Urban Rest Brews Gold Medal Pilsner Without Using Any Pilsner Malt

Winning a GABF gold medal in the American Pilsner category is already a serious achievement. Doing it without a single ounce of pilsner malt in the grain bill is the kind of detail that makes you stop mid-sip and think about everything you assumed you knew about the style.

That's exactly what Zach Typinski of Urban Rest pulled off with Kaiser, the Ferndale, Michigan brewery's flagship pils. Episode 459 of the Craft Beer and Brewing Podcast, hosted by Jamie Bogner and published February 13, 2026, runs 69 minutes and covers how Typinski built a gold-medal lager program on a seven-barrel brewhouse made from converted dairy tanks.

Kaiser started as a Franconian-inspired keller-pils, but over the years it evolved into what Urban Rest now calls an American pils. The grain bill reads like a deliberate provocation: Vienna-style malt only, sourced from a small craft maltster, with none of the pilsner malt that virtually every brewer would reach for first. The hop side of the build pulls in Indie Hops Strata Cryo alongside Strata and Sais, with the episode covering first wort and mid-wort hopping approaches. Sensory descriptors that come up include crackery malt character and crystal foam, which tracks with what Vienna malt brings to the table even if the category judges apparently had no complaints about authenticity.

The brewhouse context matters here. Double-batching lagers on a single-infusion, seven-barrel system built from converted dairy tanks is a genuine constraint. Typinski also gets into krausen additions, lagering, and fermentation management, and the episode frames the whole conversation around a point worth internalizing: careful process and thoughtful beer design don't depend on scale. Urban Rest also runs two tap rooms, and the brewery has racked up review scores in the 94-to-96 range across multiple beers, which Bogner references in the episode's subscription pitch.

The Sugar Creek malt name surfaces in the topics list alongside discussion of German pilsner and the broader archaeology of brewing, suggesting the conversation covers why Typinski landed on Vienna rather than chasing traditional German pils malt. That context, the stylistic evolution from keller-pils roots toward an American pils identity built on non-standard malts, is the core intellectual thread of the episode.

Episode 459 is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and as a direct MP3 download through beerandbrewing.com. For brewers running small systems and trying to figure out how far they can push style boundaries before judges push back, this one is worth the hour and nine minutes.