The Vienna Dialogues
Two years and two months ago, before the time of troubles, I met Reverend Nat’s Nat West in Manchester for a cider event. He was in Europe doing business stuff and I was there researching my book. A day or two later we met for pints of Timothy Taylor Landlord and later still had Sunday roast together at Marble Arch. But these are not the tales I want to relay.
Our story is centered further south, in the suburbs of Vienna. Just before arriving in the UK, Nat had passed through the city and stopped at a brewery I would visit a week later. That brewery isn’t on anyone’s travel must-see. It’s owned by Heineken, and the beer they make on their large industrial system is almost exclusively mass market lager. I know few people who have ever bothered to tour it. Yet beginning in 2016, the Schwechat Brewery began making a revival of the Vienna lager Anton Dreher first brewed at the site 175 years earlier. I’m not sure why Nat went to the brewery, but I was hoping to unearth some old brew logs. I don’t think either one of us expected to find a world-class beer there.
I don’t honestly recall if we talked about Schwechat’s Wiener Lager in Manchester. I hadn’t tasted it yet, and my brain chose not to record any discussion we might have had. We definitely talked about it afterward. We were both incredibly smitten. Perhaps it was the surprise. No one expects such a rich, characterful beer to come off a system with a mash filter in a charmless industrial plant. But when I sat down with master brewer Andreas Urban after the tour and had a glass, I was astonished. It’s a beer worthy of the brewery’s august heritage.
Several months later, now in the darkest heart of the time of troubles, Nat took possession of a case of Wiener Lager bottles. He quietly mentioned it to me as if it were contraband, asking if I would like a bottle. (That’s it in the photo above, which also appears on page 356 of the new edition of The Beer Bible.) It was, if anything, better than I recalled. What a tremendous beer.
At that point, Nat and I were deep into a dialogue about this old, largely debased style almost nobody cares about. It will come as no surprise that when I started blogging about my pFriem Wiener Lager collaboration, Nat was the first person to contact me. He wanted to taste it. I felt a touch of anxiety—Nat knows Vienna lagers!—but his opinion was the one I was most keen to hear. No one appreciates the style more.
Finding a pint turned out to be more challenging than we expected. We met at Loyal Legion on Monday, and it was already gone. Last night we met again at the bar on Stark Street confusingly named Beer. Also gone. Fortunately, we’d heard that a sports bar downtown had put it on a day earlier. Joy!—it was still on tap.
All we want for Christmas is a pint of Wiener Lager! Thanks to The Independent for acting as our Santa.
I’ll let Nat offer his report, but I was pleased to see his eyebrows shoot up during his first sip, and I caught him murmur “this is good” as he placed the glass back on the bar. pFriem’s isn’t like Schwechat’s, but we agreed that it was assertive, full of character, and interesting. It was worthy of our expectation of the style.
These are the kinds of experiences that make me love beer. Since our mutual Vienna journey began, Nat has mentioned that Schwechater Wiener Lager is one of his favorite beers. I don’t have favorites exactly—or rather I have about a hundred of them. I love finding people who, like Nat, share my love of one of these beers. The experiences of first contact, the connection that comes from mutual appreciation, and the ongoing love affair with that beer—this is what makes such a simple beverage special. We come into dialogue about our favorite beers with friends—and ultimately we come into a dialogue with certain beers. The wonderful champion of cask ale, Fuller’s John Keeling, once put it this way to me:
“I want [London Pride] to occasionally surprise you—today it’s a little bit more malty or caramelly or hoppy or fragrant or whatever—so that you are having a dialogue with that beer. You’re noticing things about that beer and it interests you and involves you because of that.”
I recently posed a question on Twitter about why avid Untappd raters seem to love a narrow band of niche styles. A lot of the answers contained shards of the truth. There is an element of FOMO to the way fans pursue the latest boozy confection. Scarcity certainly plays a role. But I see a simpler, more obvious answer. These are the styles the raters like, and the pursuit, discovery, and pleasure they bring is just the same as Nat and I spending two days and three pubs trying to find one rare beer. The styles don’t matter—it’s the unfolding experience we have enjoying them.