June 5, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Tom Acitelli, author of Pilsner: How the Beer of Kings Changed the World, tells the fascinating story of how a revolutionary brew from the Austrian Empire became one of America’s most popular beers.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue here with our American stories, and up
next the story on one of America's favorite beverages. Here's
our own Monta Montgomery with the.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Story we Americans enjoy our beer. In twenty eighteen, we
consumed about six point eight billion gallons of it, and
by far the most popular style we drink is Pilsner.
Here's Tom Acatelli, author of Pilsner, How the Beer of
(00:39):
Kings changed the world with more.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Pilsner is the dominant style of beer in the world
and has been for well over one hundred years. All
the major brands you can think of, Budweiser, bud Light, Miller, Miller, Lyte, Heineken,
Paps are based on Pilsner or imitations of the Pillser style.
They're ever ever, they're you know, every grocery store, barred,
(01:02):
gas station, bodega, you name it, it's Pilsner. It was
first made in a small what was that a sort
of a mid sized city of the Austrian Empire called
Pilsen and what's now the Czech Republic. The local aristocrats
and Pilsen who had the right to brew and sell
beer locally, they were getting tired of their beer. Their
(01:26):
local beer getting beaten out of the marketplace by beers
from Bavaria just over the border. So the aristocrats and
Pilsen are like, we're tired of losing market share to
these guys, these Bavarians making these lighter, better beers, so
we got to co op what they're doing, right, So
you can imagine, you know, they literally have meeting after meeting,
(01:47):
memos and manifestos about how to compete with Bavarian beer
and knock it out of the marketplace. And Pilsen so
what they do is they hire a Bavarian brewmaster named
Joseph Krohl, who uses Bavarian nohow, Bavarian recipes, Bavarian techniques,
in other words, just sort of imports German technique and
(02:09):
style over the border and makes this beer for the
burgers for the aristocrats of Pilsen to sell. And he
ends up making in late eighteen forty two. Now it's
lost to history whether Grohl himself intended for this to happen,
but the specific ingredients he used and the the local
(02:31):
water quality, which was very important to brewings then as
now turned out, the lightest looking beer anyone had ever
seen up to that point. Before that beer for millennia
is dark and it's thick, and it's rich. It's like
liquid bread. And they weren't the color of sunshine. Pilsner
was this lagger made in Pilsen in eighteen forty two.
(02:53):
You know, it looks beautiful, right, It's bubbly, it's clear,
it's crisp. When you taste, it's a beer that's unlike
anybody has ever seen. Right from the get go, Pilsner
is extremely unique, and it quickly grows in popularity, first
in the Austrian Empire, that in central Europe, and then
(03:15):
basically all over the world to the present day. It picked,
you know, the best time to be born and the
best time to leave home, because it's born in this
kind of supernova of technological change and political change, especially
in Europe. The technological change, you know, is everything from
the mass production of glass, which you'd never happened before
in the history of humanity. Because Pilsner looks great in
(03:37):
a glass, it looks great poor, it looks great in
glass bottles. The technology for fighting bacteria and infection, which
can be deadly to beer and deadly to beer sales,
comes along and around at the same time brewing techniques,
temperature measurement, all that is sort of blossoming around the
same time as Joseph rol Is doing those first batches
of Pilsner and Pilsen. And then you also have stuff
(03:58):
like the railroad for better shipping. The first mechanical refrigeration
starts up. Because pills are, like most lagger beers, unlike Yale's,
tastes better cold. It's easier to preserve them too. But
the political change is really what spurs Pillser's story from
sort of a local legend to you know, worldwide fame.
