The brewery’s taproom in Moorpark has a casual, family-friendly beer hall vibe, hosts live music, and is complete with a biergarten alleyway shared with a restaurant, coffee roaster, winery, and boutique shops. Their beers, like The Lightest One Helles, Valkyrie altbier, Lagertha Mosaic-hopped pilsner, and their German-style Pilsner Edel Pils, are shockingly accessible across Southern California everywhere from Trader Joe’s to your local liquor store. Moorpark’s Enegren Brewing serves as the American-brewed benchmark for many German lager styles here in the US. Just north of LA County is one of the only authentic German-style lager breweries on the west coast. Their brewery and taproom are decked out with impressively high-end equipment for a brewery of its size, including a LUKR side pull faucet from the Czech Republic designed to pour the perfect lagers, a reverse osmosis water system that helps build proper water chemistry for lager beers, and a centrifuge with in-line carbonation that helps them more efficiently produce clean, clear, and bright lager with proper mouthfeel. 14 Cannons is one of very few breweries in Southern California with a horizontal lagering tank. This is most notable in the K17 dark lager and one of the team’s flagship beers, Patient Pilsner. His beers are rich, complex, and full-bodied – important for the Czech style.

Nic spent time studying music (and drinking beer) in the Czech Republic, and it shows. These are the 12 best lager breweries in LA, Ventura, and Orange Counties.ģ1125 Via Colinas #907 | Westlake Village More InfoĪt 14 Cannons in Westlake Village, Head Brewer Nic Bortolin has a distinctly Czech style in his lagers, recognizable in every release. And, some of the breweries forging this new – well, very old – cold-fermented path are right here in SoCal. So breweries are newly invested in producing lagers. Slowly, palates have shifted away from heavy IPAs towards easy-drinking beers. Pilsners are the fastest growing style in the country. Over the past few years, though, this has started to change. Lagers, in the United States, are more commonly associated with the soft, corn-sweet Big Beer thirty-rack standards. But for decades, craft beer drinkers just haven’t demanded them. Lagers also happen to be the most most-consumed style in the world. They’re refreshing, clearly widely varied, endlessly tinkerable, and their low-ABV makes them super easy-drinking. These beers have long been a favorite of craft brewers.

But there’s a whole world of lager flavors out there: bitter European styles that bring to mind IPAs like Bohemian and German pils soft, smooth, and malty Munich Helles and festbier complex Czech lagers that linger in your mouth long after your sip bocks, dunkels, and märzens that taste like biting into fresh sourdough and drinkable and, yes, crispy, American lagers. The one word you most commonly hear about lagers is “crispy.” And it’s not wrong.

Southern california breweries map