Endless Lager (Fall 2025)

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.

This recipe takes inspiration from the lighter, easier-drinking blonde ales that the Belgian Trappist monks brew largely for themselves—but you can have some, too.

In the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, Goldfinger has built a strong national reputation for its lagers. This one is inspired by the German zoigl tradition but makes use of American ingredients, including corn and whole-leaf Mt. Hood hops.

One lager brewery at a time, a homemade zoigl star is making its way around the United States. At each brewery, the star signals participation in an evolving collaboration inspired partly by the Oberpfalz tradition. Tom Beckmann, cofounder and brewer at Goldfinger in Chicago, explains.

Here are two recipes in one: first the peach soda, which you can modify depending on your own chosen fruit, then an extract-brewed helles that you can blend to your liking.

Beer purists might look down their noses at the humble radler and other shandies, but crafting your own soda to blend with your own beer is a flavor-driven project any brewer can appreciate.

From Unsung Brewing in Anaheim, California, this West Coast pilsner—with tropical character driven by Mosaic and Nelson hops—won silver in the Hoppy Lager category at the 2025 World Beer Cup.

Funky Fauna Artisan Ales in Bend, Oregon, ferments their light, quenching house saison with their own locally captured mixed culture.

Inspired by Wallonian farmhouse brewing but rooted in Oregon terroir, Funky Fauna in Bend makes its Wild Saison beers from local ingredients, fermenting them in oak barrels with their wild-caught house culture. Here, cofounder and brewer Michael Frith shares tips on leaning local, developing your own mixed culture, package-conditioning, and more.

From our Love Handles files on beer bars we love: This no-frills, laid-back pub in Midtown Manhattan serves up pub grub, friendliness, and local craft.

Lisa Allen, co-owner and brewer at Heater Allen and Gold Dot Beer in McMinnville, Oregon, shares this recipe for a pils designed to show off a nontraditional German aroma-hop variety.

As today’s brewers explore the subtleties of hop-forward lagers, they’re finding ways to balance proper fermentation time with the brightest possible hop expression.

This Citra- and Mosaic-powered hazy IPA is the popular flagship from Kros Strain in La Vista, Nebraska. See the notes below for how to adjust for the DDH version.

Bobby Kros, cofounder and head brewer at Kros Strain in La Vista, Nebraska, explains how they gradually shaped Fairy Nectar into an award-winning flagship—and also how they build the double-dry-hopped version differently.

A classic style in the modern American pantheon, this hop-and-malt-forward strong ale serves as a great starting point for experimentation—for example, by subbing in your favorite hop varieties.

“Brewed as an ode to the sun,” this light, crisp, subtly sweet Mexican-inspired lager from Peaceful Side in Maryville, Tennessee, won the gold medal for International Light Lager at the 2025 World Beer Cup.

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.

This celebration of malt and American hops is one that should evolve nicely as the weeks pass, the bitterness rounds, and malt comes into the fore.

Based on details shared by the former lead brewer at Peoples Brewing in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, this mid-20th century American bock gets its color from a darker caramel Munich malt—not from the syrups that were common in dark adjunct lagers from that time.

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.

There are many interpretations of modern saison. This one, from Oxbow in Newcastle, Maine, features local grains and multiple strains of yeast and bacteria—gently tart and funky, and highly drinkable.

Inspired by Wallonian farmhouse brewing yet distinct from classic saison, today’s modern, funky, mixed-culture creations—whatever you call them—enjoy a refined niche.

There are no rude waiters here. From our Love Handles files on the world’s great beer bars: In central Paris, the Fine Mousse is a vanguard of the local beer scene, offering refined attention to French craft and world classics.

It doesn’t take a bespoke lager brewery to bring the subtle complexities of decoction to craft lager—but it does take some ingenuity.

Twentieth-century U.S. lager breweries would often use colorants—such as a malt-based product called Porterine—to give their pale beers a darker or even porter-like appearance. Here’s how to make your own.

Justin Slotnick, production manager at Schilling Beer in Littleton, New Hampshire, shares this recipe for their dark bock inspired by the industrial American tradition—but updated to use today’s old-fashioned craft malts.

American brewers have been producing an industrial riff on bock for more than 150 years—light in strength but dark in color, usually made with corn as well as dark syrups. How might craft brewers reinterpret this tradition, based on the ingredients they have today?

From our Love Handles files on our favorite spots around the world to enjoy a beer: There are few things we appreciate more than an airport bar that majors in craft beer; the Stone Arch at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport is worth planning a long layover.

From Northbound Smokehouse & Brewpub in Minneapolis, here’s a recipe for their Doppelbock that won gold at the 2024 World Beer Cup—and that beer also was the basis for their Eisbock, which won gold at the Great American Beer Festival in 2024 and 2025.

Northbound Smokehouse & Brewpub founder and brewer Jamie Robinson shares tips on how to brew the kind of eisbock that can win a gold medal—as Northbound Eisbock has done two years in a row at the Great American Beer Festival.

Want to brew an eisbock? The first times you try fractional freezing on a bock or other beer, you simply can’t know exactly what you’re going to get—but there are ways to maximize your chances of success.

While there are plenty of classics that have influenced the brewing journey of Pinthouse Brewing cofounder, brewmaster, and hop savant Joe Mohrfeld, it’s the beers of his friends and peers that continue to shape his approach in an immediate and constant way—and those are the beers he’s packed into his chosen sixer.

From Chicago’s Burning Bush Brewery, this amber ale includes two types of basil grown right there on their patio next to the Chicago River.

Beer and pizza are fast friends, as everyone knows. But how well do “pizza leaves” work in beer? Let’s find out.

From Scratch in Ava, Illinois, this saison recipe features 131 ingredients, all told—their use informed by deep expertise in what to forage, what to grow, and how the different components can safely be used to contribute worthwhile flavors to beer.

Scratch in Ava, Illinois, has won a national reputation for its combination of foraging and flavor finesse. Here’s how the brewery’s duo ended up putting 131 different botanical ingredients into one (very tasty) beer.

“There is no recipe for the real zoigl,” says brewer Reinhard Fütterer of the Schafferhof-Zoigl pub in Neuhaus. “Everyone has their own—that’s one of the things that make it so special.”

From shared breweries to shared tables, the zoigl tradition of northeast Bavaria is unlike anything else in modern brewing or hospitality.

This rich amber ale, featuring layers of roasted orange spice mingling with hops, is a vamp on the English winter warmers that are stronger, darker, and toastier than pale ales or bitters.

Looking for some new creative avenues to explore, or want to try something special for your next holiday seasonal? Randy Mosher shares some insights into why botanicals have always been important to beer—plus, strategies to help you use them successfully, today.

Fermentation has been around for billions of years, but only recently did a new type emerge—lager fermentation, conducted by an organism that didn’t exist for much of Earth’s history. Here is its story... starting from the very, very beginning.