Beer Culture

Given the frigid winters of central Europe and the region’s longstanding love for a hot mug of mulled wine, you might expect mulled beer to be more popular. And yet the drink probably best known by its German name, Glühbier — like the more common mulled wine, Glühwein — seems to remain largely unloved by beer lovers just about everywhere, including here in central Europe’s brewing heartland.

In part because of its pin-up marketing, it’s hard to take the new, pre-mixed, orange-flavored Glübi mulled beer from just over the border in Saxony very seriously, despite its claim as “the ultimate alternative to classic mulled wine.” And in the Czech Republic, the new “winter radlers” recently announced by Heineken’s Zlatopramen brand are being met with derision — called “beer in the microwave” at Pivni.info  — by traditionalists.

But mulled beer — generally meaning warmed and spiced, and often sweetened — has a healthy tradition of its own. Andrew Smith’s Drinking History notes that several warm beer drinks were served in the early American colonies, including the “hotch pot,” a mix of rum and warm beer, which became a “manatham” when sweetened with sugar, and a “tiff” if pieces of buttered toast were added to it. Martyn Cornell, as ever, has a great article about wassail and other mulled ales in British beer culture.

And while many in the Czech lands might consider warm beer to be nothing more than a gimmick, and a newfangled one at that, there is a clear history of mulled beer here, too, though it seems to have been largely forgotten.

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This summer, I bought a couple of pre-1989, East German Berliner Weisse bottles from eBay.de, with no knowledge of how they were stored, nor even where they were produced. After they arrived, I tracked down information in an online listing of historic German beer labels, which indicated that the bottles came from the VEB Getränkekombinat Berlin’s Schultheiss Brauerei, and dated from 1969–1989 — thus at least 23 years old, and possibly even a bit older.

After a couple of months, I opened one.

The beer itself? Dry, thin, gueuze-like, horsey. Extremely sour. Lemony. In a word, weird. In another word, excellent. But that’s not the point.

Far more interesting was what had been going on inside the bottle, and what might be still there. Thanks to Ron Pattinson, more people know that Berliner Weisse used to be made not just with saccharomyces and lactobacillus, but also with brettanomyces. I’ve worked with brett a few times, and I know from personal experience that the various strains of brett have distinctly different characteristics: you won’t get the same flavors from brettanomyces claussenii as you will from brettanomyces bruxellensis. Even two versions of the same strain can be very different: the particular brettanomyces bruxellensis from the great Drei Fonteinen lambic brewery is being propagated and sold by White Labs as its own variety of brett (#644, called “Trois”) as of 2012. Although White Labs already had a brett brux (#650) available, the Drei Fonteinen strain is different enough to merit its own production.

Despite a growing interest in brewing with brettanomyces in recent years, I’ve never seen any commercial yeast labs offering the brett strain from the old East German Berliner Weisse breweries. Andreas Bogk has a project, the Bogk-Bier Privatbrauerei, which aims to bring back the production of Berliner Weisse using the original brettanomyces strain. When I brewed my own Berliner Weisse earlier this year, I didn’t have access to the Berlin strain of brett for it. Adding a Belgian or English strain to a Berlin-style beer could be about as accurate as fermenting a Munich-style Dunkles with a Trappist strain of saccharomyces — meaning not accurate at all.

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First brewed on October 5 of 1842 — almost 170 years ago as of this writing — the Burghers’ Brewery in Pilsen, now known as Pilsner Urquell, is one of the few breweries truly deserving the term “legendary.” However, not all of those legends are true, especially when it comes to the early days of the original Pilsner.

Did the original recipe really use Saaz hops? Has there been any variation in the type of beer that has been called Pilsner Urquell? And wasn’t the brewery founded by Germans?

The following are a few mistakes, misunderstandings and misconceptions about Pilsner Urquell’s beginnings, taken from various sources: beery talk in pubs, beer blogs, The Oxford Companion to Beer, and even my own guidebook from 2007, by which we’ll kick things off.

“The first pub to serve Pilsner Urquell in Prague started up in 1843… U Pinkasů” (Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic)

U Pinkasů certainly does claim to be the first (“první v Praze”), a boast which has even been repeated by Pilsner Urquell’s marketing department, but according to the brewery’s own chronicle, Měšťanský Pivovar v Plzni 1842–1892, the first pub to tap the beer in Prague was Karel Knobloch’s tavern U Modré Štiky, once located at the corner of Karlova and Liliova streets, which started selling Pilsner Urquell as early as the brewery’s inaugural year of 1842 — one year before U Pinkasů.

