9 articles in this category
The helles that won gold at the 2025 World Beer Cup was a collaboration between Cinder Block of Kansas City, Missouri, and Blind Tiger of Topeka, Kansas. The objective? To craft a high-quality helles without a traditional decoction mash.
Here, five gold medal–winning breweries share their top tips on shaping the perfect Bavarian-style helles.
On his two-vessel brewhouse in Duluth, Georgia, Good Word owner-brewer Todd DiMatteo hand-lugs buckets full of mash to make his decoction happen for their house helles—a process that he says is worth the effort.
From beer-baron bobbleheads to bespoke barrel-aged blends, here are a few recs from our editors.
Using information provided by brewers Stefanie and Helmut Bayer, we’ve pieced together a homebrew-scale recipe for the Franconian country lager at Brauerei-Gasthof Bayer in Theinheim.
Brewing a helles is a worthy challenge. If your process is consistent and your ingredients fresh, you can make this beer sing on command.
A great helles is simple in composition—but simple can be surprisingly hard to get right, especially when there’s nowhere for mistakes to hide. It's a worthy challenge, and the payoff is a beer that pretty much everyone is happy to drink.
From Otherlands Beer in Bellingham Washington, this evolving recipe represents a snapshot of head brewer Ben Howe’s ongoing quest to crack the code of Franconian lager.
You voted, and we tallied. Here are your favorite breweries broken down in categories by beer barrels brewed.