(04:21):
There's all these revolutions and counter revolutions in Europe, and
a lot of Germans and Czechs fled the turmoil. They
were done with these wars and fighting, and they settled
in the United States, a lot of them. They were there,
about a million. A million Germans emigrated to the US
in the eighteen fifties alone. They find the most opportunity
(04:41):
farther inland, so they settle in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee,
Saint Louis. They take their preference for lighter laggers and
lighter colored laggers and lighter tasting laggers to the United States,
and of course the dominant style by then is pills
and so that's how it spread. Basically, anywhere you had
(05:03):
Germans in the mid to late nineteenth century, you were
going to have beer, and the beer was overwhelmingly going
to be Pilsner. Wherever Germans go, they bring this jones
for the light of law.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
And with the winds of the Industrial Revolution at their back,
these immigrants created some of the most recognizable names in
the beer industry today, including Anheuser Busch.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Bush were father in law's son
in law, and they became business partners. Adolphus Bush basically
rescued his father in law's business. He had a brewery
that was failing right so after the Civil War in
the early eighteen sixties, Adolphus Bush begins to build the
Anheuser Busch Brewing Company into this mega conglomerate, and he
(05:49):
does it largely behind a recipe for Pilsner imitation that
he gets via a business partner of his who had
been traveling in Europe and knew of the popularity of
this lighter colored, lighter tasting logger called pilsner. Brings it
back to Dolphus Bush says can you make this for me?
(06:09):
He does and eventually acquires the rights to it. They
name it after a Czech town called Budweis or Budweiser,
and that becomes just a sensation from the late eighteen
seventies onward. For many of the reasons that you know,
Pilsner itself became a sensation is that it just looked good.
It looked modern, it looked good in the class, It
(06:30):
looked good in a bottle. Anheuser Busch is the biggest
bottler of any food stuff at the time, in the
late nineteenth century, and it just takes off from there.
I mean, I don't you know. There was sort of
an arms race in the late nineteen hundreds between Frederick
Papps and Adolphus Busch to have kind of the biggest
brewery in the US and perhaps the world, and they
(06:52):
were both racing each other with Pilsner's and Bush's case
it was Budweiser, and perhaps case it was, well we
now know, perhaps fly Riven. Because of this arms race,
they end up just sort of sweeping all before them
competition wise, and end up, as you know, the Kings
are brewing by nineteen hundred. By you know, the nineteen teens,
(07:14):
and because of that, because of that race, Pilsner gets
more and more ubiquitous, and more and more unavoidable.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And increasingly on the radar of temperance advocates wanting to
end the sale and consumption of alcohol in the US.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Back into the nineteen hundreds, right, there's a sort of
a movement to improve the United States. You know, in
many many cases well intentioned. In one of the ways
to improve it is to cut back on over consumption
of alcohol. Now, the US in the early nineteen hundreds
was not a beer country. It was whiskey whiskey insider,
(07:49):
and Americans drank a tremendous amount compared with the rest
of the world. European visitors who chronicled their visits to
the US always noted how much and how frequently America
can drink. So there was an understandable temperance movement to
sort of slow things down. Then what happens is you
have this mass integration of Germans, and they bring with
(08:10):
them a different way of drinking and a different type
of drink. They bring lighter loggers, which are much much
lower in alcohol than whiskey, and they drink it in
beer gardens and the beer gardens are family affairs, and
Germans are still, you know, despite the fact that they
drink this beer, noted for their industriousness and their hard work.
So it sort of clashes with what the temperance advocates
(08:30):
have been telling people for decades that if you drink,
you know, you're going to be derelict and desolate, and
you know, not contribute, you're not going to get up
for work the next morning, et cetera, et cetera. German
Americans disrupt this narrative, and so the temperance movement has
to turn its efforts toward combating beer as well, and
they also have to turn their efforts toward combating the
(08:53):
brewers behind the beer, and they have a very tough
time of it, but they get a boon from World
War One, America's enemy, and World War One, of course,
was the German Empire. So the temperance advocate sees on
American skittishness about German culture. War ends in late nineteen eighteen,
(09:15):
Prohibition passes in nineteen nineteen, takes effect in nineteen twenty.
