Lager - History of Lager Brewing

History of Lager Brewing

While cold storage of beer, "lagering", in caves for example, was a common practice throughout the medieval period, bottom-fermenting yeast seems to have emerged as a hybridization in the early fifteenth century. However, in 2011 an international team of researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claimed to have discovered that Saccharomyces eubayanus, a yeast native to Patagonia, is responsible for creating the hybrid yeast used to make lager.

Based on the numbers of breweries, lager brewing displaced ale brewing in Bohemia in the period from 1860 to 1870, as shown in the following table:

The rise of lager was entwined with the development of refrigeration, as refrigeration made it possible to brew lager year-round (brewing in the summer had previously been banned in many locations across Germany), and efficient refrigeration also made it possible to brew lager in more places and keep it cold until serving; the first large-scale refrigerated lagering tanks were developed for Gabriel Sedlmayr's Munich brewery by Carl von Linde in 1870.