promulgated in 1516. The atmosphere across Bavaria was festive. Breweries touted the Reinheitsgebot during their tours, museums staged exhibitions about the edict’s history, and beer enthusiasts began a fresh round of debate about the relevance of this centuries-old writ. Four hours east of Munich as the RailJet flies, the Viennese were marking a milestone anniversary of their own, albeit with much less fanfare: 175 years of Vienna Lager.

Even if no museums commemorated the fact, and even if the media resonance was akin to the sound of one hand clapping, Vienna had good reason to celebrate its contribution to the culture of brewing. Bottom-fermented beer had been produced for centuries in Europe’s Alpine regions, but it wasn’t until Anton Dreher, owner of the Brauhaus zu Klein-Schwechat, brought together technological advances he learned in Britain and Bavaria that he was able to produce the first lager beer that could be brewed year-round. That happened in 1841. Up until then, Vienna’s top-fermented beers had a poor reputation: a dark brown, turbid, and frothy concoction that contemporaries dubbed “recht miserabel.” (I probably don’t need to translate that.)

Britain at the Forefront

Dreher’s father, Franz Anton Dreher, purchased the Brauhaus zu Klein-Schwechat in 1787 and had every intention of turning the brewery over to his son. Franz Anton passed away in 1820 while Anton was still a child, so it fell to young Anton’s mother and relatives to convince him to follow in his father’s footsteps. Initially, Anton saw things differently and enrolled as a university student, but his family eventually prevailed upon him to become an apprentice at the nearby Simmeringer Brauerei.

Though the young Dreher got off to a rocky start in Simmering, his time spent there was auspicious. It just so happened that Gabriel Sedlmayr I of Spaten Brauerei in Munich had sent his son, Gabriel II, to apprentice at the same brewery. The two brewers’ sons became fast friends, with Dreher resolving to accompany Sedlmayr on the remainder of his grand tour of Europe. During the early 1830s, the two visited places like Leipzig, Strasburg, Cologne, and Antwerp to quench their thirst for brewing knowledge. Their final destination was Britain, where the good beers of early nineteenth-century Europe were.

Dreher’s trip to Britain’s famous brewing cities, which culminated in a post-tour stay with the Sedlmayrs in Munich in 1834/1835, was seminal for the development of what eventually became Vienna Lager. Dreher learned about controlled bottom fermentation from the Sedlmayrs, who had been practicing the technique since 1807. In Britain, Dreher and Sedlmayr worked as brewing assistants to earn money for their return journey, surreptitiously gathering the secrets of British brewing and malting along the way. In acts of “corporate espionage” avant la lettre, the two even fashioned a metal tube with a hidden valve so they could sneak samples of wort to analyze later.

The British of the era were decades ahead of their counterparts in Central Europe in terms of the science and technology of the brewing process. British brewers had devised new techniques for kilning malt that involved indirect heating. They had also developed cooling systems for chilling boiling-hot wort, a technology that contributed enormously to brewing hygiene. Brewers could now cool the wort quickly to optimal yeast-pitching temperatures, and the decreased cooling time hindered harmful bacteria from spoiling the beer. The British had come to appreciate the importance of temperature control as well, using thermometers to monitor temperatures and hold them relatively constant during important steps of the brewing process.

From Thunderstorms to Thermometers

Back in Schwechat in 1836, the young Dreher began introducing these new-fangled gadgets and processes at the family brewery, which had been in slow decline since his father’s death. He faced outright hostility from his fellow brewers for his decision to implement these ideas  — so much so that that this upstart “Wirrkopf” (scatterbrain) was shunned at the brewers’ coffeehouse Stammtisch (regulars’ table) in Schwechat.

This was a time when the influence of the brewing guild was still entrenched. Production increases were strictly controlled in order to protect the livelihoods of fellow brewer masters, which assured the brew masters of Vienna and its environs a good living — that is, until the young Dreher came along with new knowledge that threatened to upend the old ways of brewing.

Up to that point, the Viennese brewers trusted feeling and intuition over “suspect” scientific novelties like thermometers. According to an account left by Johann Götz, a gifted 24-year-old whom Dreher had made head brewer, old-time brewers would rise early during the autumn months and head out into the garden. There, they would run their hands through the grass to gauge whether the beer that had been resting in cellars over the summer was nearing maturity. Dew in the grass was a sign that the beer was ready to drink.

