The Birth of a Classic

pFriem had a pretty good April. In the month’s first week, pFriem Pilsner won the gold medal at the Oregon Beer Awards for a remarkable fourth time in five years. That’s not nuthin—Oregon’s pilsner game is very strong, and it had to beat a number of award-winning competitors. Then, not quite three weeks later, Pilsner took the gold medal at the World Beer Cup.

Since it debuted little more than a decade ago, pFriem’s Pilsner has medaled at every major competition out there—the GABF, Best of Craft Beer, and Brussels Beer Challenge. In 2016, when it took bronze at the European Beer Star competition, it was the first non-German pilsner to break into the German pilsner category. Judged against its peers in local, national, or international blind tastings, it consistently emerges as one of the best pilsners in the world. And elite palates aren’t the only ones who appreciate pFriem Pilsner: for years it has been the brewery’s best-selling beer.

When I heard pFriem (pronounced “Freem”) had won gold at the World Beer Cup, I started thinking about how a brewery achieves this kind of consistent success. Pilsner is the world’s most popular style, and thousands of breweries make them. How does a brewery methodically go about brewing and refining their pilsner until it’s one of the world’s best? If a brewery wanted to set about making a “classic,” how would they go about such a project? pFriem offers us a case study, so I called up co-founding master brewer Josh Pfriem to hear how they tackled this task. The upshot is that it takes a lot of time and attention; classics aren’t made overnight. In pFriem’s case, the work started years before the brewery existed, and—as is true with every other exemplary beer—continues on batch by batch.

Pfriem Before pFriem

Josh started brewing professionally in Utah nearly twenty years ago. Until 2019, no beer sold in Utah’s stores, bars, or restaurants could exceed 4% in strength, a restriction that forced brewers to become adept at coaxing big flavors out of small beers. “Those guys, led by Jennifer Talley and Dan Burick, when I came in, were making great beer. At 4%, it had to be clean, tight,” he said. It forced a kind of discipline and attention to detail that became a hallmark of his approach.

The brewery he worked at, Squatters, made a beer called Provo Girl Pilsner—a wink at St. Pauli Girl. At the time, the brewery used Mt. Hood hops, and Josh admired the beer. But a hop shortage forced them to look for a substitute, and that led to the first of his epiphanies. Lacking a local option, he turned to Germany. “We ordered Spalt Select, and I remember this beat-up old box arriving from Germany. The change was amazing. It became a dynamic and drinkable lager.”

pFriem has been a sponsor of this blog since 2022, but this post was my idea. I spoke to Josh Pfriem and asked the brewery for pictures, but otherwise pFriem had no involvement in the story.

In 2008, Josh moved back to his home state of Washington to work at a new brewery called Chuckanut. Working with lager-champion Will Kemper, Josh got a lot more experience making lagers. “We were inspired by German beers, anything fresh and exciting we could get our hands on,” he said, name-checking Trumer as an especially influential beer. The Pilsner they brewed there was made with all European ingredients, typical for the brewery—but it followed Josh’s insight about using German ingredients to make pilsners. Chuckanut’s Pilsner is incredibly bright, vivid, and effervescent, one of the beers that immediately started winning the brewery awards. “That was a beer I was super proud of,” he said, especially when it took a medal at the 2009 GABF.

He left Chuckanut for Full Sail to work on a large system, which is how pFriem ended up in Hood River. Despite his love of pilsners, “no one was drinking lagers at the time.” (Indeed, despite its piles of awards, Chuckanut took a long time to build up a following.) Like many American brewers, Josh had many influences, and Belgium and the U.S. were as significant as Germany. So, when he co-founded pFriem, Josh wanted to make lagers, but he leaned into beers he thought the public wanted—IPAs and sophisticated Belgian-inspired beers.

Let ‘Em Rip

pFriem opened in 2012, but didn’t brew its first lager until a year later. They initially positioned Wit and Blonde IPA as flagship brands. Nevertheless, the brewing system was designed to brew lagers, and by 2014 Pilsner (along with IPA) started taking off. “At the time, it was not so obvious that those would be good choices, but I thought, ‘Let ‘em rip!’” Josh said. “Well, an IPA made sense,” he said, backing up. “In a competition between the two, IPA usually wins.” That was especially true in 2014, which was about the time New England breweries had discovered hops and began using them to make hazy beers. In the Northwest, hoppy beers had been popular for decades. Lagers, not so much.

“It’s been a dream state for me. If you’d told me in 2011 Pilsner would be our most-awarded, best-selling beer, I would have lost my mind.”

