“There’s something about the creaminess and different flavors you get,” Mr. Crisp said.

Suarez Family Brewery’s sun-soaked taproom, about 12 miles south of Hudson, N.Y., has a tap list that tilts toward unfiltered lagers, like the darkly roasty Bone Shirt and the hop-forward Qualify Pils. “It’s giving a consumer a beer’s freshest expression,” said Dan Suarez, who founded the brewery in 2016 with his wife, Taylor Cocalis.

With unfiltered beers, freshness doesn’t mean they always taste best on Day 1. The flavors of Mr. Suarez’s yeast-rich lagers evolve over several months.

“It’s a different drinking experience from week to week. At one and a half or two months, they’re gorgeous,” Mr. Suarez said, noting that he favors his own pilsners with one or two weeks of age.

Mr. Suarez prefers to describe his lagers as “unfiltered” instead of using the German jargon. “I have this rule that I don’t like to use a foreign word,” he said. “I think the word ‘unfiltered’ helps convey what the beer is better than the term ‘zwickel pils.’”

Other breweries proudly wave the keller and zwickel flag. Buoyed by brisk demand, Summit Brewing Company, in St. Paul, Minn., made its Keller Pils a year-round offering in January. Last year, Green Flash, of San Diego, released its Sea to Sea Lager — the label calls it a “zwickel lager” nationwide.

“Zwickel is just a fun word to say,” said Erik Jensen, the brewmaster at Green Flash, which specializes in flavorful I.P.A.s. The low-alcohol lager filled a void in the brewery’s portfolio, as well as its brewers’ refrigerators. “We wanted to make sure we could have something we really wanted to drink,” Mr. Jensen said.