Kindly be reminded that the Summer 2025 (Vol. 86) issue of Food & Dining Magazine is currently available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online. You can subscribe to our award-winning print publication and have it delivered to your door each issue, or read it at issuu (above).
Here, in its entirety, is the entirely new profile of Rose Hill Lagerhaus (or Lager Haus; no one seems sure, so flip a coin) written for the current issue, where you can view Dan Dry’s stellar photos.
Thanks to Buddy McHagan for a lengthy morning’s chat accompanied by uniformly excellent Monnik samples.
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Hip Hops: Rose Hill Lagerhaus … No louts, only touts
When it comes to lager, you want a slow hand
During the 1970s, when package store shelves were crammed cheek to jowl with taste-alike, mass-produced, golden-colored lagers, my favorite beer was Little Kings Cream Ale out of Cincinnati.
The intentional italics point to a fundamental tenet of brewing that eluded me as an underage drinker (legality mercifully arrived in 1981). Lager and ale are categories, or families, of beer. They’re differentiated by conscious choices brewers make as directed by the specific beer styles they’re brewing — like Cream Ale or Oktoberfest (lager).
But what drew me to ale as a gangly teen was an innate, mulish contrarianism. Cream Ale wasn’t lager, and although I had no idea why, it was great fun being the obstinate face in the crowd who summarily rejected Miller Lite. It helped that those slim, green, 7-ounce Little Kings bottles were stylishly svelte.
Later in life my priorities shifted from partying to embracing beer as a business, and the time came to learn more. People like Fred Eckhardt, legendary dean of American beer writers, were there to assist me.
Eckhardt wrote, “Ale and lager are both beers; that is, they are fermented from grain. The major difference between these two beer families stems from the temperature at which fermentation is carried out. And the importance of these differences in temperature is that chemical reactions happen more slowly at lower temperatures.”
Chemical reactions hastened by higher fermentation temperatures allow ale yeast strains to strut their stuff, resulting in flavors, aromas and a general “fruitiness” as desired according to style. It’s why Cream Ale is readily distinguishable from lager brands that look exactly the same.
Conversely, lager’s cooler fermentation temperatures scrub ale’s flashier characteristics, yielding crisp, clean flavor profiles that showcase malt and hops alone, betraying few traces of yeast’s essential toil.
To illustrate, here’s a taste test utilizing the core Bavarian stylistic duo of Helles (golden lager) versus Hefe Weissbier (golden ale; also known as Hefeweizen). The world-famous Weihenstephaner brewery in Freising brews both, and they’re readily available throughout metro Louisville at better package stores and pubs.
Sip the Helles first. Although it is rounder and more nuanced than High Life, Stella Artois or Modelo, the clean overall impression will still be familiar to anyone raised on mainstream lagers.
Next, taste Hefeweissbier, an ale brewed with half barley and half wheat, fermented at warm temperatures with a special yeast strain. It is redolent of bananas, apples and cloves; however, none of these are present. These sensations emanate from warm fermentation alone. Brewing the very same recipe with lager yeast at cooler temperatures yields entirely different (and less expressive) results.
Fermentation had been humanity’s friend from the start, allowing us to naturally preserve edibles like sauerkraut, cheeses and yogurt. We’ve also dried, smoked and pickled our meals, the simple aim being to preserve the nutrient value of perishable foodstuffs in the absence of artificial refrigeration.
The same goes for potables, extending the life of cereal grains (made into beer), grapes and fruit (wine, cider), and honey (mead). These methods evolved over the centuries through trial and error, and advances in scientific knowledge gradually made batches more replicable. By the medieval period brewers in Central Europe understood that cooler fermentation temperatures and lengthy aging in caves and cellars made for crisp, cleaner, mellow beer (the German word “lager” means “to store”).
It was the microscope’s invention around 1590 that prompted a quantum leap for brewing. While brewers had grasped fermentation from a cause-and-effect perspective, they couldn’t see how yeast actually functioned until microscopes unlocked the mysteries of the process. By the 1830s in German-speaking Central Europe, yeasts cultured specifically to perform in cooler temperatures were common.
“Lager,” as both noun and verb, described a whole new way of thinking about beer. Not unlike The Beatles, lager emerged at a perfect time, rocketing to prominence in the late 19th century as a beverage ideally suited to burgeoning consumer cultures, industrial production and a widespread zeal for scientific advancement.
Lager brewing was genuinely revolutionary. It swept the world, consigning warm fermentation to the margins. However ale’s popularity persisted in places like Great Britain and Belgium, where physical and human geography, and local traditions of eating and drinking, remained conducive.
However, as lager merged into an industrial economy of scale, it became almost too standardized for its own good. Crisp and clean bowed to mass-market flavorlessness (“wet air,” as one wag suggested), inspiring the wildly successful craft beer backlash of the past five decades, which re-emphasized ale. Now craft-brewed lager is enjoying its own moment.
Those italics, yet again.
