“Pils, please.” – the power of the calibration lager

Ordering "the blandest thing on the menu" is a great way to understand whether a brewery really knows what it's doing.

Several times on our extended trip around the Balkans we’ve been confronted by long lists of intriguing-sounding beers from exotic, unknown breweries. But our first order has been: “Pils, please.”

Why? Why choose a simple lager when we could have a double IPA, a fruited Gose, or an imperial stout with cherries?

Apart from the fact that we like lager, it’s because it’s the ideal yardstick by which to judge a brewery, a bar, and even an entire city or national beer scene.

Lager is as close as we get to ‘plain’ or ‘vanilla’ (meaning plain) in beer. It’s like a sheet of white paper you use to set the white balance on a camera. It’s how we synchronise our taste buds.

There’s nowhere to hide with pilsner or lager. If your lager tastes dirty or nasty then the chances are that your other beers will have similar problems, even if they’re concealed behind a wall of hop aroma or buckets of fruit puree.

Brewing lager speaks to:

• technical skill

• care taken during the brewing process

• quality control and perception of quality

• pride in your output

Can you brew a good lager? Then you probably know what you're doing. A good lager casts a glow of professionalism across your whole beer range, and your whole operation.

None of which is to say that your lager has to be totally bland, boring or (figuratively) sterile. There’s certainly room for ‘rustic’ and quirky – hey, we’ve been to Franconia! But, ultimately, a lager must be satisfying and solid. You shouldn’t catch yourself making too many excuses for it.

If your brewery isn’t set up to make a decent lager, the next best thing is to have the nous to outsource the job.

Again, this is about quality control and self respect. It demonstrates realism and professionalism. Those aren’t always appealing qualities in the weird world of craft beer but, as drinkers, we don’t object at all. (As long as the outsourcing is transparent.)

Some of the lagers we’ve encountered in the past couple of months have been a little rough. Why are they being brewed at all? Probably because drinkers expect there to be one and breweries can’t afford to turn down the business.

We’ve also noticed this tendency back home in the UK where breweries best known for, say, IPAs or hazy pale ales, have a lager in their range for the “What’s the nearest you’ve got to Stella, mate?” crowd.

When we’re drinking these half-arsed efforts we find ourselves thinking: “Why didn’t they just give that tap over to a lager from another craft brewery that knows what it’s doing? Or to the best of the local mainstream products?”

This would, at least, demonstrate good taste. It’s an opportunity to ‘curate’ and to guide.

And, yes, some of the national brands in Romania and Bulgaria struck us as pretty decent beers – as if they’ve been overlooked for so long that someone forgot to make them bad. We’d be happy to see them in offer in craft beer bars.

If your £6-a-pint in-house lager isn’t better than something we can buy at a normal pub for half the price, or pick up from a cornershop in a scuffed brown bottle for a quid or two, what’s the point?

If a brewery doesn’t offer a calibration lager, their most normal, most sessionable pale ale, or bog standard bitter, can perform the same function.

It’s whatever is at the top of the menu, probably, pitched at ‘normals’. In the language of BBC TV’s reality show Make it at Market, it’ll be their ‘volume piece’.

The flipside of all this is when you drink what you think is going to be a bland, bog standard, national beer and find yourself thinking: “Hold up – this is actually good.”

That happened to us with Niška, the hometown brewery of Niš, Serbia, last week. The standard lager was so good just from the bottle that we ended up replanning our entire day around visiting the brewery and drinking the beer on draught.

An English pub in Sofia, Bulgaria

More than a month into our long trip around the Balkans we were guided towards BiraBar in Sofia by a tip from Kien Tan. And what a weird experience it was.

It’s famous for serving British beer and cask ale. It also looks and feels kind of like a micropub in the south of England.

The only giveaway that it isn’t quite the real deal is that some of the tat on the walls is a bit too on the nose: a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II; a street sign for Notting Hill Gate; slightly too many union flags; and so on.

As we drank perfectly decent cask bitter (not perfect, but we’ve had worse in micropubs at home) we felt, first, a little homesick and, secondly, quite confused. It was as if our brains couldn’t understand how we’d suddenly travelled 2,500 miles back to the UK.

It also made us think about English pubs abroad – once very fashionable in Belgium, France and elsewhere but, we think, mostly replaced by faux Irish pubs, which offer much of the same vibe without our imperial baggage.

We were tempted to pull on this thread and visit another bar in Sofia described in one review as “exactly like walking into an English pub”. Then we thought, hold on, that’s a ridiculous idea. Embrace being abroad. Don’t worry about pubs for now.

We are, however, very much looking forward to pints of cask ale at the Mad Bishop & Bear at Paddington in just over a week’s time.

Hear us talk about pubs in Bristol

We’ll be part of the line up at an evening of talks about pubs at The Greenbank in Bristol on Tuesday 24 June, starting at 6:30 pm.

It’s part of a series of events organised by local brewery Good Chemistry and the Drinking Studies Network.

We’ll be talking about Bristol’s pubs as a way to understand the history of the pub more widely, and especially how it evolved in the 20th century.

We’ll also have copies of our now hard-to-find book 20th Century Pub available to buy, signed and/or dedicated if you want that; unspoiled if you don’t.

We’re giving plenty of advance notice for this, we realise, but just in case you feel like travelling inter-city for the event, we thought it couldn’t hurt.

Find out more on the Good Chemistry website.

Or check out this blog post for an idea of what we’ll be covering in a talk updated for 2025.

On the blog

Despite being on the road for the past few weeks we’ve managed to post a few things, starting with a contribution to the last edition of The Session about value in beer: “Good value in beer is easy to define: it’s when you get more than you expect for the price you pay. Like perfect pints of Butcombe Bitter for £3.”

We were also inspired by some of our experiences in Romania to write about hospitality venues that operate like machines: “At first, you might think, ugh, this is all a bit charmless. Not very organic. Not very artisanal or indie… But after a while, if you submit to it, you might start to appreciate its sheer effectiveness, which does actually translate into a form of good service.”

And we did quite a bit of work pondering, discussing and researching a post that asks: Why are skulls a craft beer ‘thing’? When we write posts like this it’s partly in the hope that people will correct us or point out things we’ve missed. In this case, that’s already started to happen.

We’ve also kept up our regular schedule of news, nuggets and longreads posts every Saturday.

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And that’s it, that’s your lot. Until next time, cheers!

Jess & Ray