The Making of a Classic: Jever Pilsener
No country is more associated with pale lagers than Germany—and this includes inward-facing Czechia. To the average drinker, pilsner is a German beer, and German beer means pilsner. (That’s likely true in Germany as well.) Germans have made pilsners for a century and a half, and pilsner is the best-selling kind of beer in Germany. For all that, ask a regular drinker to name a German pils and they’ll probably scratch their head. Beck’s? Is that a pilsner?
The issue here is a sneaky one. Beer styles are often more tightly-defined in Germany than elsewhere—except pilsners. Oh, the broad strokes are the same, but the malts and hops may vary, the strength ranges substantially (Bitburger is 4.8%, while Augustiner Pils is a burly 5.6%), and the dryness, bitterness, and balance are all up to the brewery’s preference.
Today we’re going to discuss one of the most interesting pilsners in Germany, and in many ways one of the outliers. It’s assertively bitter, lean and dry, and can shock the sensibilities of drinkers used to tamer beers. But in staking out that position, as it has done for nine decades, it has broadened the category and kept it interesting even as tastes and trends led to less colorful beers over the course of its lifetime.
History
Diedrich König founded Jever in 1848, selling bottles from the inn he ran in town. König died nineteen years later and Theodor Fetköter took over the brewery in 1867. The Fetköters owned the brewery until the First World War, when Theodor Jr was killed on the front lines. A few years after the war, the confusingly-named Hamburg brewery Bavaria-St Pauli acquired Jever from the family (This brewery was never connected to Bavaria and was also not the maker of St Pauli Girl.)
What kind of beer had Jever been making for its first 75 years? When did the brewery settle on its famously assertive brand of pilsner? Did the beer change over time? In the years I’ve been making inquiries about Jever, I’ve never been able to learn the answers—probably because Jever has passed through the hands of six owners since König founded the brewery. In 1980, the Herz brothers, owners of the coffee chain Tchibo, acquired Bavaria-St Pauli; in 1994 Brau and Brunnen bought the company, and finally, a decade later Radeberger Gruppe, the current owner, acquired Jever. Radeberger is Germany’s largest beer company, owner of 14 breweries and dozens of brands. It seems a capable steward of Jever, but it inherited it late in the game.
To their credit, Radeberger did manage to get back to me and offered some basic history of the brewery and brief notes on how they make the beer. I suspect a person could visit the plant today and find a brewer who would give detailed brewing notes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the history has been lost at this point. (The responsive and kind PR contact who emailed me back couldn’t offer much on the brewing side.) It hasn’t been a family-owned brewer for 101 years, and it would be a remarkable and unusual turn of luck if the old brew logs, correspondence, photographs, and records survived.
In any case, we do know that under the new owners, brewer Ernst Böhme started making an assertively bitter pilsner in 1934, the birth of the Jever we know today. Other references suggest Böhme found a yeast strain in 1936 that the brewery still uses. The brewery history from there is typical: World War Two devastated Jever and rebuilding took a while. However, by the early 1950s, things were humming and the brewery enjoyed growth and success. Pilsners had not been a major style before the war, and Jever capitalized on their popularity post-war to become a large regional player.
Photo courtesy Radeberger/Jever
The Beer
The words “Friesisch herb” appear on Jever’s label, serving as a double-language entendre. In German the “herb” has an idiomatic sense somewhere between “bitter” and “dry”—both accurate—but the English meaning carries a bit of truth as well. Jever is famously bitter, and with a finishing gravity of just 2° P, dry as well—and of course, the low attenuation accentuates the perception of bitterness, which the brewery currently pegs at 40 BU. The character of the hops, Herkules and Perle as it is brewed in 2024, have the classic German noble character, though, giving the bitterness an herbal tang. The brewery boasts a soft water profile, which they emphasize as a key to the profile—though I was unable to follow up with a brewer to discover how the modern plant treats its liquor. In any case, that dry, crisp, tangy profile has long been central to the beer.
The first sip of Jever is bracing; stop there and you might judge it unharmonious. But like any beer with a strong flavor note, the impression changes as you drink, and about mid-glass, a different kind of harmony arrives. Below, we’re going to document twenty years of reviews from Michael Jackson. He often calls Jever an aperitif, and that’s just right. It’s a stimulating drink, and the perception of bitterness falls away as one drinks, yet never stops providing a sprightly structure. Meanwhile, more subtle elements of malt and hop flavor emerge in time. It wears well; the bitterness and dryness preserve one’s palate. Much of the promotional material features beach photos (the town of Jever is on the North Sea), and I imagine it is a wonderful summer cooler beer as well.