I don't think it would have happened with the speed
it did without the war, and the anti German feelings
that the war engendered. It's just a fascinating slice of
life and culture when you realize what happened over those
seventy years you know, and how pilsner and beer is
right in the middle.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Of it, and great American storytelling in history through the
lens of beer. When we come back more of this
remarkable story of how the Beer of Kings changed the world,
the story of Pilsner continues here on our American stories,
(10:10):
and we returned to our American stories and the story
of the Pilsner with Tom Acatelli, author of Pilsner How
the Beer of Kings Changed the World. When we last
left off, anti German sentiment in the US was in
an all time high because of World War One, and
prohibition went into effect, impacting brewers profoundly. Let's pick up
(10:32):
when we last left.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Off, with animosity towards Germans and German culture at an
all time high. After World War One, the Eighteenth Amendment
was passed, assuring in prohibition. With their market dried up,
brewers were forced to set aside beer and make other
products to survive. Pilsner was put on hold.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Some of them made near beer. They switched to, you know,
alcohol that could be used in machinery, but a lot
of them didn't survive. It's a much smaller field of
brewers in the United States post nineteen thirty three when
prohibition ends, and what that means is the ones who
could survive, who could get by, who could skirt disaster.
(11:16):
They come out with the ability to grow very fast.
Their reach expands, and you see this massive consolidation in
the industry where the big get bigger and the smaller
kind of disappear.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Before prohibition became the law of the land, there were
over four thousand breweries in the United States. By nineteen
seventy five, there were one hundred and fifteen.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
And that's where I think Pillser starts to have a
wider cultural effect. Marketing. Pills Are becomes such a cute
focus of these bigger breweries that they start to really
innovate when it comes to advertising and marketing. So you
get the quirky beer jingles, you get the cartoon characters,
you get the sports partnerships, any number of things that
(12:01):
we all know today and we can probably remember our
favorite taglines like taste great, less filling. All you ever
wanted a beer and less I mean all those you know,
the Champagne of beers, etc. Etc. That comes about after
Prohibition and helps Pilser grow its reach wider and helps
these breweries get that much bigger. The Budweisers, the Millers,
they grew and grew and grew. Hilser becomes so big
(12:23):
you couldn't get away from it. The first big change
comes when the Miller Brewing Company, which had recently been
acquired by Philip Morris, the tobacco giant. They were laser
focused on growing from I think they were the eighth
or ninth biggest brewery in the country. They wanted to
be number two, behind Annheuser Busch. They know that they're
(12:45):
not going to be number one, and hyser Busch is
so far ahead of any brewer maybe except for Heineken,
in the entire world. And how do they do that?
They introduced Miller Lite.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
And this is the one I'm holding on to light
beer from Millers. It has a third less colories than
a regular beer, it's less billing, and it tastes terrific too.
I also love the easy open can.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Miller Lite kind of changes the game. There had been
light beers before but they you know, the marketing had
always been toward people who maybe wanted to diet or
lose weight. But the problem is, if they're trying to
lose weight, they're not going to look to beer at all,
whether it's lower than calories or not. So Miller Lte
basically presented itself as quote, a low calorie beer that
tasted like beer. They wanted to be known as just
(13:30):
beer butt with low calories, so they came up with
the famous tagline.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Blake beer from Miller everything you always wanted in a beer, unless.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
It became this kind of sensation, you know, light beer
just a quick aside. You know, this is another example
of Pilser's influence. You know, Miller Lte put a fine
pilsner right on the bottle. You can still see it
on the labels today. But you know, light l T
E or l I g h T seeped into all
sorts of food stuffs from that point on in the
nineteen seventies, so you had everything but back to beer.
