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I am cursed to live in a benighted region where it is not always easy to find fresh bottles of this clean, crisp 4.7-percent ABV German-style pilsner from Fort Bragg, California, but I snap it up every chance I get. Buy my dumb qualms notwithstanding, Pivo is both excellent and authentic: The style sticklers at the Great American Beer Festival have awarded Pivo the gold medal in the German-style pilsner category all three years that the Magnum-, Spalter-, and Saphir-hopped wonderbrew has existed. Traditional pilsners are very hoppy beers by European lager standards, but not necessarily in the modern American craft context. Pilsner is the only beer style I tend to get uptight about, which is why I was somewhat wary of the 5.3-percent Pivo, which calls itself a “hoppy pils” right on the label. Sterling hops complement Saaz to produce a beer that is herbal, earthy, and ideal. Notch refers to this 4-percent ABV unfiltered pils as a “worker’s beer,” but I can attest that it’s perfectly suited to serve as a “well, actually just kind of a blogger’s beer” too, as it has landed in my fridge at least twice as often as any other beer over the past four years. This 5.4-percent alcohol-by-volume Brooklyn beauty features a floral, grassy aroma leading into nice bready malt and light lemon before a dry, peppery finish. So on Sunday night, when your television is imploring you to ride a Clydesdale to the gas station for a 30-pack of lifeless lager, quietly exercise your right to a more tasteful life by enjoying a few of these 10 high-class American pilsners. In short, what the macro lagers pretend to be.
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The better versions are clean and easy-drinking, with moderate alcohol levels and straightforward, unfussy flavor. In recent years, however, our better brewers have begun to embrace pale lagers in general and pilsners in particular. In postwar America, pilsner’s good name was tarnished by association with mass-produced, adjunct-laden, flavorless-at-best light lagers. German and German-inspired versions typically rely on Hallertau, Tettnanger, and other noble hops for a similar effect. The spicy, floral Saaz hop is still used to give these pale lagers their distinctively crisp, flavorful profile.
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The pilsner style was invented in the Czech city of Pilsen in 1842 by the brewery now known as Urquell it was one of the first Czech beers brewed in the emerging Bavarian lager style. As a bit of counter-programming, I am attempting to recoup my January bar tab by charging VinePair a marginally lower fee to recommend you instead drink craft pilsner. The NFL sells broadcast rights to its games for $3.1 billion dollars per year it’s CBS’s turn to air the Super Bowl, and they will try to recoup their share of the $3.1-billion annual tab by, in part, charging Anheuser-Busch $5 million for every 30 seconds they spend telling you to drink Budweiser. I have a hunch NFL executives view me as an ally in the War On People Who Don’t Have At Least One Beer In Their Hands At All Times. I suppose I could be setting myself up for a lawsuit, or at the very least a 4-game suspension and the loss of my first-round draft pick, and I’d have to imagine you’d all be complicit for reading. I’m pretty sure we’re in the clear here because we’re not trying to invoke the name of the game to sell you anything directly, but I admit I’m foggy on intellectual property rules. But first I must warn you that in so doing, we’re taking a bit of a risk by using the phrase “Super Bowl” right here in plain sight rather than calling it “The Big Game!” to avoid the wrath of the National Football League, which is famously (if not always competently) litigious and also, fair enough, owns the trademark. Only a couple of shopping days left until Football Christmas, which means it’s time to discuss Super Bowl beers.