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Ale is a wonderful thing. Without ale there would not have been a craft beer revolution. Still, ale is a lumpen country cousin to the svelte and sophisticated lager. Why do so many brewers of both the home and commercial varieties brew so many ales and why are there so few great lagers?

Lagers are harder to brew. Lagers take more finesse and more time. There is nothing to hide behind when making lager, as the New Glarus Brewing Co. so pointedly declared when they named their lager Totally Naked.
It’s a fact Duluth native Steve Olson learned when he left the comfort zone of his award-winning ale ways to brew beers for a German restaurant owned by a German family in Appleton, Wis. The majority of the beers he brews for the Old Bavarian Restaurant and Brauhaus are German-style lagers, but as German beers fans know, that includes a wide range of tasty beers, from the most golden of pilsners to the murkiest of doppelbocks.

“I was an ale guy, a Belgian guy,” Olson said during the recent unveiling of his latest beery creation and his first brewer’s special – or, in the vernacular, Bierbrauer’s Spezial – a 9.5% ABV German barley wine (Gerstenwein) that he describes as a Triple Sticke Altbier. We talked as a raucous game of Hammerschlagen was taking place, which, I was told, is the German equivalent of bar dice.

Olson is a 1980 graduate of Denfeld High who went on to earn degrees in chemistry and biology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He still has family and friends in Duluth and returns several times a year to happily survey the ever-growing craft beer scene.

“I always try to make the blues fest,” he said.
Like many homebrewers, Olson got his start when someone gave him a homebrewing kit.

“My first batch was pretty good. My second batch was horrible,” he said.
This was in the mid-1980s, during the very early days of the revolution. The support then was not anywhere near what is available today. But, as if destiny was knocking, one day at UMD Olson finds he is sharing an elevator with a member of the Northern Ale Stars, the local homebrew club. Olson mentioned his second failed beer.

“He said, ‘You just need someone to show you how to do it’,” Olson said of that important encounter. With the experienced homebrewer’s help and his own science background kicking in, Olson began brewing with a passion that has been recognized with a variety of brewing awards, including 2000 Midwest Homebrewer of the Year and National cider maker of the year in 2003. He has more than 200 homebrewing awards.

That sort of recognition has only steeled his resolve to one day own his own brewery. An apprenticeship at the pioneering but sadly deceased Catamount Brewery in Vermont was another step in that direction.
“They were very, very successful at the time, an up-and-coming brewery. I had a wonderful apprenticeship,” Olson said.

Instead of following his dream of commercial brewing, a dozen years ago Olson joined Georgia-Pacific as a research associate at the paper giant, specifically, R&D Manager for Sparkle Paper Towels, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Of course he continued to brew and taste great beers with the idea of someday…and then someday happened about three years ago when the young owner of the Old Bavarian asked Olson if he could brew some fresh German beer for his restaurant.

 However, there is no brewery. Olson created the recipes and contracted the brewing out to a Milwaukee brewer that, as time revealed, did not have a lot of time to brew Olson’s beers. A supply and demand problem ensued.

But only until Olson hooked up with a gung-ho young brewmaster just down the street from the Old Bavarian. With brewhouses in Appleton and Oshkosh, Kevin Bowen of Fox River Brewing had capacity for Olson’s brews. Better yet, Bowen’s great passion is German beer, which he discovered as a 16-year-old student in Germany.

The two have gained appreciation for each other’s skills as they develop and tweak Olson’s recipes, performing the delicate balancing act of art and science that results in great beer.
“You can have the science down, but there is also an art to beer, and that is where experimentation comes in,” Olson said. “That’s why it’s so great to work with Kevin. He likes to experiment.”

But, enough talk about the beer. Let’s drink some. Before I tried the barley wine, Olson recommended I sample some of his regular lineup, which includes a hefeweizen, dunkelweizen, Helles lager, pilsner, Oktoberfest and a Dopplebock called the Tanjanator. While I pined for a pilsner, Olson said he was really happy with the Oktoberfest. I tried it and so I was I. Nice caramel tone that I’ve come to expect from an Oktoberfest. Even though the Munich brewers are now producing blonde Oktoberfests, Olson said he will stick to the amber lager for his Oktoberfest.

I followed that with the Maibock, which is one of my favorite beer styles. From a Maibock I expect a malty mouthful of hope and dreams, a liquid embodiment of the sunny spirit of spring after a long, dark winter. Drinking a good Maibock is like having a tiny Shirley Bassey belting out “Goldfinger” on your tongue.
“I call it Mind Block,” Olson said of his 7.5% Maibock. “It’s so smooth.”
I concur wholeheartedly with his assessment. His Maibock unleashed my inner Shirley Bassey.

By then, there was no turning back to the pilsner, no matter how loud its siren song. So I took the next step, to the star of the night, Olson’s 9.7% Gerstenwein.

He and Bowen know Germans don’t have a barley wine, but that doesn’t mean the Old Bavarian can’t have a German barley wine or a German stout, which is the next experiment the two brewers are trying to work out. Olson would also like to talk that rarest of German beers, Berliner Weiss, a deliciously sour, low alcohol beer. Bowen says Olson will have to work out all of the details before he would allow a Berliner Weiss in his brewery, so we shall see.

The barley wine was delicious and all 9.7% of it went straight to my head. I felt Hammerschlagened. No pilsner for me on this night.

But I did return several days later on a quiet Sunday afternoon for a half-litre mug of a truly delicious and incredibly fresh tasting pilsner. No Hammerschlagen rowdies. The sound of the football on TV was turned off. I melted into the comfortable bar stool and enjoyed my new favorite beer.