In the summer of 2018, London sweltered. From late April until August, a dense, dehydrating heat enveloped the city—and I loved it. Working from home made every day a pleasure: shorts and t-shirt on, out into the backyard, plenty of cool drinks, a quick chuckle at the thought of commuters on sweaty tube trains, down to work.

My comeuppance was, sad to say, inevitable. An hour spent in the clammy fug of London’s public transport network en route to meet a friend at the recently-opened Beer Merchants Tap, a cavernous converted book warehouse in Hackney Wick, was chastening. By the time I arrived, I was gasping. It was like Ice Cold in Alex, except maybe worse. I was so thirsty I contemplated shandy.

Thankfully, there was Keller Pils, a lemon-bitter pale lager from Bristol brewery Lost and Grounded. The first barely touched the sides: one gulp, two gulps, three gulps, gone. The second, golden and glistening with condensation in a Willi Becher—a classic straight German glass that tapers elegantly towards the top—took longer. It was crisp but rich, toasty and bitter, direct and deeply rewarding. It has been said, probably erroneously, that lager’s rise in this country was a result of the endless summer of 1976; on that hot May afternoon, I could really believe it.

Pale lager is fashionable now, but there was a time when many British drinkers scoffed at it. Some still do, but no-one who has visited Czechia or southern Germany can hold that line for long. In 2013 I went to Bamberg—the unofficial capital of traditional German brewing—for the first time, in the final days of summer. It was an eye-opening trip.

Bamberg is a half-timbered apple strudel of a town, so immaculately preserved that it would make even Bath flush red with embarrassment. Amongst many glories are its kellers; its beer gardens. The Spezial-Keller, with its hillside view of the city, is the famous one, but my fondest memories are from the more humble Fassla Keller, where I sat under a chestnut tree and watched a Europa League match (was it Eintracht Frankfurt?) with a schnitzel and a few glasses of Pils.

I’ve been back many times since, and it is these experiences—of Franconian lager and bierkellers—that sustain and fuel my enjoyment of Germanic beers. It’s culture and context, and more than a touch of romance.

As a writer, I’m drawn to romance—but it’s better, I think, if brewers take a more scientific approach. Alex Troncoso, the co-owner of Lost and Grounded and the driving force behind Keller Pils, is appropriately focused on the detail. For him, beer is a problem to be solved. This particular problem, he says, began in Australia, where he was the chief brewer at Fremantle’s Little Creatures Brewing.

“At Little Creatures I started to get fascinated by our Pils and why we couldn't make it any good,” he says. “It was okay but there was always something... it seemed to be never as good as we wanted it to be.”

““It’s hard to beat Keller Pils.””

— Rich Salthouse, Joyce

Alex went from Little Creatures to Camden Town Brewery in London, where he honed its flagship Hells lager into the easy-going supermarket option it is today, and then struck out for the West Country. At every step, the lager problem has been tackled with rigorous attention to detail. One telling example: to iron out inconsistencies between batches of Keller Pils, he now blends two types of pale lager malt, from Bamberg and Belgium, and fermentation and maturation take place in tanks big enough to contain six batches.

The process of brewing, fermentation and maturation has been gradually refined since the beer first appeared in 2016. It’s a job that never ends. “As soon as you get it dialled in and everything's right, then you'll just see the malt deviate a little bit, or the hop character deviate, and you have to go back to basics and start doing that process over again,” says Alex.

If Alex is the scientist, Annie, his partner in business and life, brings imagination. She challenges him to do things differently, he says, and she has shared the burden of building this brewery from the ground up. In 2018 I went down to Bristol to write a profile of them for The Fairfax papers (The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others) in Australia; it was clear the toll it had taken on both of them, the sleepless nights. Annie talked, Alex brooded. Running a small business is not easy, whatever drinkers might think. You can’t help wishing the best for people when you can see how much they’ve given.

“It’s like a Rubik’s cube, you know?” Alex says. “It’s about the branding. It's the communications. It's the quality of the product. It's about people out on the road talking about it. It's about how you work with the wholesalers … it’s all sorts of everything.”

The brewery has grown rapidly of late. Keller Pils makes up around 70 per cent of 2019’s 6000-hectolitre total (just over a million pints). That will double next year, with a final target of somewhere between 30,000 (5.3m pints) and 40,000 (7m). At around half the size of the new Bath Ales plant, that would make them a sizeable local player—close to half of their beer is already sold in and around Bristol—with a footprint further afield, too.

Happily, that includes my own neighbourhood in South London. Keller Pils is now popping up on bars far from London’s modern beer strongholds; it’s the only permanent line (of six) at Joyce, a new place a few minutes from where I live in Brockley.

“I wanted something consistently good, and readily available,” says Rich Salthouse, co-owner of this two-room, street-corner bar, with its elegant pendant light fittings and white tiles on the back-bar. “There aren’t many really high-quality, consistent, independently-owned lagers available at a good price. I wanted to make the bar all London beers because it’s a nice way of working, but it’s hard to beat Keller Pils.”

That much is clear at Salthouse Bottles, the bottle shop that he runs next to Brockley Station, where, despite a marked customer preference for pale ales, Keller Pils is gradually building a loyal audience: “Once people have tried it, they come back for more,” he says.

That I can understand. One week after opening, on a drizzly, dreich evening that couldn’t have been further from that sunny day in Hackney Wick, I wandered into Joyce intent on a drink. Did it taste as good as that May afternoon? Yes. It was different—less urgent, perhaps—but still an absolute joy. This is a beer for all seasons, a delicious reminder of warm beer gardens, cold rigorous focus, and the glorious, refreshing conclusion to a muggy hour on London transport.