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?

Impressed by the lineup, I wrote to the brewery managers and asked if it would be possible to taste the new beers. The Cornish Steam Lager was unavailable, but they were able to provide a couple of samples of their Strong, Celia and the 14° dark.

First surprise: the “new” 14° dark lager was in fact just a new label on the beer we know as Xantho, originally promoted for its high level of xanthohumol, a compound naturally found in hops, and the “magical effects” thereof, and which initially seemed to be marketed towards women. At Ratebeer it is listed as one beer, “Xantho (Dark Lager),” while BeerAdvocate gives separate listings (and different ratings) for Xantho and Dark Lager, though both with the same 5.7 alcohol. It is in fact the very same beer, and a very good one: dark ruby in color with slight molasses and honey notes in the nose, a relatively light mouthfeel for 14°, with nice maple sweetness balanced by lightly gingery, moderately bitter finish. My sample bottle was in great shape, better than I remember from my tastings of the original Xantho.

Žatec Strong surprised: when I heard it was an 18° beer, I immediately thought it would be a Czech “Porter,” meaning a Baltic Porter, meaning nearly black. In fact it’s more of a strong polotmavý, or half-dark: a gorgeous clear amber with a loose tan head of very little duration — pehaps not surprisingly, considering its strength of 7.3%. In the nose, it has rich dough and slight pumkin-pie spice, followed by plummy, povidla-like flavors in the mouth with significant butterscotch and toffee notes, creating a sweet, koláč-like impression followed by a bitter, herbal, almost medicinal finish. After a few sips, I thought the buttery diacetyl flavors were perhaps too strong. Later tastings brought out more pleasant, syrupy notes of sour cherries.

Considering it is made for people suffering from celiac disease, Celia is really pretty okay — much better than you might expect. It pours a clear gold with a fluffy white head, followed by grainy, corn and malt notes in the nose with just a touch of aroma hops. It has a light, malty body with an understated, bitter Saaz hop finish. I’d say it’s about average for a pale Czech lager, which is very good by international standards, and I’d call it excellent for a gluten-free brew from just about anywhere.

Like many beer fans, I’d love to see a beer from Žatec that really showcases the aromas of the town’s noble Saaz hops — despite the name, Žatec beers seem only about average in hop character, and certainly not as wow-packed as the brews coming from upstarts like Pivovar Kout na Šumavě. But one great dark lager, a good strong amber, and a new brew that brings a fair dose of flavor to the gluten-free market? Plus a fugitive take on steam lager, aka California Common?

It’s heartening to see a storied old brewery trying new things, and with such success. Heartening, and humbling, too.

When she needed to make what she described as “some major life changes,” Shannon Essa turned to beer — Italian craft beer.

The result is Ms. Essa’s American tour company, Grape Hops, that offers trips to many of the up-and-coming microbreweries in Piedmont and Lombardy, along with more traditional wine and culinary adventures elsewhere in Italy and in Spain. Founded by Ms. Essa in partnership with Kim Riemann, an administrator for the slowtrav.com travel website, Grape Hops came about after the two heard about the region’s burgeoning craft beer scene, which inspired them to start offering complete pre-planned trips as well as custom tours, hitting everything from Birrificio Montegioco to the great Lambrate brewpub in Milan, pictured above.

“We first put together an itinerary and we went over and did a dry run,” said Ms. Essa, speaking on the phone from her home in San Diego. She recalled her first experience with the vibrant Italian craft beer scene as nothing short of amazing.

“They are cooking with hops, cooking with beer — they’re experimenting with everything,” she said. “We had pieces of veal that were breaded with hops. And they had desserts that they use beers that they infuse mint into and they make desserts out of that.”

Among the many stops on the tours are the Grado Plato brewpub and Teo Musso’s legendary Le Baladin.

“I loved Grado Plato, just because it was a cool spot and their beer was excellent,” Ms. Essa said. “Le Baladin was great, because we visited their restaurant, not their pub, where they do the five-course meal and pair a lot of beer with it. Just in terms of an experience, from when you walk in the door until you leave, I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

Indeed, most visitors have not attended many beer dinners quite like the multi-course meal taking place in Le Baladin’s moody, caravansarai atmosphere.