(14:02):
So light beer happens and it becomes you know, so
pills nerve, you know, becomes even bigger and more influential.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
The United States had essentially become a beer desert. But
things were about to change that would lead to a
whole new industry being developed by innovating entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
You had a growing number of people, mostly homebrewers and
their fans, who wanted more variety, who were tired of
these beers that all seemed to look and taste the same,
and indeed they did. They start meeting sort of underground
because homebrewing was illegal in the United States, just sort
of a quirk of post prohibition in America. The federal
(14:40):
government forgot to legalize it. They legalized winemaking coming out
of prohibition, but not homebrewing. But then that happens in
nineteen seventy eight. There's a push on from California from
some lawmakers and homebrew enthusiasts in California to have it
homebrewing legalized at the federal level. That happens in early
nineteen seventy eight and takes effect in nineteen seventy nine.
(15:01):
But what does that do. That sort of brings these
home brewers out of the shadows, and people begin openly
sharing information, and they begin openly selling and sharing materials
and recipes. So you have this sort of blossoming of
underground entrepreneurial spirit turning pro and that's where you get
the sort of the first proliferation of smaller breweries in
the United States. It's the late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties.
(15:23):
So you have this infusion of knowledge and you have
this counter reaction to the rise of light beer. If
you wanted a rich er tasting beer in the nineteen seventies,
up to that point, you had to make it yourself,
or you had to like chance upon it while you know,
in Europe or something like that. But suddenly you start
to see the growth of micro brewing. Pills are still dominant,
(15:44):
and it's still dominant today, but you now have just
sort of this kaleidoscope of styles and breweries.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Today there are over eight thousand breweries in the United States.
That's over double of what existed before pro And the
big reason why these breweries exist is the pilsner and
its oversaturation in the market during the nineteen seventies. But
everything old is new again, and today the pilsner is
(16:13):
having a remarkable resurgence among even the people who tried
to get away from it all those years ago.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
You know, history repeats itself, and beer is very much
sort of a cyclical is a cyclical thing. I mean,
people discover and rediscover different styles and different approaches all
the time, and I think Pilsner is just kind of
having a moment because craft brewing was a reaction to
Pilsner's rise, and now I think the sort of rise
of Pilsner within craft brewing is a reaction to craft
(16:40):
brewings rise. The defining feature, the defining characteristic of IPAs
is bitterness is how you know, the bitterness from hops
and so the sort of overwhelming prickly crispness and you know,
alcoholic kick. And so if you want something different, what
do you do? You know, you turn to a lighter
tasting beer, and that's pilsner. You could not have had
(17:04):
this counter reaction toward Pilsner without the rise of the
bitter i pas and you know, the heavier seasonal beers
and then porters and ales and all that. Without those
you wouldn't have this reaction. But again, you wouldn't have
those without the rise of pilsner originally. So it's kind
of funny they all sort of intersected and there's no
(17:25):
end insight too. That's the thing is this, you know,
In many countries, federal governments or national governments regulate style
and ingredients and proportions of ingredients in wine and spirits.
But that's not the case for beer. You can call
yourself whatever you want in the US as long as
you follow some you know, guidelines as far as what
you put on your label. You have to use a
(17:48):
certain proportion of below grapes if you're gonna call yourself
a merleau. If you're gonna call your wine a merleau,
you don't have to use a certain proportion or a
certain type of hop if you're gonna call your beer
an ipa. So it lends itself to this experimentation in
the marketplace, and I think that's kind of a wonderful
thing because it creates this experimental dynamic, and that brings
(18:08):
everything full circle too, because what is pilser to begin with,
It was somebody one hundred and seventy years ago experimenting
with existing styles and ideas until they came up with
something new. And that's still going on today.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
And a special thanks to Monte Montgomery for that piece
and Montese. I believe Montese's passion is beer sampling every
kind possible. Also Tom Akatelli a special thanks to him.
He's the author of Pilsner. Now, the beer of Kings
changed the world. And I keep thinking about that line
where Germans go they bring their pilsner, and think about
(18:47):
that with Italians too, and their contribution with food, and
Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans. And this is what we do here.
We eat each other's food and then we marry each other.