Pilsner Urquell has only ever been one beer, the exact same pale lager it is today. 

This is incorrect. Even the first brewer, Josef Groll, initially put out two kinds of beer in 1842–1843, both výčepní and ležák, and about twice as much of the former as the latter (source: Měšťanský Pivovar v Plzni 1842–1892). That is to say: in addition to the familiar ležák (“lager,” in this case referring to the beer’s strength) around 12° Balling / Plato, Groll also brewed a weaker beer, probably around 10°, which has no analogue at the brewery today.

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The following is an English translation of the original founding document of the Burghers’ Brewery in Pilsen, the brewery which would later come to be known as Pilsner Urquell, the world’s first Pilsner beer. 

Request of the Burghers with Brewing Rights for the Construction of Their Own Malt- and Brew-house

As far as concerns the tradition of our ancestors in the city of Pilsen, it is generally known that the burghers who held brewing rights lived in constant unrest and tension with the town’s brewers and maltsters regarding the execution of their rights, and certainly not without reason, for there were times when the maltsters and brewers abused the brewing rights for their own profit to such an extent that they often managed to gain them for a bucket of beer or only a few gulden. Thus it happened that the rights fell into complete disrepute.

The burghers of the time felt this pressure from the brewers quite bitterly. Partly because of their excessive goodness, partly because they did not feel strong enough in themselves, they refrained from undertaking anything against these harmful influences, although the means to do so were not unknown to them and — as contemporary witnesses will confirm — already at that time a lively wish to end these circumstances was being heard.

Only in more recent times have our brewing rights begun to be appreciated for their true value and be given their regular appearance. With the belief that these rights have the relevant basis, the burghers’ administration was founded, though it had to be reinforced from time to time, with the purpose of successfully resisting the abuses of the brewers.

That stewardship, elected from within the impartial citizenry, which confronts to a certain extent an excessive means of overproduction, did not function when the brewers assumed the right of setting the price of beer themselves, and so even with the most strict governance it often was not possible to maintain neighborly competition, which had the effect that beer from other dominions was imported into Pilsen and consumed here in significant quantities.

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How did the burghers of Pilsen come to build their own brewery in 1842, and thus create Pilsner beer, the world’s most popular brewing style?

Perhaps the best explanation of what actually took place is to be found in the brewery’s own fiftieth-anniversary Festschrift, Měšťanský Pivovar v Plzni 1842–1892. In it, the burghers describe the events leading up to the creation of what would — much later — come to be known around the world as Pilsner Urquell. Occasionally biased, sometimes even arguably incorrect, the book is about as close as we can get to a contemporary account of the first days of the Burghers’ Brewery in Pilsen.

The passage on the brewery’s founding begins by noting that

In Pilsen, only top-fermented [“nadkvasné”] beer was brewed until 1842, although already at the beginning of the century, bottom-fermented [“podkvasné”] beer was made elsewhere in Bohemia.

This is not quite right: as mentioned here earlier, Marie Černohorská has written about fifteenth-century bottom-fermented beers and other pre-Pilsner “lager” brewing styles in the Czech lands in the brewing journal Kvasný průmysl, meaning that there were certainly bottom-fermented beers in Bohemia before the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the time of Pilsner Urquell’s founding, however, it seems that bottom fermentation had largely died out here, just as top fermentation would then quite swiftly go extinct in the wake of industrial lager, disappearing over the course of less than forty years.

Bottom-fermented beer, otherwise generally called “Bavarian beer,” because it first spread in Bavaria, slowly pushed back top-fermenting beer, and everywhere people tried to rearrange breweries for bottom fermentation. By the year 1841, already one-tenth of all breweries in Bohemia brewed bottom-fermenting beer, which over four decades then entirely took over and pushed back the top-fermented product.

According to the “Nový Poupě” of 1880, a Czech brewing handbook based on František Ondřej Poupě’s watershed brewing manual from 1794, Bohemia still had 137 top-fermenting breweries in 1870, though only two remained by 1876. Similar accounts appeared in the New York Times in 1876, as discussed here in 2008.

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Some corrections, comments, clarifications and addenda to the Czech entries of The Oxford Companion to Beer:

“The majority of beer sold in the Czech Republic is relatively light lager classified as výcepní [sic], these are brewed from original gravities between 8° Plato and 12° Plato” (page 277).