Rather than learning about the chemical, physiological, and mechanical processes of brewing, brewers put their trust natural instincts, and in the prevailing forces of “good and evil.” It was said that if a thunderstorm threatened while the beer was cooling, brew masters and their staff were beset by feelings of unspeakable anxiety at the prospect that the influences of “bad” weather could spoil the beer.

Dreher rejected these superstitions, leaning instead on what he had learned in Munich and London. In 1836 he released his “Kaiserbier,” a mild and quaffable top-fermented beer that surpassed all of Vienna’s other top-fermented beers in quality. So popular was the beer that Dreher was able to use the proceeds to triple production within a few months of its release and buy the brewery outright from his mother.

Flush with cash and increasingly confident in his brewing skills, Dreher made the move to bottom fermentation in 1839, paving the way for the release of his “Klein-Schwechater Lagerbier” in 1841. First tapped at the Kohlkreunze tavern in Fünfhaus, this beer that soon came to be known as Vienna Lager was an immediate sensation, touching off an impromptu street festival that lasted well into the night.

So What Is Vienna Lager?

Though Dreher was the progenitor of a new style, he didn’t really “invent” anything in the strict sense of the word. Rather, he skillfully synthesized several new brewing inventions — many from Britain, as we saw above — to develop his new process and recipe. Dreher made use of thermometers, steam engine mechanization, malting procedures that yielded lighter-coloured malts, and new fermentation techniques (quick cooling; controlled bottom fermentation; long lagering times) that enabled the year-round production of bottom-fermented beer.

This was a veritable revolution, for up until that point, April had marked the end of the brewing season in much of Central Europe.

What was so significant about Dreher’s success? After all, bottom-fermented beer had already been mentioned in 1420 in Munich. The problem, though, was that the beer didn’t hold up for very long without some means of cooling the wort quickly after boiling it — and wort didn’t cool very quickly during warmer months. In fact, brewing was prohibited in Bavaria and several surrounding lands between the Feast of St. George (23 April) and the Feast of St. Michael (29 September), not least as a means of ensuring beer of a reasonable quality. Dreher and others rendered this prohibition effectively obsolete by developing a process that enabled year-round beer brewing.*

Dreher’s synthesis of European brewing techniques minimized the incidence of failed brews while improving both the stability and taste of the beer. After much trial and error starting in 1839, the malt-accented and subtly spicy amber beer that Dreher eventually released in 1841 bore the stamp of European-wide brewing developments and ingredients:

• Lightly-kilned malt that resulted in an amber-gold beer, which bore the influence of maltsters in both Britain and Moravia, then a part of the Habsburg Empire.
• Saaz hops from Bohemia, which was part of the Habsburg Empire at the time.
• Quick cooling to improve the hygiene and stability of the beer, a technique Dreher learned in Britain.
• Bottom-fermentation and several weeks of lagering, a testament to the influence of brewers in Munich/Bavaria.

*For those who credit Dreher with the “invention” of lager beer as we know it, it’s worth noting that the 1830s and 1840s witnessed an intense circulation of ideas among brewers in the German-speaking realms. Dreher came out with his Vienna Lager in 1841, and Groll with his Pilsener in 1842. Both of these brewers were influenced by developments at Spaten in Munich.

The Decline and Rebirth of Vienna Lager

Anton Dreher went from one success to the next, exporting his beer as far afield as Rio de Janeiro, and opening or acquiring new breweries in Saaz (Michelob) and in Budapest. By the time of his untimely death in 1863 at the age of 53, his brewery was the largest in the Habsburg Empire, and poised to become the largest brewery in the world under his son, Anton Jr.

The style that Dreher sent out into the world gradually faded away in its home town, falling victim to changes in taste and the consequences of WWI. But Vienna Lager soldiered on, sometimes in unlikely places. It arrived in Mexico during the ill-fated reign of the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian I (1864-1867), its outlines vaguely discernible today in the corn-laden Negra Modelo and Dos Equis Amber Lager.* Elsewhere, Franziskaner-Leist released a Märzen “brewed in the Viennese style” for Oktoberfest in 1872, a beer that dominated the Oktoberfest meadow for decades. More recently, Vienna Lager has played a key, if underappreciated, role in the North American craft beer revival. Sam Adams’ flagship Boston Lager is none other than a Vienna Lager hopped to a slightly higher rate.

