Glossary
Lager
Beer fermented cool with Saccharomyces pastorianus and then matured cold — a process, not a colour or a flavour.
Cool fermentation suppresses the esters and phenols that ale yeast produces, leaving malt and hop character exposed with nothing to hide behind. This is why lager is often described as harder to brew well: there is nowhere for a fault to hide.
The category spans Munich Helles, Czech pale lager, Vienna lager, Märzen, Munich Dunkel, Schwarzbier, Bock, Doppelbock and Rauchbier. Several are dark, several are strong, and one is smoked.
Commonly misunderstood
The most common misconception in beer. "Lager" is not a synonym for pale, fizzy or bland — Schwarzbier and Doppelbock are lagers.
What this word used to mean
Historically
Beer that had been *stored* — from the German lagern, to store. It described a process, not a colour or a flavour: cold fermentation followed by months in a cellar. Bavarian lager before the nineteenth century was dark or amber, because pale malt did not yet exist in any reliable form.
Today
In most markets, a pale, clear, mass-market beer — so much so that "lager" is often used in opposition to "beer" in casual British speech, which would have been unintelligible to anyone before about 1900.
When it changed. After 1842, when the first pale lager at Plzeň made golden beer the aspirational form, and decisively after refrigeration let pale lager be brewed everywhere from the 1870s.
The idea that lager was invented in 1842 comes almost entirely from this drift. What was invented then was pale lager; lager itself is centuries older and is named after the storage.
Related
- Ale — The other fermentation family.
- Lagering — The maturation step it is named after.
- Bottom fermentation — The process it names.
More vocabulary
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.