The Best Austrian Lagers

Austria brewed the world's first amber lager. In 1841 Anton Dreher, working in Schwechat outside Vienna, took the newly-available English malting technique and applied it to a bottom-fermented beer — the result was Vienna Lager, a style with a slight toast and a copper glow that pre-dates almost every other beer most drinkers today would recognise. That single act reshaped brewing across Central Europe and, indirectly, the entire industrial lager tradition that followed.

Modern Austrian lager is quieter than its 19th-century invention story suggests. Stiegl, Ottakringer, Zipfer, and Gösser anchor the market with Märzen and Helles that emphasise soft malt and a clean finish. The hopIQ ranking surfaces both the mainstream and a smaller craft scene rebuilding Vienna Lager as a category — a style now more actively produced in Mexico and the US than in the country that invented it.