The Munich Helles Lager was created by the Spaten Brewery in 1895 to compete directly with the hugely popular Pilsner beers coming from Bohemia. The same brewer who devised the original Oktoberfest recipe for Spaten, Gabriel Sedlmayr.
Sedlmayr and the Spaten Brewery (located in Munich) had been experimenting for some years with pale ale techniques that Sedlmyar had brought home from abroad when the Munich Helles recipe was perfected. In fact, it may well have been Sedlmayr's early work with pale lagers that influenced other European brewers to their own versions of them, most notably Josef Groll who created the original recipe for Pilsner Urquell, the first Pilsner beer.
Ultimately, it was an attempt to compete with the rising popularity of the Pilsner style beers that led Sedlmayr to the Munich Helles recipe that emphasizes malty sweetness much more so than the Pilsner's highly hopped bitterness.