“When you walk in the door and there’s that music and that vibe, it’s incredible,” she said.

Upcoming tours include a trip in October this year, as well as trips scheduled for next March and May, one of which will be in partnership with a Brooklyn pub that serves many craft beers from northern Italy. In addition, Ms. Essa noted that Grape Hops can put together custom tours for four to six travelers, creating easy-to-enjoy, beer-themed vacations without a lot of stress.

“It’s really cool for people who don’t know Italy, don’t speak Italian, don’t want to drink & drive,” Ms. Essa said. “All they have to do is arrive in Milan and depart from Torino. We get them their food, we get them their beer. It’s a lot of fun.”

While beer tours in Italy might sound different to some, Ms. Essa noted that much of the good vibes and friendly atmosphere are just like those in craft brewing circles elsewhere. Only perhaps more so.

“They’re so passionate and they’re so cool and they’re so fun,” Ms. Essa said. “They’re Italian basically.”

We were on Dlouhá, close to Lokál, and Jonas was just waking up from his afternoon nap; I was wet from the rainstorm that had just passed. I was pushing his carriage towards a couple of errands and then home when I saw a friend from the Prague beer scene ahead of us on the sidewalk.

“How are things?” he asked, smiling.

“Good but busy,” I said. “I started brewing.”

“How much?” he asked.

I did some quick math. “Zero point twenty-two hectoliters.”

“And what kind of beer?”

“Well, the first batch was a saison, because it was 29 degrees in the apartment last week.”

“Perfect.”

“Yeah, it smells like black pepper. Tastes great. And today Jonas and I are going to brew a wit.”

“A wit sounds good right about now.”

“I’m looking forward to it. Do you know there’s going to be a new pub here, called the Prague Beer Museum, with something like 30 Czech craft beers on draft?”

“Where, around the corner somewhere?”

“No, right there on Dlouhá. There,” I said, pointing across the street.  ”Where the Tom Tom Bar used to be.”

“So something like Zlý Časy?”

“Yeah, only here in the center.”

“Great news. Oh, and before I forget,” he said, “today we’re brewing the Grodziskie.”

“Wow. Where’d you get the…”

“Yeast?”

“No, the malt.”

“We’re using smoked malt from Weyermann. But the yeast we got direct from Grodzisk.”

“So, in about a month?”

“Yes,” he smiled. “In about a month.”

And with that my boddhisatva said goodbye, shaking my hand and touching Jonas’s cheek before striding deeper into Old Town. And as we pushed off down Dlouhá towards our errands, and then home, both of us were grinning.

When exactly did Pilsner-style pale lagers conquer central Europe, replacing the earlier styles that had existed here for centuries? Where did they get their foothold, when, and for what reasons? I don’t have the answers yet, but I’ve recently been working in the archives of the Czech National Library, reading a bit more about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century brewing in the region. And just yesterday I found an interesting quote in Carl Balling’s Die Gährungschemie (3rd ed., 1865), regarding beers made from oats.

“Only in rare cases are oats utilized in brewing and distilling,” he wrote, “creating a very fizzy (“moussirendes,” sic) beer, as well as a more sparkling brandy.”

The money quote:

“The well-known Horner Bier near Vienna is an oat beer: it is very fizzy and refreshing, but it is cloudy. In Carinthia and Carniola oat beers are brewed.”

The lost oat beers of southern Austria and Slovenia? That requires a whole new research project.

As for Horner Bier, firing up the Google gets you genius stuff. By “genius,” I mean “Mozart.”

We’re all familiar with the Mozart canons K231, K233 and K234, right? The first two are the musical compositions the Maestro left with the titles “Leck mich im Arsch” and “Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber,” or “Kiss My Ass” and “Kiss My Ever-So-Nice Clean Ass.” The third is “Bei der Hitz im Sommer ess ich,” or “In the Heat of Summer I Eat.” These were later published together with new lyrics and, perhaps not surprisingly, new titles.