The story of Pilsner and the story of so much
more American history and American life and culture. Here on
our American stories.
And we continue here with our American stories, and up
next the story on one of America's favorite beverages. Here's
our own Monta Montgomery with the.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Story we Americans enjoy our beer. In twenty eighteen, we
consumed about six point eight billion gallons of it, and
by far the most popular style we drink is Pilsner.
Here's Tom Acatelli, author of Pilsner, How the Beer of
(00:39):
Kings changed the world with more.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Pilsner is the dominant style of beer in the world
and has been for well over one hundred years. All
the major brands you can think of, Budweiser, bud Light, Miller, Miller, Lyte, Heineken,
Paps are based on Pilsner or imitations of the Pillser style.
They're ever ever, they're you know, every grocery store, barred,
(01:02):
gas station, bodega, you name it, it's Pilsner. It was
first made in a small what was that a sort
of a mid sized city of the Austrian Empire called
Pilsen and what's now the Czech Republic. The local aristocrats
and Pilsen who had the right to brew and sell
beer locally, they were getting tired of their beer. Their
(01:26):
local beer getting beaten out of the marketplace by beers
from Bavaria just over the border. So the aristocrats and
Pilsen are like, we're tired of losing market share to
these guys, these Bavarians making these lighter, better beers, so
we got to co op what they're doing, right, So
you can imagine, you know, they literally have meeting after meeting,
(01:47):
memos and manifestos about how to compete with Bavarian beer
and knock it out of the marketplace. And Pilsen so
what they do is they hire a Bavarian brewmaster named
Joseph Krohl, who uses Bavarian nohow, Bavarian recipes, Bavarian techniques,
in other words, just sort of imports German technique and
(02:09):
style over the border and makes this beer for the
burgers for the aristocrats of Pilsen to sell. And he
ends up making in late eighteen forty two. Now it's
lost to history whether Grohl himself intended for this to happen,
but the specific ingredients he used and the the local
(02:31):
water quality, which was very important to brewings then as
now turned out, the lightest looking beer anyone had ever
seen up to that point. Before that beer for millennia
is dark and it's thick, and it's rich. It's like
liquid bread. And they weren't the color of sunshine. Pilsner
was this lagger made in Pilsen in eighteen forty two.
(02:53):
You know, it looks beautiful, right, It's bubbly, it's clear,
it's crisp. When you taste, it's a beer that's unlike
anybody has ever seen. Right from the get go, Pilsner
is extremely unique, and it quickly grows in popularity, first
in the Austrian Empire, that in central Europe, and then
(03:15):
basically all over the world to the present day. It picked,
you know, the best time to be born and the
best time to leave home, because it's born in this
kind of supernova of technological change and political change, especially
in Europe. The technological change, you know, is everything from
the mass production of glass, which you'd never happened before
in the history of humanity. Because Pilsner looks great in
(03:37):
a glass, it looks great poor, it looks great in
glass bottles. The technology for fighting bacteria and infection, which
can be deadly to beer and deadly to beer sales,
comes along and around at the same time brewing techniques,
temperature measurement, all that is sort of blossoming around the
same time as Joseph rol Is doing those first batches
of Pilsner and Pilsen. And then you also have stuff
(03:58):
like the railroad for better shipping. The first mechanical refrigeration
starts up. Because pills are, like most lagger beers, unlike Yale's,
tastes better cold. It's easier to preserve them too. But
the political change is really what spurs Pillser's story from
sort of a local legend to you know, worldwide fame.