Rose Hill Lagerhaus (1753 Bardstown Road in Bonnycastle) is a new pub birthed by the fertile minds at Monnik Beer Co. At Rose Hill, lager beers in all their variety are given primacy of place, and if you ask me, it’s about time.
The name “Rose Hill” is a nod to Julius Friedman (1943 – 2017), a renowned Louisville artist, who possessed a myriad of creative talents: graphic designer, photographer, furniture designer and videographer. Among many briefs, Friedman conjured visually arresting advertising campaigns for the Louisville Orchestra and Ballet.
In 1975 Friedman joined with fellow graphic designers Nathan Felde and Jerry Looney to rescue an antebellum plantation house known as Rose Hill from impending demolition. Friedman’s historical reclamation project still stands five minutes by foot from its namesake Lagerhaus, the latter opening in February of 2025, about a decade after its parent Monnik Beer Co. debuted in Schnitzelburg.
Monnik’s back story (it means “monk” in Dutch) is the stuff of local brewing legend. Co-owners Brian Holton and Ian Luijk endured three years of red tape and unexpected remodeling challenges to open their brewery and kitchen in 2015 with Scott Hand as the brewer of record. Hand quickly became a revered figure in regional brewing circles, producing a cross-cultural array of traditional beer styles augmented by idiosyncratic New World tweaks.
These include session-friendly British ales (the Georges: Brown and Mild); a firmly hopped eponymous American IPA; quirky Belgian ales like Eagle Skull Saison; hefty barrel-aged sippers of varied origin; and Hauck’s American Pilsner, a lager named for the late Schnitzelburg icon George Hauck, whose long-running Handy Store is now Hauck’s Corner, a popular bar.
When the New Albanian Brewing Company’s Bank Street Brewhouse closed in New Albany in 2019, Monnik took over its production-sized brewhouse and kitchen and was abruptly derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, just when the location started coming into its own, the unthinkable occurred when Hand died in 2021 after a sudden illness.
Assistant brewer Buddy McHagan was thrust into a pair of metaphorically immense rubber brewhouse boots, but it quickly became evident that Hand had trained McHagan well, and he assumed the brewer’s job full-time, returning to the mothership’s brewery in Schnitzelburg when the New Albany expansion was abandoned. Sheer serendipity prompted Monnik’s next (and most recent) move.
Pivot Brewing Co. made it known that its short-lived Bardstown Road taproom space would be relinquished, and the owners of The Post, located next door to Pivot, conveyed to Holton and Luijk that a satellite Monnik pub might be an excellent fit for the pizzeria’s western flank (gin specialist Darling’s is on The Post’s eastern side).
Concurrently, as McHagan grew into the head brewer’s role, his delicious lagers began appearing more often on the brewing schedule, leading to the idea for a lager-themed “haus,” as opposed to an “alehouse” or “taphouse.”
It would be a fresh brand extension for Monnik as well as a symbiotic relationship with The Post; after all, why maintain a pub kitchen when pizzas are available only a few yards away, and slices sold at The Post are larger than most personal pizzas elsewhere?
Holton, Luijk and McHagan concentrated on retro comfort for Rose Hill’s interior, backdating the open layout with wood embellishments and gently used booths, chairs and a reclaimed back bar. These provide private nooks alongside open space for music, trivia, karaoke and community events. Rose Hill Lagerhaus feels like a long-established bar.
But I’m here (and there) for the beer, especially traditional lager styles. According to McHagan, 75% of Rose Hill’s handles are reserved for lager, including a half-dozen or so from Monnik. The remainder are “guests,” including three imports designated as permanent pours: Pilsner Urquell, Bitburger Premium Pils and Rothaus Tannenzäpfle Pilsner; they’re demonstrably different classic hoppy lagers from the Czech Republic, Northern Germany and Southern Germany, respectively.
A fourth full-time handle is Monnik’s: Italian Disco, modeled on Birrificio Tipopils, the trend-setting, dry-hopped northern Italian craft lager brand. Other lagers likely to be rotating at Rose Hill include Hofbräu Dunkel (dark lager); Köstritzer Schwarzbier (black); Tucher Rotbier (red); and Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock (“double” bock).
Although lager beers are Rose Hill’s raison d’être, ale is readily available. There’ll always be one IPA rotator and a German-style wheat ale on tap, and the selection of bottles and cans includes familiar warm-fermented names like Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing, Saison Dupont and Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout. Part from beer, there is cider, wine and cocktails.
Buddy McHagan is a first-rate brewer. He’s also a lager whisperer. Whether it’s his Mel’s Helles (golden), Riesenrad Vienna (amber), Basic Baltic Porter (dark) or 12P Czech Lager (also dark), McHagan walks the walk. Brewing lager beer is a frigid, meticulous, process-driven stroll to a brewhouse outcome, not a frenzied, heated sprint; decoction mashing and cool aging take time and patience, and for lager lovers like this columnist, the payback in flavor is well worth those long hours of finger-tapping anticipation.
Previously at Hip Hops:
Hip Hops: It’s all about the beer (and at least 43 years drinking it)
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 
