Helles

What is Helles?

Helles is a medium-bodied lager beer with a straw-yellow colour, featuring a lightly sweet malty taste, delicate bitterness, and floral hop aromas.

The name "hell" or "helles" means pale in German. Emerging from Bavaria in the late 19th century, it was created in response to the widespread popularity of the pilsner style. However, helles contains less hop flavour compared to pilsner.

Today, this style is primarily popular in Southern Germany.

Origin Story

Originally, all German lagers were dark beers, but with the advancement of malting techniques in the mid-19th century, slightly lighter-coloured lagers began to emerge, such as the reddish märzenbier (1841).

The first truly pale German lager was introduced by Spaten Brewery in Munich in 1894 under the name helles lagerbier. It quickly became a sensation.

The success of the helles style led to a passionate meeting of Munich breweries on 7 November 1895, where several prominent brewery owners declared their reluctance to produce pale lagers. For example, Paulaner didn’t bring a pale lager to the market until 1928.

The breweries even planned to form a cartel against pale lagers to maintain the local market. However, the meeting did not yield the desired results as those breweries interested in producing pale lagers continued to do so. Forward-thinking breweries understood that pale beer was the future.

Today, both helles and pilsner styles are equally popular in Bavaria, but helles is almost non-existent in the rest of Germany and other countries.