— Josh Pfriem

Curiously, the brewery decided to put their thumb on the scale for Pilsner. “I wanted it to be our flagship,” Josh said. “We under-produced IPA and over-produced Pilsner.” The brewery was still small, so perhaps it wasn’t as risky to push a lager into the market that was years from embracing it—but pilsners were still years from becoming a significant factor in Northwest brewing. “At the time, it was a maverick thing. Nobody really had a flagship pilsner.”

In 2015, it started winning awards, beginning with a silver at the GABF. Josh had taken all that he’d learned about lagers to make pFriem’s version, and it was paying off. The next year it would pull off that big win at the European Beer Star awards, and various outlets were beginning to call it one of the best beers in America. It definitely deserved the accolades. I became a fan of the beer around 2014 and started citing it as one of those American beers that demonstrated how seriously Americans were starting to take lagers. pFriem Pilsner wasn’t done evolving, however. A trip to Bavaria made sure of that.

Moments of Inspiration

In 2016, Josh visited Bavaria and met with Eric Toft, the Weihenstephan-trained American who has been the master brewer at Brauerei Schönramer since 1998. More importantly, he spent three or four days drinking Toft’s pilsner, which seems to have been a transformational event, even for a brewer who had been making lagers professionally for a decade. “You wait for these moments of inspiration as a brewer,” he said. “I still dream about that beer.”

It wasn’t so much that they did something special at Schönramer—the details just added up to something special. Pilsners are straightforward, but they come alive in the details. I asked Josh what impressed him, and he ticked off the elements that wowed him: a “dynamic” malt character, an acid profile they created in-house, a layered hoppiness and assertive bitterness—and the way these elements came together. Toft helped in some fundamental ways, like connecting pFriem to German hop growers, and he developed a relationship with Weyermann, the Bamberg malthouse. Bavaria also taught him about a secret “ingredient”—sulfur, which has become integral not just in Pilsner, but his thinking about lagers generally.

When he got back to Hood River, he began refining pFriem Pilsner. “We changed the way we thought about the beer and how we could tweak each piece along the way.” Following his experience with Schönramer, he zeroed in on an important relationship, the “dance” among pH, bitterness, and sulfur. These pieces each influence one another, and pFriem slowly put them into a new balance. “The IBUs used to be 37-38, but we dropped it to 30-31–but the dance has kept the intensity similar,” he explained by example. He continued: “[The beer] is very simple: pilsner malt, German hops, 3470 yeast—but within that framework, it’s every little thing we do. We’re looking at all our process points and all the factors that touch those.”

As pFriem has evolved as a brewery, it has grown a bit more American, too. In terms of fundamentals, Josh said their lagers had a classically Bavarian orientation—“a lot of lager and cellar character and aromatics.” But they’re Americans, and they use malt from multiple sources and have an American sense of hop character. “From a palate standpoint, we started there, but we do use whirlpool hops. We’re Americans—let’s get some hop aromatics in there!” These are important to the beer’s growing identity as an American beer, not just a Bavarian clone.

During Covid, pFriem made a massive investment into their flagship, installing a new German-made GEA brewhouse in Hood River. It was optimized to make lager beer—so much so that I recently asked Campbell Morrissy, Director of Brewery Operations, how easy it was to make hoppy ales on the system. (He admitted it took some work.) “pFriem Pilsner is the heart of the brewery,” Josh said. Their constant thinking, learning, and tweaking they’ve done in Pilsner informs everything they do in the brewery. “As that beer gets better, the rest of the beers get better.”

The most valuable lessons I’ve learned have come from brewers who have spent decades making the same beer. There’s a “cræft” in understanding a beer at a level so deep it settles in a brewer’s bones. Constant repetition allows them to understand the process and ingredients the way a spider knows its web—able to detect tiny vibrations anywhere in the brewhouse. The beers I admire most aren’t special because they have a secret ingredient or unusual technique. Beers like Harvey’s Sussex Best or Saison Dupont or Schneider Weisse or Pliny the Elder—these are triumphs of attention and refinement. They can’t be engineered in a few batches or even a few years, no matter how talented or clever a brewer is.

Classics aren’t born overnight. They are built slowly, over many years and with the constant vigilance of their caretakers. A decade is too little time to call any beer a classic, including pFriem’s Pilsner. But at the start of the process, this is what it looks like. If Josh and his team continue to put the same level of attention in their flagship the next decade that they have in the past, however, it will be in a position to join that group. It’s not easy to make great beer, and it’s extremely hard to make a classic. But it’s doable—and I’m rooting for pFriem to get there.