There’s some question if the music is indeed Mozart’s, but the lyrics — the “unruly” text of the originals, as Constanz Mozart called them — are believed to be authentic, and include the following line in K234:

“Ich nehm Limonade, Mandelmilch, auch zu Zeiten Horner Bier, auch zu Zeiten Horner Bier; das im heissen Sommer nur, im Sommer nur.”

Only in summer, Mozart wrote, which goes along with Balling’s description of Horner Bier as “refreshing.” There’s another reference to Horner Bier in 1781’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz by Friedrich Nicolai, which describes Horner Bier as a “white beer [weißes Bier], which comes from Bohemia.”

(To repeat: he’s saying white beers — meaning wheat beers — come from Bohemia. Not Bavaria.)

Today, Horner Bier is back, or at least that’s the impression you’d get by looking at the website for Horner Pfützl Bräu, a brewery founded in 2006, which seems to be having its beers made under contract. I can’t find its brews in Ratebeer, nor is it listed in the Austrian pages of the European Beer Guide, but it says its beer is “leicht naturtrübes, spritziges,” which sounds a lot like Balling again, and notes that the original was “an oat beer.”

Anyone with firsthand experience? Perhaps it’s time to make another road trip…

(One last note: was the great nineteenth-century brewing scientist Carl Balling or Karl Balling? You can find references to both. In fact, the third edition of Die Gährungschemie I was reading at the National Library listed his name as “Carl Balling” on the title page, and offered other publications from “Karl Balling” in an advertisement in the back of the very same book.)

You say tomato, I say rajčatka: there’s more than one way to name almost everything in this city. Take, for example, the Dancing House, also known as the Dancing Building, locally called Tančící dům, although its official title is the slightly less-romantic Nationale-Nederlanden Building. Designed by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić, the building’s resemblance to a dancing couple earned it yet another nickname: Fred and Ginger. (I usually just say Dancing House myself.) It remains one of the most visited and most frequently photographed sites in Prague.

So what does that have to do with great beer? As of last month, the building’s newly renamed café and restaurant became only the second place in Prague to regularly stock beer from Pivovar Kout na Šumavě, one of the country’s best craft brewers.

Located on the Vltava’s eastern riverbank right at Jiráskův most, one bridge south of the National Theater, the Dancing House’s top floor has long been home to an arch, reservations-only French restaurant. But in late 2008 that location was taken over by the management of the great Angel Restaurant in Old Town, who opened a new restaurant with a new name, Céleste.

As you might expect from a Gehry building, the atmosphere and interior spaces are remarkable. (A balcony encircles the weird spherical sculpture that could represent Fred Astaire’s head.) The views of Prague Castle and Malá Strana are literally spectacular; the inventive, French-based cuisine is outstanding. And now, to go along with the restaurant’s seven-course tasting menu (1,450 Kč, or about $70 at today’s rates), you can choose a draft lager from one of the country’s best breweries.

Interestingly, the bar manager decided to stock Kout’s classic 12° pale lager. My favorite is the brewery’s 10° beer, which is as vibrant and bittersweet as many breweries’ premium brews, but the bar manager told me he believed that Kout’s 12° was better suited to pair with their food. It’s available in Céleste along with meals, as well as in the café-bar at the street level. I found it exceptionally well-tapped when I tried it with Max Bahnson recently. It’s not Žižkov-dive cheap — prices are 40 Kč per .3-liter glass in the ground-floor café, 65 Kč for the same in the top-level restaurant — but you have to remember you’re also paying for atmosphere, service and location. For me, considering the amazing views and the cool architecture, the price isn’t an issue.

What this means, however, is more than just wider availability for a great beer: it shows that one more of the city’s highest-profile, most luxurious restaurants is taking good beer seriously. Instead of just stocking whatever beer would give them the most money or would offer to pay for the most coasters and lights, the management at Céleste figured that they would do better by selling the beer that tastes the best.

