Daisy, Daisy, give me your pilsner, do: To Those Who Wait by Working Draft Beer Co.

The world of beer and brewing, like any human endeavor, is full of legends, lore, and downright bullshit. I think the first bit of BS foisted upon me regarding beer was about Killian's Red. One afternoon a friend and I were at Buck's – the late, great, and lamented establishment on Hamilton Street here in Madison that had a fireplace, perpetually reeked of vomit, and poured some of the strongest drinks in town – sipping on the macro Irish red lager. My friend asks me, "Do you know how they get the beer to be this color?"

This is the early 1990s and I was quite ignorant of brewing methods. It could have been judicious use of red dye 40 for all I knew. I shake my head.

"They put very finely ground tobacco in it," he tells me.

"That's bullshit," I retorted. "You know how I know it's bullshit? Because you're full of shit," I explain. It was true. He was a smooth-talking bullshitter. Granted, it helped him get more ass than a toilet seat in college but I'd known him long enough by that point to realize when he was trying to slip something by me.

The beer world is full of such fabulation.

Just when you think you know the history of, say, a beer style, someone pulls some brewing logs or tax records out that they found at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard" which demonstrate your knowledge to be nothing but a craft beer canard. Q.E.D. I've had beer historian types expose so many stories that I once took as gospel to be nothing but myths that I now doubt everything that appears on a beer label or brewer's website with a level of skepticism that would make even René Descartes sit back in awe.

Much to the credit of Madison's Working Draft Beer Company, neither the label for their Czech-style pils, To Those Who Wait, nor their website makes any claims on the history of the style.

Pilsner beer dates back to the early 1840s and the Czech city of Plzeň (a.k.a. – Pilsen). The story goes that the (top-fermented) beer brewed there was so bad that the town fathers eventually got fed up and commissioned a new brewery to be built so they could have some decent beer for a change. It would be state of the art with its own malt house that would use indirect heat so as to produce pale malt, still something of a novelty at that time in much of the world. And the beer would be bottom-fermented, the hip new(ish) trend in brewing. To pull this off required a secret stratagem involving a monk being recruited to smuggle the precious flocculators out of Bavaria.

By 1842 the shiny new brewery (Pilsner Urquell) was humming along nicely and in November of that year the first batch of clear, fizzy, golden piwo was being served at the finest establishments in Plzeň.

That is more or less the pilsner piety I was given when I was initially learning about the style. But as time went by and I read more from Evan Rail, an American expat researching Czech beer history from his home in Prague, the more I realized there was more to the story and that robe and dagger bit with the monk was nothing but a tall tale. The price of local beer and a desire to indulge in trendy lagers were also factors in the invention of pilsner.

For more on the history of pilsner, check out Rail's blog, Beer Culture.

Working Draft Beer Company opened in 2018 smack dab in the middle of Madison's Marquette neighborhood just northeast of downtown. The brewmaster (and co-owner, I see as well) is Clint Lohman who has previously worked at Wisconsin Brewing Company and Vintage Brewing before that. I had a splendid conversation with him at a Madison Craft Beer Week event several years ago when he was still laboring under the tutelage of Scott Manning at Vintage. I'm happy to see that he has his own brewhouse now.

Lohman's To Those Who Wait is what I think you'd call a Světlý Ležák over in The Czech Republic. (Czech sure uses a lot of diacritical marks.) Here we call it a Czech-style pils or a Bohemian pilsner. Although Czech dark lagers are popping up here and there these days, this type of pale lager is surely the most common style available from U.S. brewers and the one I'd bet comes to the minds of most drinkers when they think of Czech beers.

To Those Who Wait was a lovey light gold color and crystal clear. My pouring skills produced a nice white head that was light and pillowy and stuck around for a while. In addition to lookin' mighty fine, it smelled nice too. A little cracker plus the traditional Saaz aromas that, to my nose, are like grass and black pepper/cubeb. A little herbal too.

The beer's medium body tasted of cracker along with that green/grassy and peppery tastes from the hops. My notes say that the carbonation was perfect. Enough for a nice fizziness on my tongue but not too much so as to overwhelm the milder flavors. Plus I think the moderate fizz helped give the beer a creamy taste.

For the finish there was a moderate grassy/herbal hop bitterness along with a little dryness from the carbonation.

The name To Those Who Wait is apparently a nod to the 8 week lagering period that the beer gets. While I am unsure how long Pilsner Urquell, Staropramen, etc. are aged, here 2 months yields an extremely tasty brew with a light, crackery flavor complemented by those delicious Saaz hops. Not a big, bold brew, just one with lovely delicate flavors all in their proper places.

Junk food pairing: At 4.2% A.B.V. To Those Who Wait will pair with a nice thin potato chip. I recommend getting a big bag of Old Dutch Onion & Garlic Potato Chips. The pils will go down extra easily after a few handfuls.