(04:21):
There's all these revolutions and counter revolutions in Europe, and
a lot of Germans and Czechs fled the turmoil. They
were done with these wars and fighting, and they settled
in the United States, a lot of them. They were there,
about a million. A million Germans emigrated to the US
in the eighteen fifties alone. They find the most opportunity
(04:41):
farther inland, so they settle in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee,
Saint Louis. They take their preference for lighter laggers and
lighter colored laggers and lighter tasting laggers to the United States,
and of course the dominant style by then is pills
and so that's how it spread. Basically, anywhere you had
(05:03):
Germans in the mid to late nineteenth century, you were
going to have beer, and the beer was overwhelmingly going
to be Pilsner. Wherever Germans go, they bring this jones
for the light of law.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
And with the winds of the Industrial Revolution at their back,
these immigrants created some of the most recognizable names in
the beer industry today, including Anheuser Busch.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Bush were father in law's son
in law, and they became business partners. Adolphus Bush basically
rescued his father in law's business. He had a brewery
that was failing right so after the Civil War in
the early eighteen sixties, Adolphus Bush begins to build the
Anheuser Busch Brewing Company into this mega conglomerate, and he
(05:49):
does it largely behind a recipe for Pilsner imitation that
he gets via a business partner of his who had
been traveling in Europe and knew of the popularity of
this lighter colored, lighter tasting logger called pilsner. Brings it
back to Dolphus Bush says can you make this for me?
(06:09):
He does and eventually acquires the rights to it. They
name it after a Czech town called Budweis or Budweiser,
and that becomes just a sensation from the late eighteen
seventies onward. For many of the reasons that you know,
Pilsner itself became a sensation is that it just looked good.
It looked modern, it looked good in the class, It
(06:30):
looked good in a bottle. Anheuser Busch is the biggest
bottler of any food stuff at the time, in the
late nineteenth century, and it just takes off from there.
I mean, I don't you know. There was sort of
an arms race in the late nineteen hundreds between Frederick
Papps and Adolphus Busch to have kind of the biggest
brewery in the US and perhaps the world, and they
(06:52):
were both racing each other with Pilsner's and Bush's case
it was Budweiser, and perhaps case it was, well we
now know, perhaps fly Riven. Because of this arms race,
they end up just sort of sweeping all before them
competition wise, and end up, as you know, the Kings
are brewing by nineteen hundred. By you know, the nineteen teens,
(07:14):
and because of that, because of that race, Pilsner gets
more and more ubiquitous, and more and more unavoidable.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And increasingly on the radar of temperance advocates wanting to
end the sale and consumption of alcohol in the US.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Back into the nineteen hundreds, right, there's a sort of
a movement to improve the United States. You know, in
many many cases well intentioned. In one of the ways
to improve it is to cut back on over consumption
of alcohol. Now, the US in the early nineteen hundreds
was not a beer country. It was whiskey whiskey insider,
(07:49):
and Americans drank a tremendous amount compared with the rest
of the world. European visitors who chronicled their visits to
the US always noted how much and how frequently America
can drink. So there was an understandable temperance movement to
sort of slow things down. Then what happens is you
have this mass integration of Germans, and they bring with
(08:10):
them a different way of drinking and a different type
of drink. They bring lighter loggers, which are much much
lower in alcohol than whiskey, and they drink it in
beer gardens and the beer gardens are family affairs, and
Germans are still, you know, despite the fact that they
drink this beer, noted for their industriousness and their hard work.
So it sort of clashes with what the temperance advocates
(08:30):
have been telling people for decades that if you drink,
you know, you're going to be derelict and desolate, and
you know, not contribute, you're not going to get up
for work the next morning, et cetera, et cetera. German
Americans disrupt this narrative, and so the temperance movement has
to turn its efforts toward combating beer as well, and
they also have to turn their efforts toward combating the
(08:53):
brewers behind the beer, and they have a very tough
time of it, but they get a boon from World
War One, America's enemy, and World War One, of course,
was the German Empire. So the temperance advocate sees on
American skittishness about German culture. War ends in late nineteen eighteen,
(09:15):
Prohibition passes in nineteen nineteen, takes effect in nineteen twenty.