What a concept. Incidentally, when I asked about sales, the bar manager said that with Kout on tap, he was selling three times more beer than he had anticipated. It’s certainly not going to be their biggest money-maker: Céleste is a restaurant, after all, with $35 main courses. But selling three times as much beer means they can probably afford to pay for their own coasters.

“What’s the hoppiest beer you have?,” someone asked.

I have no idea. I don’t think anyone knows. We don’t keep track of hoppiness here, not in the sense of boasting about IBUs and alpha acid percentages. The brewers at Pilsner Urquell told me that their beer has 40 IBUs, but most brewers here wouldn’t be able to do much more than guess. It’s simply not an issue. Beer here is supposed to be good, that’s for sure. But it’s not necessarily supposed to be terribly hoppy.

However, high levels of hop bitterness and aroma seem to get a lot of attention among American beer fans, and the question got me thinking: what would it be like to take a perfectly great Czech pale lager and crank the hoppiness up a notch?

Thus my second experiment in beer hacking. The first involved dosing a Czech Baltic porter with Orval yeast dregs. In the comments for that story, Jake from Northern Table suggested “getting your hands on some hop pellets and dry hopping a few bottles.” But by that point, my dry-hopped Bernard pale lager experiment was already well underway.

For my dry-hopping hack, I didn’t use pellets. On my desk I had a single cone of Angus hop as a memento from my trip to the Budweiser Budvar hop room. So I cracked open a Bernard sváteční ležák bottle — chosen primarily because of its resealable swing-top cap — and just dropped the bud into the brew.

I resealed the bottle, covering the top with packing tape just in case, and put it in the fridge. Today — about a month later — I opened it along with an untreated bottle of Bernard sváteční ležák and poured two wine glasses to compare.

Here’s what didn’t happen. Contrary to my expectations, the dry-hopped bottle didn’t go flat: like any other swing-top bottle of Bernard, it opened with a reassuring pop. The two glasses in front of me have virtually identical amounts of carbonation and head retention.

Thankfully, it also didn’t sour or spoil. The aromas and overall flavor profiles are nearly the same. There is no trace of infection.

But what is different is just a whiff of more grassiness in the nose. And in the mouth, there’s a slight increase in the bitter, peppery notes. When you go back to the undoctored Bernard, you get much more of the grainy malt and sweet corn flavors. When you try the dry-hopped version again, you might think you’re tasting black pepper and pot resin. It’s actually not that much of a change, but if you focus you’ll probably notice the difference.

(However, there is one point at which you can’t help but notice the change. With apologies for any lack of decorousness, I have to say that the dry-hopped version burps far hoppier than the regular Bernard. How is it that a beer is only slightly different in the mouth, but wildly different upon belching? Good Lord, it’s like burping up the entire Budweiser Budvar hop room.)

As I drink the last sips, the differences are becoming more clear, probably due to the warmer temperatures. The dry-hopped bottle smells like high-grade weed; the unadulterated beer has yeast and bready notes instead. (Bernard sváteční ležák is a kvasnicové pivo, or yeast beer, which commonly has bread-like aromas.) There’s also much more citrus coming through with the dry-hopped version, as well as a touch of peppermint.

In the end, my single bottle of dry-hopped Bernard may in fact be the hoppiest beer in entire the Czech Republic. But does it matter?

That’s what some people don’t seem to get about hoppiness. To put it another way, my version certainly is hoppier. But I’m not at all convinced it’s any better.

The following classic Beer Culture post is one of many which disappeared in the Wormhole Incident™. It is being reposted now because more people should think about beer with a sense of place.

The best thing I heard was when Jean-Pierre Van Roy said “Now we’re going to open the ‘75.”

We were talking about his life and work at Cantillon, the last remaining lambic brewer and geuze blender in the city of Brussels, and Jean-Pierre Van Roy decided that he wanted to open a beer he’d bottled 33 years earlier.

Someone asked “What?” in the way that means “Are you crazy?” Jean-Pierre just nodded and said “It’s time. It needs to be drunk.”

That was the second best thing I heard at Cantillon.

