A London pub has become the first in the UK to pour the flagship lager from Germany’s revered Private Landbrauerei Schönram on draught.

The Royal Oak Marylebone, which is a free-of-tie establishment, is pouring the 5.0% Schönramer Hell on tap.

Schönram, which has been brewing near the Austrian border since at least 1622 has been in the same family since 1780.

The brewery’s Hell, Bavarian for “pale”, has won gold at the European Beer Star three times, and brewers on both sides of the Atlantic hold it up as a reference point for the style.

The beer is produced under senior brewmaster Eric Toft, who is a Wyoming-born geophysicist who trained at Weihenstephan, the Technical University of Munich’s brewing school.

He has with Schönram since 1998 and still guards the recipe, selects the ingredients and fine-tunes the process each year.

Schönram ferments in open vessels and skims them by hand each day. The hops come from a small group of contracted farms in the Hallertau and Tettnang, the malt is all Bavarian, and nothing is pasteurised.

The connection runs between The Royal Oak and the brewery can be tracked back to Weihenstephan, where Toft studied alongside Alastair Hook, founder of Meantime Brewing.

Alastair met Royal Oak director Andy Ward at Oliver Peyton’s Atlantic Bar & Grill in the 1990s with Ward going on to work for him at Meantime for 12 years before founding Urban Inns.

Commenting Eric Toft from Private Landbrauerei Schönram, said: “Hell is a beer with nowhere to hide. It has to be balanced, clean and easy to drink, pint after pint. We’ve spent years fine-tuning ours, and I’m delighted London’s first taste of it on draught will be at The Royal Oak.”

Andy Ward added: “We’re delighted to have one of the world’s best lagers on draught at The Oak.

“We’ve been pouring pints on York Street since 1807, so a brewery that’s been in one family since 1780 felt like the right company to keep.”