Pale Lager

Meant to represent the kind of pale lagers that were brewed by the likes of John Wagner, who brewed the first lager in the United States, this is kind of like German or Czech Pilsner but includes some local variability and flair.

Besides sanitation, success here depends on two things: slightly chloride-forward water to round out the malt, and great attenuation for a light, dry finish.

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.

Seth Carter, head brewer at Peaceful Side in Maryville, Tennessee, cites the key factors that helped their Solveza lager win gold at the 2025 World Beer Cup—and it begins with a team-wide approach to quality.

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.

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.

From Accra’s Heritage Brewing, Ghana’s first modern brewpub, comes this recipe for their flagship lager—technically an ale, but cleanly fermented—featuring local maize and cassava as the bulk of its fermentables.

Brewing a helles is a worthy challenge. If your process is consistent and your ingredients fresh, you can make this beer sing on command.

Give this one some time. After about three months, you’ll find that the malt and hops are so perfectly integrated that you’ll want to just sit and smell this beer for a while.

This reverently Czech-style lager is triple-decocted and brewed with imported Moravian malt and whole-leaf Bohemian Saaz. Green Bench cofounder and head brewer Khris Johnson says the beer “was inspired by a life-changing week spent in the Czech Republic with an incredible group of people.”

From the production team at Creature Comforts in Athens, Georgia, here’s a recipe for their clean, crisp, easy-drinking American lager that won gold at the 2022 Great American Beer Festival.

From the famously soft water to whole-cone hops and extraordinarily long maturation, the brewmaster at Budvar delights in all the details that shape one of Czechia’s most popular beers.

“Pintje is an homage to the type of pilsners brewed in Belgium,” says Joran Van Ginderachter, the Belgian-born cofounder of Halfway Crooks Beer in Atlanta.

Partly inspired by Flying Dog’s Numero Uno, this lager has a bready, tortilla-like backbone with some lime-like Motueka hops for a refreshing edge.

As Black History Month draws to a close, Ghostfish brewer Tae Caldwell shares this gluten-free lager recipe inspired by Peoples Brewery, one of the country’s first Black-owned breweries.

Randy Mosher, author of Radical Brewing, delves into the decidedly un-radical character of the world’s most unassuming—yet arguably most rewarding—swath of the beer spectrum.