Bierstadt Lagerhaus isn’t the only craft brewery in the United States focused on lager brewing, but their dogged approach to quality—from ingredients and brewhouse through cellar and service—has earned them the respect of brewers around the world. It’s no surprise, then, that cofounder Ashleigh Carter is drawn to similar intention in the breweries she loves.
“I am inspired by the commitment to doing a thing,” Carter says. “I make exactly the beer I’m trying to make, but every day I try to do more and narrow that gap to perfection.”
Her six-pack is filled with breweries and beers that share that intentionality, no matter the style.
Schönramer Hell
Schönram, Germany
“Bill [Eye] and I met Eric Toft when he visited us at a past brewery, but the first time I had his beers, Bill and I were looking for a brewhouse in Germany. It was early 2014, we had negative dollars, we were destitute, but we arranged with Eric to visit Schönram on a Sunday. We took the train to Teisendorf. It was a Sunday, when most things are closed, and we weren’t sure how to get to the brewery since it was about six kilometers from where we were. We found a phone bank and called the Bräustüberl, and no one picked up because they were closed, but we eventually found an open restaurant in this tiny town with a young waitress who spoke some English. She called us a cab, and the cab driver got us to the brewery, but again the Bräustüberl was closed. The cab driver didn’t give up, though, and went around knocking on peoples’ doors asking for the brewmaster. Turns out Bill had his number in his phone the entire time, and we could have just dialed Eric directly, but we didn’t!
“It was pouring down rain, and we were ready to give up, but the cab driver eventually found him, and Eric came down. We drank bottled helles for hours, and it ended up being the most incredible day ever. At that point, I hadn’t made the caliber of beer that I think we make now, but that experience helped define the upper echelon of beer. I’ve been there so many times now, and Eric’s an incredibly generous host. The experience, the consistency, seeing how it’s made with the open fermentors—everything that Eric knows about beer has been so influential on the way that I make beer. Flotation tanks are a big one that we picked up from him—there are only maybe 10 paragraphs across a number of books that mention them, so it was great to see the design in practice.
“That first experience drinking fresh helles off the bottling line, having it there, with Eric… it’s the best place, the best beer. Bill asked me to marry him in the brauereitische at Schönram. It’s a very special place for us, and it all started with a day that almost didn’t happen.”
Guinness Stout
Dublin
“I think Guinness Stout is the first beer I had on draft, in England, in a town called Rugby when I was 20. But the story starts years earlier, when I was a competitive soccer player in seventh grade. We played in a tournament in Colorado Springs, and this boys’ team from England came over. I became long-term pen pals with one of the guys, through college. I saw him when my high-school soccer team went to England. When I turned 20, my dad gave me savings bonds he’d bought for me when I was young, so I took all my bonds, exchanged them for British pounds, and arranged a trip to visit him. They made fun of me for drinking Smirnoff Ice—it was so dumb—but one evening we went bowling, and he asked me if I wanted a beer. I knew nothing about beer but at least recognized the Guinness name, so that’s what I ordered.
“Now, there’s a really cool bar down in LoDo [Denver] called Nallen’s, and the Guinness is super-fresh. If we’re not here at the brewery, we’re probably there, even as a team. I don’t split the G, but it’s a beer I want to drink a lot of. I don’t care for cask beer, at all, but Guinness is a fallback comfort beer for me. Even Guinness Extra Stout in the bottle. It’s a beer style I don’t make and don’t know how to make, so I’m at Nallen’s once or twice a week.
“When Bill and I were opening Bierstadt Lagerhaus, we looked at things that were remarkable to us. The idea that you almost always get Guinness in a Guinness glass is part of the reason we serve our beer in our own glass. Why is that only for European breweries? Why are they fancy and we’re not fancy? Guinness is a big reason why you get our beer the way you do in the pils glass or the helles glass.”
Bohemia Pilsner
Monterrey, Nuevo León, México
“When Bohemia is fresh, it’s excellent. It’s Saaz hops, which I discovered while on a podcast with Will Kemper [of Chuckanut]. I have wild respect for Will Kemper, all their beers are excellent—their helles, their Kölsch. What they did at Thomas Kemper paved the way for what I’m able to do now. I love Mexican beer, and I love pale lager, obviously. But Bohemia always struck me as a macro beer that—if you get it at the right time—the hops pop. They’re bright, bitter, Noble, and off the charts. For the podcast, I had to select three beers for the audience that they could go out and purchase, and chose Coors Banquet, Bohemia, and my beer. We didn’t prepare beforehand, and I’d never done anything professionally with him, but as it turned out, Will had amazing stories about all three of these beers. I didn’t know he had background with Bohemia, and when I said, ‘I think it’s Mittlefrüh,’ he corrected me with, ‘No, it’s Saaz.’ It was great to have it explained to me by the guy who knew.