Correctly spelled “výčepní,” this category of beer has long had an upper limit of 10° Plato. Czech beers of 11° and 12° Plato compose a different legal classification, called “ležák.” (Source: Czech State Agricultural and Food Inspectorate.)

“Beers having more than 5.5% ABV are referred to as special [sic] Speciální” (page 278).

Called “speciální pivo” (or “speciál”), this legal classification is for beer “with an original gravity of 13° or higher.” The amount of alcohol has no bearing here. (Source: as above.)

“Budvar… has 5% alcohol by volume and 20 units of bitterness” (page 191).

According to the company’s press spokesman in the Czech Republic, Budweiser Budvar’s 5% alcohol lager has 22.5 units of bitterness, not 20.

In the entry for “Bohemian Pilsner,” the book states that for Czech versions, “the brewing grists are invariably 100% pilsner malt” (page 140).

Actually, many breweries in the Czech lands use a small portion — about 1% — of caramel malt in their premium pale lagers, or “Bohemian Pilsners.” (Source: interviews with Czech brewers and brewery consultants.) While 100% pilsner malt might be a traditional grist for a Czech pale lager, it is not “invariably” the case today.

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If you were at all interested in Czech beer culture, you’d probably want to sneak a peek at the legal regulations on beer and beer-based beverages available from the Czech Ministry of Agriculture. I had to wade through those pages when we were putting together Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic, which included a summary of their obtuse Czech legalese in what we hoped to be semi-legible English.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the changes in a new version of that document. Errors have been fixed, a few vagaries have been cleared up, and at least one category of Czech beer has been washed away — while an interesting new Czech beer category has been proposed in its place.

At the time of the publication of GBG Prague, there were just a few legal categories for beer:

• Lehké pivo (“light beer”), under 7° Balling in original gravity and less than 130 kJ/100 ml
• Výčepní pivo (akin to “taproom beer”), 8° to 10° in original gravity
• Ležák (“lager”), 11° to 12° in original gravity
• Speciální pivo (or “special beer”), 13° and higher in original gravity
• Porter, a dark beer composed primarily of barley malt, 18° and higher in original gravity

And that was largely it, with a few more clarifications or specifications: the grist of pšeničné pivo (“wheat beer”) had to contain at least 1/3 wheat malt; kvasnicové pivo (“yeast beer”) was (confusingly) only defined as containing an addition of fermenting wort, but not yeast itself; řezané pivo (“cut beer,” generally a mix of pale and dark lagers) had to be of two beers from the same category (eg, two “taproom” or two “lager” beers).

You can see the old document here: http://iom.vse.cz/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/vyhlaska_335_1997.pdf

The new document, available from the website of the State Agricultural and Food Inspectorate, makes some very interesting changes. You can find it here: http://www.szpi.gov.cz/docDetail.aspx?docid=1007482&docType=ART&nid=11816 (click the first PDF, titled “[vyhlaska_335_1997_Sb.pdf]”

Can you spot the differences?

• Lehké pivo is gone completely. (This won’t be missed. I think I only ever encountered two or three examples.)
• In its place is a new style of beer: stolní pivo (“table beer”), made primarily from barley malt, up to 6° original gravity (inclusive).
• Výčepní pivo now ranges from 7° to 10°, up to a full percent weaker in terms of original gravity.
• Ležák is still 11° and 12°.
• Speciální pivo is still 13° and up.
• Kvasnicové pivo is now defined as containing an addition of clean yeast culture or an addition of fermenting wort.
• A new category, pivo z jiných obilovin (“beer from other grain,” meaning other than barley or wheat), of which — if I’m reading this correctly — at least 1/3 of the grist must be the other grain specified.

Also, the earlier document seemed a bit too focused on yeast types, specifying as tightly as “Saccharomyces cerevisiae subsp. uvarum (carlsbergensis)” for Czech bottom-fermented beers; now it just says “bottom-fermenting brewing yeast.” (Interestingly, both documents acknowledge the possibility of also using both acetic- as well as lactic-acid-producing bacteria in brewing. However, this is possible only for top-fermenting beers: lambic-lager hybrids are still not on the cards.)

