Do, a deer, a female deer
Re, a drop of golden sun

A lost song from childhood flits through my mind, weaving its unruly way like a bat navigating gathering twilight. Then it vanishes and I am back in a brewery cold room studying a gleaming, snow-white foam-topped glass of Helles brewed next door. On the nose there’s a minor scale of floral and slightly spicy hop notes—Tettnang, Perle—while the mouthfeel goes for the major scale, its crispness and bittersweetness contrasting with subtle citrus before a dry and quenching finish.

As I gulp from the glass, on this sweltering Saturday afternoon in the hills high above the Vermont town of Stowe, brewery owner Sam Von Trapp tells me about his father Johannes’ vision for making his own lager. “He wanted it as he knew it in Austria; it was something he had been thinking of for 15 to 20 years.”

Yes, you read that right, Von Trapp, of The Sound of Music fame. The family has its own brewery within its much-visited tourist attraction lodge, and Julie Andrews played Sam’s grandmother in the film—my first outing to the cinema. However, let us put away childish things and concentrate on the brewery’s Golden Helles Lager.

Each sip (I am in urgent need of hydration having walked four miles in a heatwave) persuades me that this is one of the finest lagered beers I have ever had. I have another, followed by a snappy Vienna with its flavours of toffee and caramel. Sam—plus the then head brewer Allen Van Alda—and myself discuss the fascination of lagered beers and how they represent something so fundamental in the culture of beer. Later on, as I ride back to my hotel on a loaned mountain bike, I reflect on how my fascination with lager keeps growing.

That was the summer of 2010, a milestone on what I now regard has been an ever-evolving journey through the kaleidoscopic world of lager, an adventure that many of us who immerse ourselves in beer undertake.

If ever there was such a hopeless descriptor of a family of beers of various colours, aromas, flavours and cultural mores, then lager is it. This is a variety of beers that encompasses the brooding, shadowy alter egos of bock, doppelbock and schwarzbier, the bright, cheerful treasure hoard of gold-flecked helles, pils, kellerbier and světlý ležák and not forgetting the amber assertiveness of a vienna or a märzen (oh and there’s also rauchbier, maibock, festbier, zoigl, tmavý ležák and American pils). I could cheerfully hang out with this family for the rest of my life.

““I am both mystified and enthralled whenever I think of the deep sleep of lagering, the process that brings the raw ingredients of the beer into a sharper focus.””

Let’s rewind a bit. When I first came to London in my 20s, I drank a lot of lager: bottles of Holsten Diat Pils because I thought I wouldn’t put weight on; Stella Artois because it was the beer I had tasted on my first ever journey to Europe at 15; and Beck’s, because—don’t laugh—I liked the beer label. I got on better with them than I did with cask beer, which I used to feel was a bit too glutinous. These lagers also had a sense of the wide-open spaces of the European continent, a universe away from what I then perceived as the parochialism of cask beer (I’ve obviously changed my mind since). They seemed to talk to me of Europe, a place that was (and still is) as gilded and beautiful as the fabled domes of Samarkand were to ancient travellers.

Matters changed after regular readings of Michael Jackson’s column in The Independent in the late 80s, which finally opened my eyes to the devoted family of lager. I bought his books and wanted to drink Moravia Pils (which I never did), while Czech lagers possessed a satisfying glacial-like, stylish coolness on a par with the characters who populated the novels of Milan Kundera. At the same time, this love for lager coincided with what was becoming an obsession with beer in general, but it was 2010 when my journey through lagered beer really started to matter.

Later that year I was at Pivovar Chodovar, in the west of Bohemia, a family brewery that attracts tourists who pay to have a bath in beer, or a mixture of water, beer and spent grains, at least. I took a dip in the moss-green liquid to a soundtrack of soothing music I would normally expect to hear in a funeral home as caskets are picked. It was a weirdly warm and grounding experience, enlivened by several glasses of the brewery’s světlý ležák (Czech for ‘pale lager’) served bath-side.

I then visited the brewhouse, where head brewer Jiri handed me a tin mug of foam-flecked beer drawn straight from the tank. The beer was creamy, fresh and perky, fulsome in the mouth, with a bittersweet buzz followed by a notable bite of bitterness. It was a heady combination that I immediately recognised as one of those particularly memorable beer experiences. I asked Jiri what the style was and he thumbed vaguely in the direction of the Bavarian border a few kilometres away. “It’s a Spezial,” he said, “but over the border they call it a Märzen or Festbier.”

This was the healing power of the beers in this part of the world for me—whatever the fractured history Bohemia has had with its larger neighbour—lagered beer was the bridge that drew them together.

I am both mystified and enthralled whenever I think of the deep sleep of lagering, the process that brings the raw ingredients of the beer into a sharper focus. Enchantment touches me like a spell when I consider the steampunk-like nature of some of the brewing techniques such as lautering and decoction mashing. Then, as if conjured up by some celestial agent, there is the aristocratic elegance of noble hops, which, when writing its entry for the Oxford Companion to Beer, I was surprised to discover that it was a marketing term from the 1970s instead of something from the days of Hansel and Gretel.

I have shivered in the ice-cold cellars at Budvar, marvelling at the differences in beer flavour at different stages of maturation; at Gänstaller brewery south of Bamberg have watched a coolship with hop pellets at one end being filled with hot wort for a brief rest before being whisked away to the kettle; and in Bamberg itself a visit to Brauerei Heller, where the mighty Schlenkerla Rauchbier is produced, had the air of a pilgrimage. These and many more are iconic moments in an obsessive journey through the world of lager, which I doubt I am ready to call a halt to yet.