Brewing technology · Cold

Mechanical refrigeration

The single technology most responsible for what the world drinks now: it detached cold fermentation from winter, from caves, and from Bavaria.

From the 1870sApproximateAdopted quicklyStill in use

Before

Lager brewing required cold, and cold was a place and a season. Bavarian brewers cut cellars into rock, cut ice from lakes in winter and packed it away, and were forbidden by law from brewing through the summer at all — a restriction that was a public-safety measure and also a straightforward acknowledgement that it could not be done well. Lager was therefore a beer of particular geographies: somewhere with cold winters, and somewhere you could dig. A brewery in Madrid or Mexico City or Sydney could not make it, whatever it wanted to make.

After

Cold became a utility you could buy. Lager could be brewed anywhere, at any time of year, at any scale, and within fifty years pale lager had displaced local traditions across most of the world. Refrigeration also made year-round production possible for everybody, made long-distance shipping of beer practical, and made the modern brewery — where fermentation temperature is a setting rather than a season — conceivable. If one entry on this list explains why most beer sold today is pale lager, this is it.

The historical question this page exists to answer. How the technique itself works is on the brewing process pages linked below.

Why it spread

Fast wherever capital allowed, because it removed a constraint rather than improving a process. A brewery that could brew all year instead of half of it roughly doubled the return on the same building — an argument that needs no persuasion.

Who is credited

Carl von LindeDocumented

Linde developed practical mechanical refrigeration working directly with Bavarian brewers, Spaten among them, and the brewing application was the point rather than a later use of a general invention. He was not the only person working on refrigeration, and BeerHQ credits him with the machine that brewing actually adopted rather than with the idea of cooling.

A contemporary record supports this attribution.

Styles that exist because of it

Or that changed materially. A style listed here would be a different beer, or would not be brewable at all, without this.

What people get wrong

Refrigeration made lager possible.

Lager had been made for centuries using cellars, ice and winter. What refrigeration made possible was lager *everywhere* and *all year*, which is a claim about geography and economics rather than about brewing, and is the larger change of the two.

Related myths

Was lager invented in 1842?Not true
Cold bottom-fermented brewing is centuries older than 1842. What was new at Plzeň was a lager that was pale and clear, which is a combination rather than an invention.

Questions

How did refrigeration change beer?

It detached cold fermentation from cold places. Lager needs sustained low temperatures, which before the 1870s meant rock cellars, harvested ice and a winter brewing season — so lager was a beer of particular geographies. Mechanical refrigeration turned cold into something a brewery could buy anywhere, and pale lager spread across the world within about fifty years.