*Note (2024): The story about Vienna Lager and its arrival in Mexico during the reign of Archduke Maximilian circulates through almost every English-language source about Vienna Lager written in the 1990s and 2000s,. According to my further reading on the subject, this story about Maximilian and his brewmaster seems to be apocryphal. To complicate matters, though, those who call the story into question base their arguments on speculation. This has much to do with the paucity of texts surrounding Vienna Lager’s arrival in Mexico. Not even Austrian beer historian Günther Thommes could turn up sources at the Austrian National Library or National Archives about the topic. Consulting sources in Mexico seems to be the way forward for anyone with a desire to pursue this further. At any rate, it seems that Lagerbier didn’t arrive in Mexico until around 1880, some 13 years after Archduke Maximilian’s death. The questions that remain (for me, at least) are these: What gave rise to the story about Archduke Maximilian, Mexico, and Vienna Lager in the first place? How beers like Negra Modelo and Dos Equis Amber come to be associated with Vienna Lager? A possible answer to this latter question: Vienna Lager was among the most dominant beer styles in Central Europe by the 1870s and 1880s, so it wouldn’t be surprising that brewers who introduced lager to Mexico were brewing Vienna-style beer.

All but extinct in Vienna a decade ago, the style is enjoying a long-overdue renaissance in its hometown as well. Craft breweries such as Gusswerk in Salzburg and Loncium in Carinthia got the ball rolling earlier this decade, spurring local powerhouse Ottakringer to take notice and resuscitate a 100-year-old recipe for its Wiener Original, a step up from its regular beers.

Not to be outdone, Brauerei Schwechat showed that it, too, still has what it takes to brew a characterful Wiener Lager formulated in the spirit of Anton Dreher’s original recipe. Smaller Viennese breweries like Brew Age, Rodauner, and 100 Blumen have also gotten into the act. (For a taste of these recent renditions, check out Vienna Lager: Ten Beers to Try in Austria’s Capital.)

Though this renewed enthusiasm for Vienna Lager certainly amounts to more than a drop in the sea of light-hued lagers and Austrian Märzens, you won’t yet find it at every corner pub. But the style is once again alive and well in the city of its birth, and as a self-proclaimed malthead, I’ll drink to that.

***

Special thanks to Conrad Seidl, who turned me on to the delightful piece in Der Humorist, from which I have taken the title for this article.

Related Articles:

Vienna Lager: Ten Beers to Try in Austria’s Capital

Autumn in a Glass: Märzen, Oktoberfest Beer, and Vienna Lager

The Setting Sun: Five of Vienna’s Best Spots for a Late Summer Beer

Sources:

“Durst Notiz: Kleine aber erhabene Bier-Epopä,” Der Humorist (Vienna, 17 June 1843).

Michael Jackson, “The Birth of Lager,” All About Beer (March 1, 1996).

Alfred Paleczny, Die Wiener Brauherren: Das goldene Bierjahrhundert (Vienna: Loecker Erhard Verlag, 2014).

Josef Promintzer, Dreihundert Jahre Brauhaus Schwechat: Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der größten Brauerei Österreichs (Vienna, 1932).

Conrad Seidl, Unser Bier: Reisen zu Österreichs Brauereien 1994/95 (Vienna: Franz Deuticke Verlag, 1993).

Stadt Wien, Wien Geschichte Wiki: Bier and Brauhäuser

Christoph Wagner, René Schaumüller, and Gerhard Trumler, 1000 Jahre Österreichisches Bier (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1996).

With the exception of “In der Brauerei” (Wiki Commons), all images by F.D. Hofer. Since I don’t have too many on hand that relate to Brauerei Schwechat specifically, I’ve included photos of Vienna itself. If you haven’t visited already, hopefully the photos will entice you to come over and try the beer.

© 2019 F.D. Hofer and A Tempest in a Tankard. All rights reserved.