“I check the date when I see it at retail, and if it’s fresh, I’ll buy it every time. That bright and clean hop character is hard to beat.”
U Fleků Tmavy 13°
Prague
“This will surprise you. I’m a known hater of Czech beer. But the last time I had it, it didn’t have the same effect. It spurred a collaboration we did, in the best way. I love collaborations and think that they need meaning. They should come out of the cool things about hanging out with people and never out of left field. A lot of people ask me to do collabs, and I turn them down because I feel so genuinely that collaboration shouldn’t be manufactured; it should be natural and organic. It’s about learning something, whether it’s using a certain ingredient or technique, and quite frankly most of the collaborations I do are about a single malt or single hop, which is boring for everyone else but very insightful for me. Also, the only way I like to try new things is on other peoples’ brewhouses!
“We were on the tail end of one of the most exciting things to be invited to, Birrificio Italiano’s Pils Pride, in Milan, and getting to taste Tipopils on draft was an exceptional experience that I recommend anyone have. I’m annoyed at people who like it but have never had it on draft, as it’s an entirely different experience, and actually not as hoppy as everyone’s trendy Italian-style pils. But we were at Birrificio Italiano, Jeff Bagby was coming from Estonia, and we decided how cool it would be if we extended our trips and met somewhere we’d never been before. We settled on Prague, and it was our business partner Chris Rippe’s first trip out of the country, ever. It was my first time in the Czech Republic, but Bill had told me how dogshit the beer was in the country—all diacetyl, U Fleků is a tourist trap, whatever. But we went, and first of all, they have accordions—it’s in my top four favorite instruments, and I want one at my funeral. We sat down and got this dark beer—because they only had one. (Now they also have a pale beer, which I think is a terrible idea.) It was just so good—dark and roasty, but roasty in the right way. It’s definitely not schwarzbier, and it’s not as sweet as some of the other tmavys we had had. It’s a different degree—13°, not 12° or 11°, as a lot of them are. We were drinking the beer, listening to the accordion, trying to avoid this person swindling us into shots, eating Czech food in a gigantic beer hall. There was no diacetyl in it, and it was utterly perfect.
“That’s how we decided to collaborate on tmavy with Jeff, because I wanted to bottle up that experience and have it again. It was the first time since developing our Helles that we actually tried to emulate something, to re-create a beer. Not riff on it, but actually tried to re-create a specific beer, time, and place. Jeff came out and made it with me after GABF. He had judged with the brewmaster of U Fleků, who had been brewing it for 40 years. He gave us some hot tips on malts, and we were pretty close. We still make that beer every now and then, so that beer, that experience, that time has had a lasting effect on me. The flavor lives in my head, and I keep trying to find it again.”
Comrade Superpower
Denver
“Superpower is what I think of when I think of West Coast IPA. I wish it weren’t 7 percent ABV—c’mon guys—but it’s still a beer where whenever I see it, I order it, no matter what. It’s obviously changed over the years, not for good or for bad, but every time I drink it, I love it. It’s not fruitastic, it’s not too dank, it’s not too piney—it’s the perfect balance of all those things, all the time. It’s a cool name. I’ve known founder David Lin for a long time and even worked with him. I watched them start the brewery from a concept, long before they opened. I’ve gotten to know Marks [Lanham] well, and years ago, before we had a brewery, I called up Marks and said, ‘Hey man, I just need to be in a brewery. Can I grain out for you?’
“I have so much respect for how they think about beers and put together beers. It’s the opposite of what I do and think about, and I don’t think I could make that beer. It’s dry, it’s bitter, it’s grapefruity, but it’s not over the top. It’s firmly bitter but not abrasive. It’s aromatic. I would drink three of them right now, and I wouldn’t get tired of it. I’m a creature of habit and like a known quantity. I need beer I can count on and that will deliver to my expectations every single time, and Superpower does that. It’s always spot-on.”
Godspeed Sklepník, Pitch-Lined
Toronto
“I met Luc (Lafontaine) in Japan, as his wife is Japanese, and they split time between there and Canada. He happened to be in Toronto while I was there, so we connected for a beer along with a mutual friend from the Czech foreign office in Toronto. This pale lager is really interesting—he has a large Pilsner Urquell barrel, and he showed me videos of them rolling pitch in it. We drank some of the beer from that tank, and it was one of the first experiences I’ve had with wood-aged lager that felt real, not manufactured. It didn’t feel like something he did just to say he did it. It’s one of the cleanest breweries I’ve ever been in—beautiful brewery.
“Drinking out of that barrel made me so grateful that I got to be there with him and have that experience. It was good, solid lager. Could have used a filter, but that’s my hang-up. You could taste the environment in the beer, and that connection between beer and place was inspiring. There was so much intention behind it—him traveling to Plzeň and building the barrel with them, shipping it over, lining it—it’s not something you just do for a press release. It’s nothing I want to do myself, but I love that someone did that. It’s so cool.”
