Beer

No need to clothe Prima Pils in flavor

Some brewers like to call them "naked beers."

Say what you will about Budweiser — and the less said the better — Budweiser is a naked beer. Millions of times every day, beers from any one of the Anheuser-Busch breweries are poured around the world and they are virtually the same beer. The unnerving consistency of Budweiser, in spite of radically different water, malt and hop sources, has long been the marvel of the brewing world.

A naked beer is stripped to its bare essentials. Every blemish is there to see, to smell and to taste. Brewers consider them particularly challenging because, unlike a beer brewed with a passel of different kinds of malt and hops, there is no place in — or on — the body of a naked beer for a mistake to hide.

Prima Pils, brewed by Victory Brewing Co., just outside of Philadelphia, proves the starkness of the naked beer can be wickedly deceptive. Victory's Hop Devil, a delicious malty India Pale Ale, and Golden Monkey, a delightful riff on a Belgian triple, came to Austin a few months ago. I heartily recommend both. But for the beer drinker who has been brainwashed to believe that Miller Lite is what is meant by a pilsner beer, Prima Pils demonstrates that there is honor and flavor in simplicity.

Pilsner is an Americanized word for a beer done in the style of the beers of Plzen or Pilsen in the Czech Republic. Pilsner Urquell is the best known of these and a model for the delicate balance between pilsner malts and the Saaz hop, one of the so-called noble hops of Europe.

The spicy tang of Saaz gives Prima Pils its aroma and its enticing bite at the end of a swallow. A single kind of pilsner malt, much lighter in body and in color than those used in amber or dark beers, gives Prima Pils a pale golden sparkle in the glass and a light, bracing crispness.

Adding anything to this straightforward interplay of beer's most basic materials would be like putting a trenchcoat on Michelangelo's "David."

Where to buy Prima Pils: Both Central Markets and Whole Foods stores; Oak Hill Liquor, 6036 W. U.S. 290.