Untitled Art
Hop-happy beer lovers, take note: Tipopils may be the most influential beer you’ve never heard of. But its American progeny could soon become tap-line titans.
Tipopils is produced by Birrificio Italiano, a brewery in Limido Comasco, a small town southwest of Italy’s Lake Como. Agostino Arioli, the brewery’s founder, learned his trade in German breweries. He returned home in 1997 to help start the Italian craft beer movement, drawing on the German pilsners he had already learned to brew.
Arioli’s work is slowly gaining influence among American craft brewers, including Untitled Art, made at Octopi Brewing in Waunakee, and Working Draft Beer Company on Madison’s east side. Representatives from both breweries say they have had significant success with their recent Italian pilsners. Each brewer took a slightly different approach.
Earlier this year Untitled Art, in partnership with Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Minneapolis, released its Italian pilsner. Untitled Art innovation brewer Matt Dick traces its origins directly back to Arioli’s brew.
“Tipopils was the original gangster of Italian pilsners, and it is widely given credit for starting the trend,” says Dick, a Milwaukee-area native who studied brewing at Chicago’s Siebel Institute and Munich’s Doemens Academy.
An Italian pilsner is a German pilsner with a greater emphasis on hops, including dry-hopping at the end of its brewing cycle. Pivo Pils, first brewed in 2013 by Firestone Walker Brewing Company in Paso Robles, California, is a legendary early adopter in this country.
Untitled Art’s Italian pilsner is brewed in the classic pilsner style, says Dick. He adjusts Octopi’s water chemistry to more closely match the water German brewers use. The brewers blend traditional German yeast and a lot of Noble hops in the boil, along with German Hallertau, Perle and Czech Saaz hops. German Tettnang hops, which have citrusy and earthy characteristics similar to Saaz, are used to dry-hop the brew.
Untitled Art’s version pours golden and slightly hazy, with a half-inch creamy head that dissipates slowly. The aroma is bright, almost summery, bringing to mind green grass dusted with slight spice. It finishes at 5 percent ABV.
The flavor is classic pilsner, but with a bit of earth and spice on the back palate.
“The beer is designed to be dry on the palate,” Dick says. “That’s partly due to our yeast strain, which ferments many of the sugars in the wort and adds to the dry-hopping.”
Working Draft launched its first seven-barrel batch of Italian pilsner in late summer, says brewmaster Clint Lohman, and it was on tap for about a month. Lohman limits his hop varietal to Tettnang in the boil and the dry-hopping. He maintains the beer’s natural carbonation by producing it in a closed system that transfers the beer directly to another vessel for the final dry-hopping stage.
“We also filter our [Italian pilsner] so that it’s crystal clear,” he adds. “I tend to think that the yeast floating in the beer muddles the flavor. When you filter the beer, it comes through more focused.”
Lohman’s Italian pilsner is similar to its German cousin, but dryer and crisper with a pronounced hops aroma and flavor that blends with a spicy, European lager flavor. This summer’s batch finished at a light 4.8 percent ABV. Working Draft now has a second seven-barrel batch in the works that Lohman expects to be closer to 5.3 percent ABV. He plans to have it on tap by around Dec. 10, or shortly thereafter.
Untitled Art has something slightly different in the works.
“We’re thinking of doing another pilsner, this one with New Zealand hops, which have some exotic fruit and spice characteristics,” Dick says. “But we haven’t quite figured that one out yet.”