Pilsner: How the Beer of Kings Changed the World

by Tom Acitelli

Pilsner tells the remarkable tale of the world's most popular beer style. It begins with its humble birth in a far corner of the Austrian Empire in 1842, goes through its zenith and near death during Prohibition in the United States, and concludes with its present dominance worldwide. Pilsner was born during a remarkable mid-nineteenth-century epoch, and this first biography of the style places it in its historical context, where it intersected with revolutions in politics and technology, including the railroad, refrigeration, and germ science. The book shatters myths about pilsner's very birth and about its immediate parentage, showing that it's largely a German invention rather than a Czech one. Pilsner also pops the top on new insights into the style and into beer in general through a character-driven narrative that shows how pilsner influenced everything from modern-day advertising and marketing to today's craft beer movement which is driven by a reaction to pilsner's dominance in the form of brands such as Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Light, Heineken, and Snow (the world's best-selling beer, a pilsner out of China).

Unknown Binding

About the author

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (Chicago Review Press; May 2013; 416 pages), the first history book of the American craft beer movement. He is a regular contributor to Town & Country and is the founding editor of Curbed Boston. He was a senior editor at The New York Observer for five years; and has also written for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg View, the New York Post, Redbook and All About Beer, the leading trade magazine for the American brewing industry. He earned degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Columbia Journalism School; and lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife, an art historian.