I don't think it would have happened with the speed
it did without the war, and the anti German feelings
that the war engendered. It's just a fascinating slice of
life and culture when you realize what happened over those
seventy years you know, and how pilsner and beer is
right in the middle.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Of it, and great American storytelling in history through the
lens of beer. When we come back more of this
remarkable story of how the Beer of Kings changed the world,
the story of Pilsner continues here on our American stories,
(10:10):
and we returned to our American stories and the story
of the Pilsner with Tom Acatelli, author of Pilsner How
the Beer of Kings Changed the World. When we last
left off, anti German sentiment in the US was in
an all time high because of World War One, and
prohibition went into effect, impacting brewers profoundly. Let's pick up
(10:32):
when we last left.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Off, with animosity towards Germans and German culture at an
all time high. After World War One, the Eighteenth Amendment
was passed, assuring in prohibition. With their market dried up,
brewers were forced to set aside beer and make other
products to survive. Pilsner was put on hold.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Some of them made near beer. They switched to, you know,
alcohol that could be used in machinery, but a lot
of them didn't survive. It's a much smaller field of
brewers in the United States post nineteen thirty three when
prohibition ends, and what that means is the ones who
could survive, who could get by, who could skirt disaster.
(11:16):
They come out with the ability to grow very fast.
Their reach expands, and you see this massive consolidation in
the industry where the big get bigger and the smaller
kind of disappear.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Before prohibition became the law of the land, there were
over four thousand breweries in the United States. By nineteen
seventy five, there were one hundred and fifteen.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
And that's where I think Pillser starts to have a
wider cultural effect. Marketing. Pills Are becomes such a cute
focus of these bigger breweries that they start to really
innovate when it comes to advertising and marketing. So you
get the quirky beer jingles, you get the cartoon characters,
you get the sports partnerships, any number of things that
(12:01):
we all know today and we can probably remember our
favorite taglines like taste great, less filling. All you ever
wanted a beer and less I mean all those you know,
the Champagne of beers, etc. Etc. That comes about after
Prohibition and helps Pilser grow its reach wider and helps
these breweries get that much bigger. The Budweisers, the Millers,
they grew and grew and grew. Hilser becomes so big
(12:23):
you couldn't get away from it. The first big change
comes when the Miller Brewing Company, which had recently been
acquired by Philip Morris, the tobacco giant. They were laser
focused on growing from I think they were the eighth
or ninth biggest brewery in the country. They wanted to
be number two, behind Annheuser Busch. They know that they're
(12:45):
not going to be number one, and hyser Busch is
so far ahead of any brewer maybe except for Heineken,
in the entire world. And how do they do that?
They introduced Miller Lite.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
And this is the one I'm holding on to light
beer from Millers. It has a third less colories than
a regular beer, it's less billing, and it tastes terrific too.
I also love the easy open can.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Miller Lite kind of changes the game. There had been
light beers before but they you know, the marketing had
always been toward people who maybe wanted to diet or
lose weight. But the problem is, if they're trying to
lose weight, they're not going to look to beer at all,
whether it's lower than calories or not. So Miller Lte
basically presented itself as quote, a low calorie beer that
tasted like beer. They wanted to be known as just
(13:30):
beer butt with low calories, so they came up with
the famous tagline.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Blake beer from Miller everything you always wanted in a beer, unless.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
It became this kind of sensation, you know, light beer
just a quick aside. You know, this is another example
of Pilser's influence. You know, Miller Lte put a fine
pilsner right on the bottle. You can still see it
on the labels today. But you know, light l T
E or l I g h T seeped into all
sorts of food stuffs from that point on in the
nineteen seventies, so you had everything but back to beer.
