Schönramer Hell, the flagship lager of Private Landbrauerei Schönram, a family brewery in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, has arrived in the UK. It has gone on sale at The Royal Oak, Marylebone, in London.
Schönram has been brewing near the Austrian border since at least 1622 and has been in the same family since 1780. Eight generations on, it is still family-run.
Its Hell (Bavarian for ‘pale’) is the beer it’s best known for, and locals call it the 1780er. It has won gold at the European Beer Star three times, and brewers on both sides of the Atlantic hold it up as a reference point for the style.
The beer is brewed under senior brewmaster Eric Toft, a Wyoming-born geophysicist who trained at Weihenstephan, the technical university of Munich’s brewing school. He has been at Schönram since 1998 and still guards the recipe, selects the ingredients, and fine-tunes the process each year.
Schönram ferments in open vessels which are skimmed by hand each day. The hops come from a small group of contracted farms in the Hallertau and Tettnang, the malt is all Bavarian, and nothing is pasteurised.
The Royal Oak connection runs back to Weihenstephan, where Eric studied alongside Alastair Hook, founder of Meantime Brewing. Alastair met Andy Ward at Oliver Peyton’s Atlantic Bar & Grill in the 1990s. Andy went on to work for him at Meantime for 12 years before founding Urban Inns, which runs The Royal Oak, and in which Alastair is now a shareholder.
To mark the launch, head chef Freddy Wilson, formerly Tom Booton’s head chef at The Dorchester Grill, will serve a Bavarian Weekday Special from Monday, 9th, to Friday, 13th November. This will take the form of a chicken schnitzel with cucumber salad and a Schönramer Hell and mustard sauce, made to go with a pint of the Hell.
“We’re delighted to have one of the world’s best lagers on draught at The Oak,” said Andy Ward. “We’ve been pouring pints on York Street since 1807, so a brewery that’s been in one family since 1780 felt like the right company to keep.”
Eric Toft added: “Hell is a beer with nowhere to hide. It has to be balanced, clean, and easy to drink, pint after pint. We’ve spent years fine-tuning ours, and I’m delighted London’s first taste of it on draught will be at The Royal Oak.”
