The Best Beers We Had at Lagerville 2022

Figueroa Mountain Brewing’s Lagerville festival was, to this craft beer lover, easily one of the highlights of the spring. I was fortunate enough to be able to cover the event for Beer Paper LA and have my review written in print. I’ve included the text of the article here, but I encourage you to take a look at Beer Paper’s online copy to check out the photos (and the hilarious caption to the photo of me and Beachwood’s Julian Shrago) and the rest of the issue. Now, more than ever, it’s a necessity that we support local print media in all its forms, but I also wanted to make sure this site hosted a copy, so regular readers can find out the best beers we had at Lagerville 2022.

Thank you to everyone supporting this site, and please go support Beer Paper LA (especially if you live in Southern California)– and a big thanks to Figueroa Mountain and all the brewers who were so generous with their time when writing this article. Hopefully you’ll see another piece by me in print very soon. And, if you’d like, inspect the above photo closely– like Where’s Waldo, I’m hiding in the crowd. Cheers!

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We feel the rumblings from beneath us. We see the groundswell as it approaches. We hear the pleas on social media from brewers and beer aficionados alike: Make Craft Lager Popular Again.

While lager remains an exceptionally popular drink for non-craft consumers of beer across the country, not toolong ago, craft beer lovers pivoted the other direction, eschewing the light crispiness of a lager or pilsner for the bold hoppy delights of the IPA. Now, as the IPAs get hazier, and the stouts get sweeter, and the sours get more fruited, Untappd Ozymandias cries out, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” while a certain subset of beer geek seeks refuge in the refreshing delights of the lager once more.

Enter Lagerville, Figueroa Mountain’s lager-only beer festival, held April 9th outside their Buellton location. Figueroa Mountain launched this festival in 2018 as an antidote to your Festivals of Dankness and your Pastrytowns, a glorious oasis of pilsners, bocks, Baltic porters, and lagers of all shapes and sizes. “Too many people still think of lager as clear, fizzy, mass-produced stuff, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” said Kevin Ashford, Figueroa Mountain’s brewmaster. “There are so many beautiful lager styles out there… Our hope is that this festival will show more people that.” They’re an appropriate host, as they’ve been a destination for lager lovers for over a decade, boasting, among their countless accolades, 15 Great American Beer Festival medals in various lager categories, including a gold in 2021’s American Amber Lager category.

This year, after two years of socially distancing itself, Lagerville has re-emerged, bigger and better than ever. (In stark contrast to me, who only re- emerged from social distancing bigger than ever.) A beautiful sunny Saturday made for perfect lager weather, and while there were a number of fantastic lagers from across the country— including Oregon’s Heater Allen, Texas’s Pinthouse Pizza, and Washington’s Cloudburst Brewing— the bulk of the festival was centered squarely upon California’s lager scene, to help prove true beyond any shadow of a doubt the age-old adage: “West coast, best coast.”
And much like the Los Angeles Dodgers two short years ago, these California breweries stepped up to
the plate and knocked the assignment out of the park. I could wax poetical for three times my designated word count. So, with much love to places like Urban Roots, Alvarado Street, and the Almighty Russian River, I’ll be keeping things focused on the beers I tried from Central and Southern California.

It feels appropriate to start in Ventura County, as VC ran a clean sweep over the awards voted on by festival attendees and given out at the end of the day. Ventura Coast Brewing went home with not only the Best in Show Runner Up for their Beachscape Pilsner, but also the coveted Best Overall Brewery award. For the Best in Show winner, hop on the 101-S for half an hour and get to Tarantula Hill Brewing, whose Accidental Amber blew the voters away.

Even outside of the award-winners, Ventura County impressed. We got great German-style pilsners from MadeWest and Institution with Purple Tide and Rx, respectively. We got a typically delightful selection from the lager legends at Enegren Brewing— their rauchbier, The Big Meat, was definitely among the boldest beers poured at the festival. I also couldn’t resist the chance to grab some Naughty Pine Brewing, a brewery in Westlake Village that’s under a year old, but whose Sturdy B-Pils I’m already ready to declare one of the best pilsners in Southern California.

