Category Archives: Book

“Vienna Lager”, My New Book

Today, I am publishing my new book titled “Vienna Lager”. It’s the result of 1.5 year of intense research about the history of the Vienna Lager beer style and its current state. And of course, how to brew it.

I consider this to be my greatest work so far, and I’m absolutely proud about the result. I achieved everything I wanted to achieve in this book: first, I managed to put together the history of Vienna Lager in Austria from its very beginning in the late 1830’s until its demise after World War I in great detail, all embedded in the history of its inventor, Anton Dreher, and his brewery in Klein-Schwechat near Vienna. Second, I was able to shed more light on the supposed survival of Vienna Lager in Mexico. My research very quickly showed that it wasn’t Mexico that was big in brewing Vienna Lager, it was the United States! This is something many will be surprised about, but Vienna Lager was a fairly popular style in the US, and even survived Prohibition to a certain extent, until it made it into the canon of classic beer style as we know it nowadays. And third, I could reconstruct how Vienna Lager was brewed, from the ingredients to the brewing process, fermentation and lagering. I have previously discussed elements of this here in my blog, but in this book, I can finally present all the sources that corroborate even the tiniest detail about historic Vienna Lager brewing.

So today, I’m releasing the book both as printed book and e-book, exclusively on Amazon. You can find more information about the book including links to Amazon on vienna-lager.com.

As with my previous book, I tried to keep the price moderate to make it affordable for everyone. While “Vienna Lager” is more extensive compared to my previous book, I deliberately decided to keep the price for the e-book the same. As for the print-of-demand book, I had to slightly increase the price to offset the increased printing costs. For every book sold, I roughly get the same amount of royalties, no matter which media. I think this is fair, as I’m happy with the individual royalties that I earn, while being able to keep the costs down for interested readers. Ultimately, we have to face the hard truth: there is not a whole lot of money to be made as an author in a niche topic such as beer history and home-brewing. And that’s not my reason why I decided to write about historic, extinct German beers or Vienna Lager in the first place: instead, I wanted to let everyone know about everything I’ve been able to find out about these beer styles. Which brings me to my next point…

The history about Vienna Lager, as communicated in many works in the general beer history and craft beer sphere, has not been of great quality up to now. I’m not going to name names, but some books are outright works of fiction, while others suffer from something that’s called the Woozle effect. I didn’t know the term until a few months ago, but it’s what I had observed for quite a while: unsourced claims or historic stories frequently get cited even when they lack any historic factuality. The existence of citations creates an illusion of authority, which in turn gives credence to these claims, and generates even more citations which in turns boost the illusion of authority, and the spiral continues. The more citations are found or the same historic-sounding story is encountered, the more it seems like it’s true. The historic narrative around Vienna Lager is certainly not unique (IPA and Porter for example have long suffered from similar problems, and despite beer historians like Martyn Cornell, Ron Pattinson and others trying to correct them, they still cling on), but it’s the topic that I’ve researched fairly extensively for 1.5 years and that is now closest to my heart.

So this is my attempt to correct the narratives, and ironically, the real history of Vienna Lager is much more exciting. There is just so much we got wrong that got perpetuated over the years. Probably the most prominent example is the narrative that Vienna Lager supposedly survived into the 20th century due to Mexican brewing tradition. You often find stories of some unnamed Austrian brewers or German or Swiss brewers like Santiago Graf or Emil Dercher who supposedly went to Mexico (the Austrian brewers are often associated with Mexican King Maximilian, who, as a Habsburger and younger brother of the Austrian Emperor, was of Austrian descent) and started brewing Vienna Lager there. From everything I could gather, none of that was true. While brewers like Dercher and Graf definitely existed and (especially in the case of Santiago Graf) had great influence on brewing in Mexico, their connection with Vienna Lager is very doubtful.

But the real truth behind is actually much more interesting: up to the 1880’s, beer in Mexico was an imported niche product mostly enjoyed by expats or rich European immigrants. Most alcohol consumed at the time was agave-based, either just fermented (pulque) or distilled (mezcal). The first brewers didn’t have the conditions to brew cold-fermented lager beers, either, but instead brewed top-fermented beers from locally sourced ingredients such as sun-dried barley malt and unrefined cane sugar known as piloncillo. There are exceptions to it, like one German brewer allegedly building a small lager brewery including lagering cellars on the slopes of mount Popocatépetl, but lager brewing was only a necessity introduced the fight back American imported beer that came into the country after Mexico and the United States were better connected by railroad. That’s the kind of history of early Mexican beer that I actually find more interesting, and which in my opinion should be researched more thoroughly as it makes for a much better topic than just the narrative of Vienna Lager in Mexico.

But enough spoilers.

And there is one more thing I want to emphasize: I can’t even blame any of the writers that perpetuated any of the stories that we’ve previously heard about Vienna Lager that turned out to be not quite true. That’s what used to be the only material accessible to English speakers, and even for German speakers, there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff around (by now, the situation has slightly improved; in particular the history of brewing in Vienna independent of Vienna Lager is really well-researched and well-presented). In that sense, I very much recognize my privilege in being a native German speaker with sufficient proficiency in English that allowed me to research the topic based on original sources and to communicate my research results to a wider audience in English.

Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to complete my work without the help of many other people. In particular, I’d like to thank my wife Louise for supporting me in writing my book and for her tolerance of my obsession with the whole topic. I’d also like to thank everyone who inspired me to write this book, who provided me with interesting source material, or who supported me by giving me lots and lots of valuable feedback: Boak & Bailey, Ron Pattinson, Gary Gillman, Geoff Latham, Jeff Alworth, Joe Stange, Johannes Kugler, Michael Williams, Michelle Humphrey, Sven Förster, Michaela Knör, Glen and Julie, Doug Hoverson, Stan Hieronymus, Dave Carpenter, Mark Dredge, Natalya Watson and Benedikt Koch. A big Thank You to all of you!

Here are some of the online resources that I used for my research:

A few more geeky details: I wrote the book using Visual Studio Code in Markdown format, and used pandoc with custom templates to render it into epub as well as a print-ready PDF (via LaTeX). When all the dust has settled, I intend to publish a whole template to produce books for self-publication in the same way I did it for my last two books. The book cover design is self-made: as background image, I used a historic map of Vienna from 1875, while the book title itself was inspired by Vienna’s iconic street signs and made possible by the Wiener Norm font which is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

“OK, great, what’s next?” some of you may ask, and to be honest, I don’t know yet. Originally, I had planned a lot more around the launch of this book, but due to The Event that has plagued us since at least March 2020, and the necessary precautions due to it, much of that simply has not been possible. I hope to be able to do something like a proper launch event at a later time, and will announce this accordingly in case it will actually be possible in the near future.

If you think the topic of my new book is interesting and more people deserve to know about it, please spread the word and tell people about it. If you have a blog, write about, if you have a beery podcast, feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll happily talk about Vienna Lager with you.

For now, enjoy the book, enjoy Vienna Lager, if you’re a home-brewer, or even a pro brewer, go and brew some. Cheers!

My new book

As I had previously mentioned here, I’ve been working on a book about historic German and Austrian beer styles and how to brew them at home. Finally, today was the big day: the book is finally published! It’s called “Historic German and Austrian Beers for the Home Brewer” and can be purchased on Amazon as an e-book. You can get it here on Amazon.com, here on Amazon UK, and here on Amazon Germany. If you’re from another country, just search for the book title on your country’s Amazon website.

I decided to go the route of self-publishing, and went for exclusively publishing it for Amazon Kindle. You don’t need a Kindle e-book reader to read it, there are also mobile apps and desktop apps for Windows and Mac available for download. While this locks the book into the Amazon platform for the next 3 months, it also gives me, the author, more options to earn royalties. Not that I expect to earn a lot of money from this…

Work on the book started in November 2016, shortly after I had released my previous book which is shorter, in German and has a broader focus. The overwhelming feedback back then was that there was a huge interest in historic beer recipes from non-German speakers, so there was really no other option than to prepare the content in English, but very quickly turned into just focusing on German and Austrian beer styles and researching them much more in detail.

Due to a change in jobs in the middle of 2017, I didn’t put much effort into the project for several months, and only picked up work on it again towards the end of last year. So, part of my new year’s resolution for 2018 was to release this book within the first quarter of the year, which I’ve successfully managed. In the end, it was quite a bit of work to clean things up and get everything right. Thanks to everyone who was willing to proof-read the book beforehand and give me some feedback!

To give you a few insights into my nerdy ways of creating the e-book, let me describe my workflow. Just skip this paragraph if you’re not into geeky e-book software for programmers. Essentially, I used the Markdown format to write my book, with one file per section. It’s a simple text-based file format for documents which can then be converted into a number of other file formats by using various different tools. One of them is called pandoc, and is probably the most powerful converter of text file formats. It does a pretty good job converting a bunch of Markdown files to e-books, in particular the epub format. I also used it to produce a PDF file for easier reviewing, and used a tool named kindlegen to convert the epub file to .mobi, which I ultimately uploaded to Amazon for publishing. To build all these files, I used an old-fashioned Makefile, so whenever I edited any of the Markdown files, a simple “make” command rebuilt all files (.epub, .mobi, .pdf). To create the cover design, I used gimp. The cover image was painted by Eduard Grützner in 1912 and in the public domain. I downloaded it from Wikimedia Commons.

All in all, it was a great experience to work on the book. I learned a lot myself, discovered lots of interesting and exciting details about German beers, and I hope this e-book helps me get the word out that there is a side about German beer culture that goes way beyond the typical association of pale lager beers, Pilsner, and Bavarian wheat beer. That side has long been neglected, and was mostly replaced by modern lager brewing, but just that the fact that historically, there has been a beer tradition that is entirely different from modern German beer, is worth celebrating and worth spreading the word about. And my book is just a glimpse, there were literally hundreds of local beer styles around, while my book can only cover those for which specific recipes were preserved and documented. Unless more historic sources are uncovered, many old German beer styles may be lost.

So, if you’re a homebrewer, or a craft brewer, and you’re interested in exploring something new that is actually old, read my book, brew these beers, and help these styles have a revival. It worked for Gose, a beer style that was functionally extinct for several decades, and is now one of the most popular beer styles of the international craft beer scene, so I think it can work for other German beer styles, as well.

What will my next project be? I don’t know yet. I haven’t really thought about it. But I’m pretty sure something will come up, some topic that I will eventually find interesting enough to write about. Until then… read my book, and if you like it, spread the word. 😉