Personally, I’m thrilled about the idea of Czech table beers that are not limited to low-calorie versions: this is an entirely new style that deserves some great new examples from some courageous Czech brewers, stat. For the moment, however, I’m most interested in — and most confused by — that “beer from other grain” category. Are we going to start seeing rye beers built on at least 33% rye, or oat beers with at least 33% oats? (Answer: unlikely.) But more importantly, does that mean that you can’t call your beer a “corn beer” if it doesn’t contain at least 1/3 corn?

We seem to be entering a great time for beer writing (and reading), with wonderful work being done by Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins and by Martyn Cornell at Zythophile, two writers who are sharpening our understanding of beer’s lengthy history, and correcting a lot of inaccuracies and misunderstandings along the way, especially in the field of British brewing.

Over at A Good Beer Blog, Alan McLeod is knocking out whimsical investigations of Albany Ale (what’s that?) and 19th-century brewing in Canada and America.

But at the moment, Central Europe’s storied brewing history seems to be getting less attention in this regard, at least in English beer writing — a pity, because our beer culture suffers from at least as many inaccuracies, misunderstandings and made-up backstories as those northwest of here. (I’m not convinced, for example, that Prague’s traditional beer style is the U-Fleků-style dark lager, or even that “the standard medieval Czech brew was decidedly dark, not blond,” as Horst Dornbusch has written. That clearly wasn’t the case by 1672, when Bohuslav Balbín wrote that “Pražskému pšeničnému, jemuž se říká světlé, se může máloco rovnat, pokud jde o blahodárné účinky,” or, roughly, “There may be little equal to Prague wheat beer, which is called ‘pale’, in terms of its beneficial effects.”)

If you’re interested in things like Grodziskie, Lichtenhainer, Horner Bier or pre-lager brewing in Bohemia, you don’t have to travel to the Czech National Library or the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv to start your research. In fact, Google Books has a bunch of electronic books — “free” as in “beer” — that desperately need curious readers and writers to share their wealth of information. Best of all, they’re in the public domain, so you don’t have to pay for them. And because they’re digitized, you can easily search for interesting terms like “sauer” or “Grätzer.”

To start, get J. C. Leuchs’ Brau-Lexikon from 1867. Nice stuff here on all kinds of older Central European beers and how they were made.

Move along to the Allgemeine Hopfen-Zeitung, Volume 10, Issues 1-74. The chemical analysis of Grodziskie on page 259 tells you exactly how much alcohol that beer had in 1870: just 1.923% by weight.

If you were really interested in Czech hops, you’d probably want to sneak a peek at Böhmens Hopfenbau (1846), by Johann Wenzel Hocke.

And the big one, of course, is the 1854 edition of Karl J. N. Balling’s Die Gährungschemie, which notes that “The well-known Horner Bier near Vienna is an oat beer: it is very fizzy and refreshing, but it is cloudy.” With all the interest in historical beers and sour brewing, someone has got to make an authentic Horner Bier one of these days soon.

I don’t know everything that’s in these volumes, only that much of what is in there isn’t widely known, so please dig around and see what you find. Perhaps you’ll bust some myths, misconceptions and made-up histories of your own. And if you come across other public-domain brewing books that deserve a wider audience, send me a link and I’ll update this list.

It’s always humbling to be called an expert on anything, and the more I learn about Czech beer the more I come to think my expertise extends only as far as the drinking of it. Nevertheless, I was happy to be asked to write some tasting notes for a Czech Beer Festival that took place at the Porterhouse pubs in London and Dublin this past November.

The surprise? The festival lineup went well beyond the expected also-rans and usual suspects. Among the Czech beers we all know quite well were several rarities, as well as a few I hadn’t yet heard of, including what looked like two new beers from Pivovar Žatec, the historic underdog brewery in the great hop-growing town also known as Saaz.

On the list: Žatec Strong, an 18° beer, as well as what looked like a new 14° dark lager. And when I checked the brewery’s own website, I saw they were even putting out a new, gluten-free beer, called Celia, and a Cornish Steam Lager. Whatever happened to the old underdog that couldn’t seen to think beyond the common půllitr?

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Just over a week ago I went to Plzeň to join a group of British beer writers — Adrian Tierney-Jones, Mark Dredge, Pete Brown and Tim Hampson — at Pilsner Fest 2010. In addition to the festive, carnival-like atmosphere at giants Pilsner Urquell and Gambrinus, we also visited craft brewers and new brewpubs, as well as historic dives and dingy bars, to make a short film about beer culture in one of Europe’s greatest brewing cities.