How Pouring Styles Became the Big Draw in Draft Beer

For generations, draft beer in the U.S. was mostly just that: beer that was drawn (or “drafted”) from a tap. It was simple and usually pretty good, so widely recognized as better than beer packaged for retail that big breweries occasionally played tricks with the name, offering bottles and cans of products like Miller Genuine Draft and Guinness Draught that were anything but draft (or even draught). Back then, how you tapped beer was straightforward: Put it in a glass, ideally with a half-inch or so of fresh foam on top. Yes, some beers were better than others, and the craft beer movement certainly pushed flavor to the fore. But for a long time, the fact that any beer was on draft was a big part of its appeal.

Then something snapped.

Across North America, the appeal of draft beer is increasingly becoming not just that it is on tap, but how it is being tapped. Want a tube of 100 percent foam? You can get that. Want a Czech-style šnyt, with about half foam and half liquid? No problem. Want a beer poured in the style of a small taproom in Tokyo during the late 1930s? We got you.

Nowadays you can even find Heady Topper — a beer that was, for a long time, famous for pretty much only being available in cans, with an admonition to “drink from the can!” — served from a hand pump, in a weird inversion of the somewhat cynical “draft” branding on mass-market cans and bottles from multinational brewers. Even canned Guinness Draught is getting upstaged by actual draft Guinness and the trend of “splitting the G.”

Craft beer is obviously at an inflection point, with sales volumes continuing to decline. In recent years, the beer category at large has also found itself in the historically unusual position of trailing spirits in U.S. sales by value. So what does it mean that the discussion around beer is shifting from aspects of its production — formerly important marketing elements like celebrity brewers, innovative recipes, heritage malts, unusual yeasts, or new kinds of hops — and focusing instead on simply how that beer is being served to the customer?

The Rise of the Czech Tap

Bierstadt Lagerhaus was one of the first places to gain nationwide attention primarily for how its beer was tapped, rather than how it was brewed or what kind of hops went into it, thanks to its location in Denver, Colo., home of the Great American Beer Festival. When beer fans and brewers stopped by Bierstadt while visiting Denver, they often took pictures of the brewery’s extremely photogenic Slow Pour Pils, drafted in three stages, which ends up with a tall crown of foam that rises above the top of the glass.

According to Bierstadt brewer and co-founder Ashleigh Carter, that style of pour was part of the plan for the brewery long before it opened in mid-2016, mostly because that’s how she and her husband and business partner Bill Eye prefer to drink pilsners.

“We decided we were going to make it the expectation from day one, that’s how we were going to pour this beer,” she says. “We had a stated goal at the beginning of opening the brewery that we wanted to change the way beer was served in America.”

They appear to have pulled that off, insofar as there are a lot more bars and breweries using the term “slow pour” today, compared to nine years ago. To create their slow pour, Carter and Eye used the expensive and slightly overbuilt taps from Lukr in the Czech Republic. Sometimes called “side-pour” or “side-pull” taps, Lukr faucets started showing up in lager-focused craft breweries across the country that year. Notch Brewing installed a Lukr setup in its taproom in Salem, Mass., in June of 2016, just a few months before Bierstadt launched in August. Wayfinder Beer served beer through Lukr taps when it opened in Portland, Ore., one month later.

Featuring a gradually opening, highly controllable ball valve instead of the simple, on-off plunger valve of a typical American beer tap, Lukr faucets have a big advantage when it comes to an often overlooked element of great draft beer: foam. High-quality foam is not an afterthought in Lukr’s homeland, the Czech Republic, and it’s considered an essential element of draft beer in many other regions. But in North America, the type of foam that comes out of a Lukr tap — dense, wet, and long-lasting — came across as a revelation, almost a revolution, for what draft beer could entail. In particular, Lukr foam seemed to strike a chord with the people who brew beer.

“Beer is the only beverage that makes and keeps foam,” Carter says, calling out foam’s role in texture, carbonation, aroma, and other aspects of one of the world’s greatest beverages. “All the things that we do in the brewhouse, on canning day, and transfer, are to make sure that we have good foam.”

When I wrote about Lukr taps for Good Beer Hunting in 2018, they still felt new, connected to the then-nascent craft lager movement. In the years since, they’ve gone mainstream enough to be featured in a New York Times article about beer and foam this past January. And at this point, they’re no longer exclusive to craft lagers, as anyone who has sampled “Canal Champagne” — meaning Miller High Life from a Lukr tap — can tell you.