Lacking a more robust history from the brewery, I decided to turn to my library and see how Michael Jackson characterized Jever over the years. He loved it, and included it in his first book on world beer, continuing to write about it through his career. You’ll note that he downgrades it from a “world classic” to a merely excellent beer, claiming it changed. Perhaps it did—he lists the beer at 47 BUs in 1977, and the hops were different than they are today—but it’s also possible Jackson’s palate changed as well. I think this is characteristic of beers like Jever. The first encounter shocks in a way subsequent ones can’t. It’s human nature to believe the object rather than the subject (us) has changed. Here’s Jackson:
World Guide to Beer (1977). “Bavaria-St Pauli (a Hamburg brewery, despite its name) has a subsidiary in German Friesland, at Oldenburg, producing Jever Pilsener. This is superbly well-hopped and dry beer, at its best when chilled to about 8° C (46° F).
Pocket Guide to Beer:
(1982 Edition) “What makes the company truly notable is a highly distinctive beer from it Premium subsidiary brewery in Jever, Friesland. This product, known simply as Jever Pilsener, has an astonishing 47 units of bitterness. (The legend ‘herb’ on the label is the German word for bitter; it is not an herbal beer, even though its palate is so pronounced as to suggest that it might be.) Samplings in other countries can disappoint , because Jever doesn’t travel well unless it is handled with proper care. It might be more hardy if it had a longer lagering period than ‘about four weeks,’ but its wonderfully hoppy dryness nonetheless ensures its position as a world classic. *****
(1994 Edition) “Jever Pilsener ****, which is regarded as something of a Frisian specialty, is the most bitter beer in Germany, despite a slight mellowing in recent years. Jever has a big bouquet (the aroma hops are of the Tettnang variety), a yeasty palate (the brewery has had its own strain since 1936) and an intense aperitif bitterness in the finish. A Frisian nation once straddled what is now the borders of The Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, and its traditional drinks suggest a liking for intense and bitter flavours. In its handsome resort town, Jever is a pround and prosperous brewery, with a very modern plant.” [Note: brand still owned by Bavaria St Pauli]
(2000 Edition) “The most renowned and widely available truly bitter brew in Germany is Jever Pilsener ****. Since the brewery was acquired by the national group Brau und Brunnen, Jever Pilsener seems to have diminished slightly in character, but its dryness still makes it a wonderful aperitif. It has a big hop bouquet, a yeasty palate, and a robust finish. The brewery is very modern, though it does have some turn-of-the-century buildings.”
The Beer Companion (1997). “Jever Pilsener typifies the very dry style of Pils made in the far north of Germany, and even exceeds its immediate competitors in that respect…. Malts from the Netherlands, France and Germany are used, with Hallertau and Tettnang hops added in two stages, and a yeast that has been employed since 1936. The beer is said to have 42-44 BU. Lagering is for three to four weeks. The beer has 11.7 Plato (1047) and 4.7 percent alcohol by volume. Jever Pilsner has an emphatic hop aroma; a dry start; a firm, slightly yeasty palate; and a long, bitter finish. It is a splendid aperitif.”
The modern brewery, courtesy Jever/Radeberger
Legacy
Most of the beers in this series are linked to a physical brewery with a hallowed reputation. Drinkers literally make pilgrimages to places like Guinness and Orval and even Russian River. For some reason, Jever is not one of those breweries. The beer is a classic, however, in all the ways that matter. It’s characterful and unusual, a beer that has been brewed to roughly the same profile for 90 years. Those decades correspond to the mass marketization of beer, when sweet, processed flavors displaced bracing bitter ones. The hallmark of German beer is balance and drinkability, whether we’re talking about altbier or weissbier or pale lagers. Even the specialty beers like doppelbock and gose retain a domesticated civility. Yet over the 20th century, that tendency, combined with trends in flavors, led to more sedate beers.
During that time, Jever has served as an increasingly important counterpoint to the trends. As other pilsners became little more intense than a helles, Jever stuck with its punchy assertiveness. In the Oxford Companion to Beer, Conrad Seidl writes:
“Today, the straw gold color remains a hallmark of the style, but bitterness has decreased substantially in most examples and now averages about 26 IBUs. A series of analyses carried out by the VLB shows that there has been a steady decrease of bitterness in the hundreds of samples they analyze every year. In 1973 the average German pilsner would have had a bitterness of 34 IBUs, with extreme samples going as high as 50 IBUs, and the low end of the scale having only 16 IBUs. There was little change until 1985, but by 1995 the average bitterness was down to 30, and another decade later it was 27.”
Jever has been an unusual but valuable ambassador to the world, signaling more diversity in German beer than foreign drinkers might have expected. It also contrasts clearly with Czech pilsners, which are in some cases equally as bitter. They are never as lean as Jever, nor as dry. Jever has a kind of elegance that seems perfectly German, even if its bitterness is not.
Brewers in the United States have taken notice, and more and more have made their own, sharp “North German pilsner.” (This isn’t solely due to Jever—Flensburger, in particular, makes another fantastic example of a bitter, dry pilsner.) If drinkers see these beers and wonder what a North German pilsner is and who makes it, they follow a trail back to Jever. This cool, northern pocket of Germany was once the center of the beer world, as brewers in the nearby Hanseatic city of Bremen were the first to use hops in commercial beer. That legacy lives on, nearly a millennium later, in Jever’s Frisian “herb.”