First Lager Beer In The US

In the traditional account, lager brewing reached the United States in 1840 when John Wagner brought bottom-fermenting lager yeast from Bavaria to Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission commemorates the site as America’s first lager, and the Oxford Companion to Beer describes Wagner as setting up a small eight-barrel brewery behind his Philadelphia home and lagering the beer in his cellar. The story marks the usual starting point for the American lager timeline, but modern beer-history research has questioned whether the documentary evidence is strong enough to prove that Wagner existed and that his beer was truly the first lager brewed in the United States. Even with that caveat, the 1840 Wagner tradition remains important because it shows how closely American lager history was tied to Bavarian yeast, German immigration, Philadelphia brewing, and the later dominance of lager in the United States.