Pilsner has now made it on to the Left Handed Giant core beer range, exciting stuff I know! This may come as a surprise to some, but followers on the twittersphere may remember a few weeks back a picture was tweeted giving some clue as to what we were up to. Anyway, down to brass tacks. Lager-esq beers are a tricky beast to get right. Often lacking in something we humans called flavour. We are all too familiar with the fizzy piss that’s poured ubiquitously across the country. Correct me if you must, but the issue with lagers and pilsners is that there aren’t a lot of place to hide favour wise. The beers have to be pretty damn clean tasting and have a hop profile that is just so. Too much and the beer runs risk of jumping way out of style, obviously to little hop flavouring and it’ll just be lost in the sea of commercial booze that is out there already or otherwise fall flat in taste.
As all sensible people know unfiltered and unfined beers are the best kind. The purists out there may already be chanting that authentic pilsners are filtered, individuals holding firm to this ideology are also the kind that would probably be excited by an evening duct taped to David Icke, thus we ignore them. I digress, our pilsner, just like the rest of our range is vegetarian friendly and unfiltered. Our pilsner pour a lovely straw colour and is (filtration aside) as authentic as we could make it given the restrictions imposed on us, be they geographic circumstances or brewing equipment. The malt is all genuine Czech pilsner malt from Czech land and the hops all Saaz. Which is especially novel given that Saaz hops are currently harder to find than hens teeth thanks to a spectacularly underwhelming harvest over the past couple of years. So that’s the malt and hops, what of the water I hear you ask? Believe or not, even the water chemistry was carefully researched by our head brewer and subsequently treated to mimic the water table of western. The beer was matured for as long as we could get away with; six weeks (the current nationwide average is around a week). The end result is what we like to think is a true representation what we believe a great bohemian beer should be.
The team in the brewhouse have really nailed it with this one, as we think it's a great beer! Left Handed Pilsner won’t be making it into bottles unfortunately, so square that question firmly away. For now it’s all keg and available at all good beer bars. What of the future? Given the unexpected shortage in Saaz here at Left Handed Giant we haven’t decided to sit idle. There is a whole world of pilsner types to explore. From the spicier Germany variety to new world and dry hopped editions.