Lagers have been “trending” for at least a decade. No, not those lagers; craft lagers. Odds are your friendly neighborhood brewery has at least one on tap at all times. Even more likely, it’s appended with a foreign geotag: German, Czech, Mexican, Japanese. Traditional lager styles, and the hard lines that separate them, leave little room for improvisation. And well they should, as they’re not only delicious but an essential part of modern beer’s heritage. So, how can a brewery play with lager? A conversation with Sam Tierney, brewing manager at Firestone Walker’s Propagator R&D brewery, helped answer that question with a single beer.

“So what is a lager, you know? Is it a specific style, a process, anything with lager yeast? I don’t think there’s any agreed upon definition.” Tierney’s brought up a grand 21st Century Fact of Beer: there are no rules! Ha! I’m only half joking.

Though it’s easy to get into the weeds about “what’s an IPA” and blah blah blah, his point was that our expectation of a flavor profile based on existing parameters isn’t always met. “Think about how many beers around the world are brewed with lager yeast that aren’t called lagers - Dragon Stout, Lion Stout, Foster’s Ale. If you use lager yeast at a warm temperature, is it still a lager?”

Here we meet Welcome to L.A., billed as a West Coast Lager. Tierney has brewed a half-dozen iterations of this beer over the last two years. The canned product, which is available in the Los Angeles area, is 5.4% abv and brewed with Pilsner malt and Mosaic, Motueka, Mandarina Bavaria, and Citra hops. And yes, fermented cold and clean with lager yeast. “A good German lager has some sulfur character, but if you double down on that with Mosaic and Citra and add those sulfury notes you get stinky onion. So managing that during fermentation is something that we do here.”

The first whiff, atomized from the freshly popped can, is unmistakably American, a lively, tropical fruit salad of hop aromas. The beer has a wafer-thin malt profile and very, very light body. Thankfully, the bitterness is relatively low, and the hop flavor is top banana through and through. My first thought: “This is a Cold Pale,” referencing the Cold IPA trend emanating from inner Southeast Portland. More on that later.

Welcome to L.A. is to the 805 beers what Luponic Distortion was to Union Jack IPA: an intentional shaking of the sheets. “We’ve always been chasing that ‘can we make a lager that gives us everything we love about IPAs?’ Tierney muses.

Firestone, in this instance as a large marketing entity that sells beer, looks closely at the numbers. Its classic Pivo Pils, the first Italian-style pilsner in the U.S., struggled and languished on store shelves despite plenty of industry accolades. The brewery expanded production and distribution of 805, a blonde ale, to much success, and has followed it up with 805 Cerveza, a lime-infused lager that looks to be the brewery’s number-two seller next year. 

Firestone Walker, which is part of the Duvel-Moortgat USA family of breweries, is of a size where it needs to compete on grocery store shelves as well as in its local markets. To that end, beers like 805 Cerveza are targeted toward Modelo drinkers, while Luponic Distortion competes with beers like Elysian’s ubiquitous Space Dust IPA. But Welcome to L.A. is a little different.

“For me it defines my time in L.A.,” says Tierney. “Hoppy lagers have kinda become a SOCal thing, so it’s our L.A. beer. The whole idea of putting this brewpub in L.A. and not the Bay Area was that L.A. was more of a core market for us, so why not put a Firestone brewery in L.A.? 

So this beer is really a grounding element - you can look back and say this beer is L.A. turning around and us being influenced by our time here. It’s a result of conversations in the community, too. Matt [Brynildson, Brewmaster] is so open minded and has been part of the community for so long. We might not be the cool kid anymore, but we can still make beers like this, and that’s what Propagator is for.”

Enough about marketing. We’re here for the beer. I mentioned my impression of Welcome to L.A. as a “cold pale ale” of sorts, and Tierney immediately mentioned Wayfinder founder and head brewer, Kevin Davey, who also brewed at Firestone Walker. “It’s hard to get IPA drinkers to drink a lager. IPLs have never gotten popular. I used to sit around with Kevin Davey and talk beer for hours - these conversations about Cold IPA woke me up. It’s all about finding flavor profiles that steer people away from lagers. I have to give Kevin his due respect here - we didn’t use adjuncts, and because we didn’t do that, we can’t call it a Cold IPA.” 

This is when he asked that question: “So what is a lager, you know?” The canon of beer styles can be drawn as an orgy of Venn diagrams in various states of overlap. More often, beer geeks will talk about the difference between German and Czech Pilsners; the issue of lager becoming IPA is a bit stickier and, perhaps or perhaps not, more far-fetched. Because the word lager either means mass marketed piss or strict brewing tradition, it takes a battering ram to break barriers in the public consciousness.

“I think because of the craft industry’s affinity for ales because they’re easier and there’s a stigma for lagers, lager hasn’t received the spectrum of treatment that ales have. Almost every ale you come across today is an Americanized version. There’s no reason that lagers can’t go through the same Americanization gamut that ales have. Lager brewers haven’t taken that step yet - well some have - but lager brewers tend to be European traditional lager brewers. They tend to respect lager styles as a classic archetype that you don’t mess with.” 

Because lager was essentially demonized by craft beer at its outset in the 80s, it’s only in the last decade or so that they’ve entered the conversation and re-upped their clout among folks who think about beer. Sam Tierney and Firestone Walker’s efforts behind Welcome to L.A. reveal a two-pronged solution; the impetus behind the beer is to anchor it in the community, and the studied approach expands the conversation about lager beers.