A World of Different Pours

Lukr faucets and Czech draft styles have been a big part of the growing focus on how beer is tapped, rather than how it is made. That includes the headline-grabbing, all-foam “milk pour” known as mlíko — actually considered a gimmick by many Czech drinkers — and the related “milk tube” served in smaller cylindrical glasses at places like Philadelphia’s Human Robot.

But Czech styles are not the only game in town. Last spring, Oregon-based beer writer Jeff Alworth wrote about the burgeoning trend of British-style cask ales in the Portland area. In Chicago, Dovetail Brewery has put on a number of special events that it calls “beer halls,” featuring foreign styles of service, including Cologne-style Kölsch evenings. The latest? Turning the brewery taproom into a Japanese tachinomi, or “standing bar,” and offering just one beer, Dovetail Lager, in a number of draft styles that are believed to date from Japan’s early Showa Era, shortly before World War II.

For Jenny Pfafflin, who works as both marketing manager and brewer at Dovetail, the chance to taste the same beer through a variety of unusual pours offered regular customers new insight into a taproom favorite, as well as a chance to learn about a different beer culture.

“People are looking for experiences. And again, there’s a whole wide world of beer culture out there.”

“At Dovetail, we like to answer the question, ‘How the heck do people drink pale lager around the world?’” she says. “For some people, it was really eye-opening that there is this aspect of service that can really impact the flavor and mouthfeel of your beer.”

As special events, Dovetail’s tachinomi beer halls have also featured a guest tapster, or beer bartender, bringing in Zigmas Maloni from Beermiscuous in Chicago’s Highwood suburb. That specialty beer café has a half-dozen different types of faucets, including traditional American taps, a hand pump, and Japanese-style dispensers, with tapsters often mixing kegs and styles to see what happens. Beermiscuous has let regulars pull their own pints of both Modelo and Hamm’s on Lukr taps at anniversary parties, and sometimes serves American craft beers as Czech-style pours.

“West Coast pils, hoppy American lagers, they really go well off those foam-heavy pours,” Maloni says. “They taste pretty snappy.”

Reasons to Focus on Draft

Snappy taste is a great reason to refocus on how beer is poured, rather than how it is brewed, though there are plenty of others. For Pfafflin, some of the appeal of Dovetail’s foreign-inspired special events lies in the more social way that people drink in a traditional Czech hospoda or Japanese tachinomi, possibly due to holdover feelings of isolation from the lockdown era.

“Especially for the beer halls, it’s very communal,” she says. “People are looking for experiences. And again, there’s a whole wide world of beer culture out there.”

“We need people to focus on what made this business great in the first place, which is really kick-ass, high-quality, fresh beer, delivered the way the customer wants it.”

For Maloni, a former brewer, focusing on how beer is drafted also highlights the important role of the people who serve it. It’s not just about putting a lager in a glass and handing it to a customer. There’s a human element.

“You could put two pours side by side, and they really do taste different,” he says. “They could look almost identical. Somebody drinks them, and they’re like, ‘Wow, OK, there’s actually a difference there.’ And that was the bartender that made that happen.”

A Master Cicerone and draft beer consultant at Craft Quality Solutions in Kansas City, Neil Witte traveled to Chicago to attend one of the tachinomi events at Dovetail, setting up his own Japanese-style standing bar on his return home. In his eyes, the renewed focus on how beer is served strikes a balance to some of the excesses of the craft era.

“I feel like craft beer hit a wall,” he says. “It got big and kind of bloated.”

As craft beer expanded, he says, a lot of brewers stopped thinking about quality, focusing instead on sales volumes and increased variety. Putting the focus back on draft and fun pouring styles means a greater focus on freshness and customer experience, as well as something interesting that doesn’t involve a new type of hop or a new beer style every single week.

“We don’t need another f*cking style. We don’t need another variety of IPA. We don’t need another beer with some bullshit dropped in the mash tun,” he says. “We need people to focus on what made this business great in the first place, which is really kick-ass, high-quality, fresh beer, delivered the way the customer wants it.”

For Pfafflin, caring about how beer is drafted feels like the last piece of the good-beer puzzle.

“It’s a maturity, for lack of a better word, that is becoming part of American beer culture,” she says. “It’s actually becoming culture.”

To put it another way: Draft has long been recognized as the best version of beer. More attention to how it is drafted can only make it better.