I recently toured a new brewery in Portland that is brewing a Helles lager beer called Portland Lager. It’s called the Bull Jagger Brewing Company and its claim to fame is that it is Maine’s only dedicated lager brewery. In a bit I will get into what lager means and why it makes this beer so great.

The brewery is located on Riverside Street in Portland near Route 302. After sampling a bottle (OK, two) from RSVP in Portland I went to their website, www.bulljagger.com so that I could find a phone number to call and ask for a tour. I am happy to report that Tom Bull and Allan Jagger gave me an excellent tour of their facility and I even got to taste a future brew that they are presently working on.

The research for this particular column produced facts about German beer that I did not know although I was stationed in Germany for the better part of 10 years. Without a doubt, Germans are proud of their beer and there is good reason that they should be. One of Germany’s famous laws regulating beer is called the Reinheitsgebot. It is the first beer law that was put down in 1487 by Duke Albrecht, who decreed that “a quart of winter beer shall cost one pfennig, a quart of summer beer two pfennigs,” and further added that brewers “shall take only barley, hops and water for the beer, boil it in a proper fashion, and add nothing else nor permit anyone else to add anything.” That law has changed but there is no doubt that Germany produces some of the best beers in the world.

What I find interesting with the production of Portland Lager is the ingredients that are used to make it. No rice or other fillers for this fine beer. The malt, hops and yeast come from Germany. Another unique fact of the Bull Jagger Brewing Company is that their beer bottles also come from Germany and hold 500 ml of beer. Most breweries produce beer that is either lager or ale. Lager beers are produced by bottom fermentation because the yeast settles at the bottom of the vat. It is usually fermented at a temperature less than 50 degrees. Then it is lagered for a period of time and for Portland Lager it’s five weeks.

Lager in German means “to store” so the beer must be lagered which makes a tremendous difference in the taste. I would guess that most of the beer produced in the world is lager but it would take a much larger column to go into the different kinds.

It was just a few short weeks ago that I tasted my first bottle of Portland Lager. The taste was so smooth that I knew that I had finally found a beer brewed in the United States that matched the taste of German beer. I don’t care for beers with some kind of taste added to its flavor. Tom Bull hit the nail on the head with this beer and amazingly he is using only the basic ingredients of water, hops and malt to make this fine lager. Malt is barley that has be germinated and dried so it can be used in brewing.

Portland Lager is called a Helles lager and Helles means “a light one” and the light refers to the color, not to a beer like Miller Lite. It is usually straw-blond in color and around 5 percent alcohol by volume. What’s amazing about the Helles style of beer is that unlike many other kinds of beer, it is known that it was born on March 21, 1894, and was first produced by the Spaten Brewery of Munich. It was produced to compete with a successful Pilsner beer from its neighbor, Bohemia. And what a success it was, as is Portland Lager.

Lane Hiltunen of Windham believes Windham town councilors should drink some beer at council meetings. Maybe, just maybe, they could finally accomplish something instead of arguing.