(14:02):
So light beer happens and it becomes you know, so
pills nerve, you know, becomes even bigger and more influential.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
The United States had essentially become a beer desert. But
things were about to change that would lead to a
whole new industry being developed by innovating entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
You had a growing number of people, mostly homebrewers and
their fans, who wanted more variety, who were tired of
these beers that all seemed to look and taste the same,
and indeed they did. They start meeting sort of underground
because homebrewing was illegal in the United States, just sort
of a quirk of post prohibition in America. The federal
(14:40):
government forgot to legalize it. They legalized winemaking coming out
of prohibition, but not homebrewing. But then that happens in
nineteen seventy eight. There's a push on from California from
some lawmakers and homebrew enthusiasts in California to have it
homebrewing legalized at the federal level. That happens in early
nineteen seventy eight and takes effect in nineteen seventy nine.
(15:01):
But what does that do. That sort of brings these
home brewers out of the shadows, and people begin openly
sharing information, and they begin openly selling and sharing materials
and recipes. So you have this sort of blossoming of
underground entrepreneurial spirit turning pro and that's where you get
the sort of the first proliferation of smaller breweries in
the United States. It's the late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties.
(15:23):
So you have this infusion of knowledge and you have
this counter reaction to the rise of light beer. If
you wanted a rich er tasting beer in the nineteen seventies,
up to that point, you had to make it yourself,
or you had to like chance upon it while you know,
in Europe or something like that. But suddenly you start
to see the growth of micro brewing. Pills are still dominant,
(15:44):
and it's still dominant today, but you now have just
sort of this kaleidoscope of styles and breweries.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Today there are over eight thousand breweries in the United States.
That's over double of what existed before pro And the
big reason why these breweries exist is the pilsner and
its oversaturation in the market during the nineteen seventies. But
everything old is new again, and today the pilsner is
(16:13):
having a remarkable resurgence among even the people who tried
to get away from it all those years ago.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
You know, history repeats itself, and beer is very much
sort of a cyclical is a cyclical thing. I mean,
people discover and rediscover different styles and different approaches all
the time, and I think Pilsner is just kind of
having a moment because craft brewing was a reaction to
Pilsner's rise, and now I think the sort of rise
of Pilsner within craft brewing is a reaction to craft
(16:40):
brewings rise. The defining feature, the defining characteristic of IPAs
is bitterness is how you know, the bitterness from hops
and so the sort of overwhelming prickly crispness and you know,
alcoholic kick. And so if you want something different, what
do you do? You know, you turn to a lighter
tasting beer, and that's pilsner. You could not have had
(17:04):
this counter reaction toward Pilsner without the rise of the
bitter i pas and you know, the heavier seasonal beers
and then porters and ales and all that. Without those
you wouldn't have this reaction. But again, you wouldn't have
those without the rise of pilsner originally. So it's kind
of funny they all sort of intersected and there's no
(17:25):
end insight too. That's the thing is this, you know,
In many countries, federal governments or national governments regulate style
and ingredients and proportions of ingredients in wine and spirits.
But that's not the case for beer. You can call
yourself whatever you want in the US as long as
you follow some you know, guidelines as far as what
you put on your label. You have to use a
(17:48):
certain proportion of below grapes if you're gonna call yourself
a merleau. If you're gonna call your wine a merleau,
you don't have to use a certain proportion or a
certain type of hop if you're gonna call your beer
an ipa. So it lends itself to this experimentation in
the marketplace, and I think that's kind of a wonderful
thing because it creates this experimental dynamic, and that brings
(18:08):
everything full circle too, because what is pilser to begin with,
It was somebody one hundred and seventy years ago experimenting
with existing styles and ideas until they came up with
something new. And that's still going on today.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
And a special thanks to Monte Montgomery for that piece
and Montese. I believe Montese's passion is beer sampling every
kind possible. Also Tom Akatelli a special thanks to him.
He's the author of Pilsner. Now, the beer of Kings
changed the world. And I keep thinking about that line
where Germans go they bring their pilsner, and think about
(18:47):
that with Italians too, and their contribution with food, and
Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans. And this is what we do here.
We eat each other's food and then we marry each other.
The story of Pilsner and the story of so much
more American history and American life and culture. Here on
our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.