For the past two decades, there have been two types of St. Louis beer drinkers: the staunch, old-school Anheuser-Busch backer and the upstart craft beer connoisseur. The former put their faith in mass quantities of easy-drinking, lighter American lager; the latter rebel against the straw-colored stuff in search of more flavor from fruity sours, boozy barrel-aged stouts, and hop-packed IPAs.
But if you’ve dropped by your local brewery or bar lately, you may have noticed some Venn overlap of these two drinking circles. For instance, you and a friend can walk into Blue Jay Brewing Co. and order a pitcher of Change Up, a crisp, clean American lager. Your crew can meet at a sports bar and share an iced bucket of Zwickel Light bottles from Urban Chestnut Brewing Co. or swing through Total Wine and pick up a 12-pack of 12-ounce cans of 4 Hands City Wide Light Lager. Even at Busch Stadium, you can choose between a plastic cup of Bud Select or that of a Brewligans Lager from 2nd Shift Brewing.
St. Louis, the city shaped by AB, is once again a lager town.
For decades, lager in STL was a given. “I grew up learning to drink Budweiser,” said Jay Thompson, brewer who with his wife, Nicole, opened Blue Jay Brewing in Midtown in 2023. “My friends, my family, my family’s friends all drank Bud. Growing up, everyone knew someone who worked at Anheuser-Busch. And they gave a lot of free beer to their employees. As a kid you find it. AB made a huge impact on the city and its drinking culture.”
Thompson left for 20 years training to brew and whipping up German-style lagers for brewpub chain Gordon Biersch in California. When he returned to St. Louis in 2011, he encountered a beer scene he barely recognized. The craft beer revolution of the 2000s was only just beginning to seize the city, with the likes of 4 Hands, Civil Life, and Perennial all joining Schlafly that year. Like most independent brewers nationwide, these upstarts specialized in big, flavorful beers like stouts, English-style ales, and IPAs.
The exception was Urban Chestnut (UCBC), also launched in 2011, co-founded by Florian Kuplent, a German-born master brewer and former AB brewmaster. Thompson found a home at UCBC, helping produce flagship Zwickel, a wildly popular classic Bavarian lager. “I don’t think they were specifically looking to be the one thing for everybody,” said Thompson. “But they hit the nail on the head with Zwickel: German-style, light, but unfiltered so there was a bit more flavor.”
Even so, as the decade wore on other STL breweries brought attention to the city as a world-class wellspring of BA stouts and wild ales (Side Project) and American and New England-style IPAs (Modern and Narrow Gauge). Enthusiasts from around the country would come for the latest releases from Perennial and Side Project or connect with locals online to facilitate bottle trades. It wasn’t until the 2020s and the pandemic that the city started to drift back toward a taste for lagers.
First, there was a gradual national trend of younger drinkers looking for functional drinking sessions with less alcohol and fewer calories. This saw the rise in alcoholic seltzers, but also helped lighter lagers, whose ABV was sometimes less than half that of IPAs or stouts. Then came the pandemic, when even the most discerning drinkers felt the pinch of tough economic times and limited public drinking spaces.
“Bars shut down, breweries started doing pickup,” said Manny Negron, who witnessed the swing in tastes firsthand in retail shifts at now-closed bottle shop Craft Beer Cellar and then Schnucks, before opening his own bar, Little Lager, in 2023. “People leaned into grocery store beer and away from craft. They could fill their fridge with 30-packs of Busch, Stag or Pabst without destroying their wallet.”
When quarantine lifted and hop heads emerged, their palates had changed. Demand led some STL prestige craft brewers to apply their considerable skills to lagers, which are generally considered harder to make because there is nowhere to hide flaws. Side Project put out cans of Maplewood’s Best rice lager (a play on Milwaukee’s Best) and Millpond released Old Millstadt light lager. UCBC doubled down on Zwickel with Zwickel Light, packaged in 12-ounce cans and long-neck bottles designed specifically to replicate the look and feel of Bud Light. The gates were open for breweries to branch out into adjacent sub-styles like Mexican lagers, Italian and Czech Pilsners, German Helles, and darker offerings like Vienna lagers, Czech dark lagers, Schwarzbiers, Bocks and smokey Rauchbiers. Entire lager-centric breweries Blue Jay and Great Heart Brewing opened, along with Negron’s Little Lager, featuring Czech-style side pours.
Negron even thinks that this embrace of lagers among local brewers has led to once-adamant craft drinkers lowering their guard a bit when it comes to the macro brews. “Now that their heroes are making lagers, they are more willing to go into dive bars and drink Budweiser,” he said.
Thompson acknowledges the growth of craft lager in his hometown. But he also said that local craft culture’s readiness in adapting back to pitchers, buckets, bottles, 12-packs, and even actual Buds shows that lager has been in our DNA all along.
“St. Louis has long been a lager town,” he said. “And while I can’t foresee the future, I think it will always be a lager town.”