Brewing a Dreher-style Wiener Lager

Wiener lager wort straight from the kettle.

Book tour update! My East Coast leg continues after a great event at Carton Brewing in New Jersey yesterday afternoon. Have a look at the schedule and join me at Bonn Place tonight (Bethlehem, PA) at 5:30, Hailey’s Harp Tuesday (Metuchen, NJ), Torch and Crown Weds (Manhattan), and Guinness Thursday (Baltimore).

On Friday that began with misty clouds lacing the mountaintops, I drove out the Gorge for a special occasion. pFriem was brewing up a collaboration we’ve been planning for the last couple months. This is one of the tasty fruits of our partnership together, and something I am very excited about.

We were looking for something unusual that would intrigue people but also taste contemporary and pFriem-like. Ever since my visit to Austria a couple years ago, I’ve been dreaming of Vienna lager. Not the pallid descendants of the famous style once called “fire in the glass” by an impressed drinker, but the 19th century Viennese originals, smoldering with character.

Pilsners would eventually supplant the pale lager Anton Dreher brewed in 1841, but for a time, Vienna lager—Wiener lager to locals—was the toast of the world. Dreher’s was so renowned that he used its success to fund construction of the most modern brewery in Europe, and later a second in Hungary. He purchased hop fields in Bohemia to secure a source of the second-most important ingredient in his sparkling brew. He built an empire on his lager and created one of the most successful beers ever.

Made solely with Vienna malt and hopped fairly stiffly with Saaz hops from his Bohemian fields, it has always sounded amazing to me. As a shorthand, you could think of it as a decocted Czech pilsner made with Vienna malt. (And like the světlé pivos of Czechia, it came in a couple strengths.)

Josh Pfriem and his team, which now includes Campbell Morrissy as Head Brewer, had a long and detailed conversation about how to evoke that beer in a modern brewhouse with modern equipment. They invited me to Zoom in and and participate. It has been fascinating (though not entirely surprising) to see how pFriem approaches new beers and how methodical they are about the details. I started by preparing a historical overview of the beer, including everything I knew about its production method—with a big assist from Andreas Krennmair.

The oldest brewing logs from Dreher’s old brewery in Schwechat.

I peered through a video link as the team began discussing how to translate Dreher’s original into a modern beer. The process piece is actually fairly easy, but deciding on ingredients was more challenging. Amazingly, they were able to source some pilsner malt made from Hana barley, a 19th century variety that Dreher himself may well have used. The original Vienna malt is long vanished, so pFriem went with Weyermann. They used a single decoction, a concession to the quality of modern hops, and plan to do a longer, warmer ferment. The final beer will debut at the brewery in November, and pFriem even ordered dimple mugs for the occasion. I will update you before the debut.

Campbell Morrissy

I was startled when I learned that pFriem’s longtime head brewer Gavin Lord was stepping down this spring. He had been such a big part of the brewery’s direction in past years—not to mention a familiar public face—that I couldn’t imagine a Lord-less pFriem going forward. He left some pretty big shoes.

The person they found seems to be filling them just fine. Campbell Morrissy has worked as a professional brewer over the past decade and graduated from the UK’s premier brewing program at Herriot-Watt in 2013. Most recently, he was the director of brewing ops at Mother Road Brewing in Flagstaff. Perhaps most impressively, while brewing at pFriem, he’s also pursuing a Ph.D. in crop sciences at OSU. His work at the Barley Project there involves studying the impact of genotype, environment, and agronomic conditions on flavor and process outcomes for malt.

It’s been great to work with him, and pFriem seems to be in excellent hands.