Pale Lager

Here, five gold medal–winning breweries share their top tips on shaping the perfect Bavarian-style helles.

The flagship beer from Wiseacre in Memphis, Tennessee, Tiny Bomb is a svelte, session-strength American lager with the full flavor of a German pilsner.

“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.

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.

Technically, this cold-fermented showcase of expressive Czech aroma hops—brewed by the folks at Sacred Profane in Biddeford, Maine—is a lager. But it drinks like an IPA, so that’s what they call it.

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.

It’s a throwback, now, but we remain loyal, and we know they’re still out there. And brewing a great IPL is more about executing the “L” than anything else.

Courtney Servaes, founder and brewer at Servaes Brewing in Shawnee, Kansas, shares this recipe for a Czech-inspired pilsner base that gets a whole bag of tortilla chips in the secondary.

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.

While the recipe is big for a Czech pale lager—it’s really 14°P rather than the typical 12°—it drinks well below its strength and makes a bright showcase for that floor malt and ample Saaz hops.

Jono Gaytan, head brewer at Flix Brewhouse in El Paso, Texas, says this easygoing pale lager that features Idaho 7 is “meant to be enjoyed during college football games or mowing the lawn.” (Or, no doubt, during a movie at Flix.)

From Three Taverns in Decatur, Georgia, we share a recipe for a hop-forward, triple-decocted, Czech-American lager that celebrates a notable piece of history.

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.”

First brewed for Notch’s 10th anniversary in 2020, this is a 10°P pale lager in the Czech tradition—low in strength yet full of flavor. The beer is triple-decocted, open-fermented, naturally carbonated, and “lagered forever.”

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.

IPL is about making sure the “L” part—lager—is getting its due. With this recipe, the idea is make something that’s clearly a lager but also features hops in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the palate or the grist.