West Coast Pilsner

This summer I’ve been seeing a particular beer on quite a few taplists: West Coast pilsner. Whether it is “new” or not depends on what we’re talking about. Hoppy pilsners have been around a long time—a decade?—but as a shaggy category that each brewery interpreted in their own way. In Portland, anyway, 2023 seems to be the year we hit some kind of tipping point. West Coast pilsners have achieved escape velocity, hit the mainstream, and have enough coherence as a style that when I order one I have an expectation of what I’ll receive.

This may not be everyone’s experience. Forty percent of the people who responded to my recent Xitter poll hadn’t really encountered the style. No surprise—“West Coast” has always had more currency out here than elsewhere in the country. Those who have encountered it aren’t sure if it’s actually a pilsner or a low-alc version of a cold IPA. So it’s still early days. That makes it the perfect time to discuss an emerging trend; in a year or three we’ll know if it stuck.

All the Pilsners, Compared

Lagers have definitely, finally made inroads among consumers in the craft segment.* The style that seems to have to most salience is pilsner, and breweries have IPA-ed it—using “pilsner” as an anchor and spinning out a million variants. So, if you visit a brewery today, you might see any of these:

Czech pilsner. The original pilsner could be a lot of things as interpreted by Americans, but a decent dose of Saaz hops will probably be in the mix.
German pils. A softer, maltier pilsner with German hops, unless it’s a …
North German pilsner, in which case it will be dry and assertively bitter.
Italian pilsner. A dry-hopped pils, typically made with European hops.
Alsatian/French pilsner. A more nebulous category, but usually characterized by French hops.
New Zealand pilsner is another nebulous category, but refers to the use of Southern Hemisphere hops.
Assorted random pilsners. The pilsners mentioned above are either real styles or variants with enough substance most brewers recognize them. But out in the wild you might see a bunch of other stuff that they’re throwing against the wall: Polish pils, hoppy pils, Bavarian pils, imperial pils, Belgian pils, rye pils, etc. The existence of these random beers illustrates how much currency the “pilsner” name has achieved. Like IPA, it’s a category now, not a style—at least in the US.

Until recently (or maybe still) West Coast pils fit into that last category. You might see the name, but it could refer to anything from a regular pilsner made with Citra hops to a low-alcohol IPA to a regular-strength IPA made with lager yeast. It had no fixed definition. That all changed, if my understanding of matters is correct, when breweries in Southern California started brewing West Coast Pilsners to a tighter style. I’m not sure if Oregonians are making them the same way, but if not, they, too, seem to have settled on what the term means.

The Contours of West Coast IPA Today

For me, the style snapped into focus when I tried Fracture’s version. Fracture is a newish Portland brewery that specializes in beers with an overlap between IPAs and lagers—and their West Coast pilsner seems to be their calling card in the crowded Portland market. It won silver at the recent Oregon Beer Awards (the other two medal-winners in their category were Italian pils), and has become one of my favorite beers this year. It also functions as a great template for the emerging style.

In American brewing, “West Coast” means American hops, and my nose picks Fracture’s up at arm’s length as their sticky scent wafts into the hot, summer days. With dank tropicality, it smells like a modern IPA. Upon first contact with the tongue, it tastes like an IPA, too; the first time I tried it, I really thought it was just going to be an IPA posing as a lager. But almost immediately something interesting happens. The hops seem to evaporate, revealing the pilsner underneath. Like any pilsner, it is lightly malty, crisp, and dry. Trace amounts of hop flavor linger, but by the time you swallow they’ve transformed almost entirely into aromatics. The hops are “fine” in the European sense—very soft, nothing sharp or grating. You get the intensity of an IPA on the nose, but the performance and drinkability of a pilsner—with a hoppy patina—on the palate.

I know some people would regard this as a debased style, a trick to turn everything into an IPA. That may be true of some examples, but Fracture offers something different. In our Xitter discussion of West Coast pilsners, Alistair Reece crystalized my impression of how this worked. “Assuming here that West Coast Pilsner is made with local West Coast ingredients, then is it any different from Germans taking the concept of pale lager as made in Plzeň and localising it with their ingredients and to suit their audience?”

I don’t know if Fracture’s was made with American pilsner malt, but that would suit the style. A characterful European malt would make the beer a muddle. A fairly neutral American malt, however, would give the beer some sweetness and hints of bread/cracker, but mostly contribute to the light, crisp quality required of a pilsner/-all while allowing those American hop aromatics to shine.

For years I have been wondering what a distinctively American pilsner might taste like if such a thing were to emerge. I’d assumed it would have followed most pilsner substyles into the land of herbal/spicy hopping, but why would it? A beer with “classic” American hops (that is, not like Sterling or Lorien, hops bred to mimic European varieties) makes more intuitive sense. Of course American Pilsners would taste, you know, American:

As for “West Coast,” well, if you’re trying to signal American hops, you have to distinguish it from hazy IPAs—a style irreconcilable with pilsner. So at least on the West Coast, “West Coast pilsner” makes sense as a naming convention. But if this style does catch on, and if it spreads east, its name will probably need to change to reflect something average drinkers understand. Perhaps “American pilsner” will finally come to mean something more than domestic later.

Made well, it’s a fantastic beer. I hope to see even more of them in the future.

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* Changes in the industry have rendered “craft brewery” meaningless, but consumers still understand “craft beer” to mean anything that’s not a mass market lager.