Los Angeles County was also well-represented, as Highland Park Brewery, those purveyors of perfect pilsners, had their classic Timbo Pils on hand, as well as their exceptional High 8 West Coast Pilsner that they brewed for their recent anniversary. I sipped down samples from two of my South Bay favorites, El Segundo Brewing and Common Space Brewing, and I got a chance to have my first- ever beers from Malibu Brewing— the Pacific Gold is a nice light crusher, and the Canyon Rosé a slightly fruity and floral light lager, as its name suggested.

I also got some Loma Prieta from Beachwood, one of my favorite beers of the festival. In talking to Julian Schrago, the brewmaster and co-owner of Beachwood who was pouring pilsners for lucky folks Saturday, his passion for the artform of brewing lagers came through: “You start to understand the term ‘respect your elders.’ These are some of the original beer styles. I don’t think you can really truly understand beer in its entirety unless you get the fundamentals, which is what you get here. This is drinkable, consumable heritage. This is fundamental beer.”

In from Orange County, Evan Price, co-founder and brewmaster of Green Cheek Beer Co., was also slinging some of his terrific lagers, including the sublime Kinda Like Toast, a Vienna-style lager that’s light and, appropriately enough, a little toasty. Price, like many others in attendance, dug the more focused festival format, saying, “It’s important to do specialty beer festivals. Getting together an audience that appreciates that one thing?… I think this is the future of beer festivals.”

I also had my first encounter with Bearded Tang Brewing, a Stanton brewery which has only been open
a year and a half yet already boasts a GABF gold medal in the Coffee Stout category. Their lagers are
equally praiseworthy, from the Australian pilsner Ella Down Unda to my personal favorite and a festival standout, Zest Quest, their citrus bomb of an unfiltered pilsner. The folks at the booth told me Bearded Tang is aiming “to put Stanton on the map”— with beers as good as these, they’re well on their way.

The SLO County breweries may have driven down for their festival, but they have driven themselves up my personal rankings for great California beer. There Does Not Exist’s hazy IPAs make their way down toward LA County now and again, but their lager game is top-notch, wowing attendees with their dark lager, Moonset, and their German pilsner, Mittpils. Their neighbor, Liquid Gravity Brewing, brought their own terrific German pilsner in Crispy Life, and Central Coast Brewing presented, among others, General Schwarz, a five-star schwarzbier whose medals of honor include a GABF gold medal.

And, of course, it’s not a California lager festival without Firestone Walker pouring some of their beauties. Matt Brynildson, brewmaster at Firestone Walker, told me Lagerville was “another amazing example of the increasing interest within the craft community for lager style beers. This is a relatively remote event that drew 1000 lager lovers together and most of the brewers came themselves to pour their beers…. it made this lager nerd smile ear to ear.” Brynildson definitely wasn’t alone in that regard.

Finally, there’s the host brewery itself, serving up, among other things, Lagerville, a terrific Czech dark lager collab with Enegren and Urban Roots, and the giggle-inducingly named I Just Dunkeled In My Pants, an award-winning dunkel that won a place in our hearts with its name and its flavor. They have a terrific venue for a beer festival of this size, and I’m glad they used it for the purposes of spreading the Gospel of Lager.

Events like this give me hope for further specialized beer festivals down the line coming to Central
and Southern California. More lager festivals. More saison festivals. More Belgian ale festivals. Break up the monotony, strike back against the hype. Beer is the magnificent art form it is precisely because of its versatility, its variety of style, of flavor, of kick, of effervescence. (It’s also the tastiest form of art, I find.) Specialized festivals like Lagerville help showcase more of the colors in the beer brewer’s palette and expand the reaches of the beer drinker’s palate. For that— and for the opportunity to make that palette/palate pun— I am grateful.

Photo credit: Jesse Natale