But there was a lot more to hear. Jean-Pierre seemed relieved when I told him he could speak French, and when he asked if I spoke French, too, I said that wasn’t really the point.

“You’re the one who’s talking,” I said. “Me, I write.” (Or rather, “C’est vous qui parlez, monsieur. Moi, j’écris.”)

So Jean-Pierre Van Roy poured a round of lambic and started talking, about beer in Belgium and Cantillon in particular, about how he had taken over the reins from his father-in-law in 1969 on the day after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, and I wrote down everything I could. And over the course of several hours, I heard a lot. A bit of it would go into my assignment, a piece on European beer travel for an airline magazine, but most of it was superfluous, a bounty of information and opinion that had no real destination.

For example, what do you do with a quote like this?

“It’s not because a beer is industrial that makes it bad. I’m not against industrial production. I would rather have a well-made industrial beer than an artisanal beer that tastes bad.”

(You embroider it into a sampler and hang it up on your wall, that’s what you do. You write it down and put it into the New Gospel of Beer. You ponder it and share it as often as you can with your beer-loving friends, hopefully over a glass of something good.)

I found him to be extremely contrarian, but charmingly so. When I said that I had come to Brussels to drink geuze and lambic, the original styles of the region, and said that I wanted to drink a local beer from a local place, not Belgian version of a pilsner, which comes from where I live now, he stopped me.

“Hang on,” he said. “Belgium made some very good pils once. Very good. Excellent beers.”

Take the ‘75. He opened it and said that it smelled right to him. He poured it, careful to keep the sediment in the bottle, then offered a glass. I thought it had a black tea nose and tastes of tannins, citrus blossoms and acacia honey. But before I could say anything, he waved the beer away.

“Myself, I prefer it younger than that,” he said. “It’s lost the freshness.”

Most Cantillon beers are in 75-centiliter wine bottles. He showed how the cork on this one seemed a bit damaged and noted that, over the last 33 years, the bottle had lost 10 centiliters of liquid to evaporation.

We talked about how breweries lose their way, about how things get worse when beers get more popular.

“A brewery is a building,” he said. “If you make a brewery, you start by making a building with a specific volume of production in mind. Let’s say that you make a brewery to produce 25,000 hectoliters per year. But then a beer becomes popular. In order to supply the demand, the owners need a new building, but they don’t want to make a new building. So what do they do? They cut the production time from three months down to a month and a half. And then they’re producing 40,000 hectoliters per year.”

Cantillon’s own survival has been tough sledding. Jean-Pierre said that in 1970, the brewery directly supplied 220 cafés and bars in Brussels alone. Now? Just eight or nine.

In part, he blamed a change in taste toward sweeter beverages. Several brewers mentioned Coca-Cola during my trip; Jean-Pierre recalled the date when he first tasted it. Sour beers like geuze and lambic have a hard time surviving in a candy-flavored world, and the vast demographic changes in Brussels itself have also had an impact. Located not far from the Gare de Midi, Cantillon is in a neighborhood awaiting gentrification, with many empty shopwindows and vacant lots but not many good places to get a beer. And yet Jean-Pierre said that when he took over the brewery, the neighborhood was thriving. Cantillon used to sell 2-3,000 bottles a month, he said, just to the cafés and bars within 800 meters of their door.

Today, he said, 68% percent of their production is exported.

“Without the United States and Japan…,” he started, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

I held the ‘75 up to the light, sniffed it and took another sip. Before I could write down my notes, Jean-Pierre stopped me.

“Beer is not made for judging, nor for looking at,” he said. “It’s made for drinking.”

ADDENDUM OF 5 MARCH 2009: Notice the “Sold Out” signs in the background behind Jean-Pierre? Those were for some of Cantillon’s special beers which were no longer available. Such a sign would be a rare sight in central Europe, as most brewers here make no special beers at all.

In hindsight, I find it incredibly ironic that one of the world’s greatest local beers is surviving on its exports. Ironic, perhaps, but necessary. As the man said, “A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.”

The sign above the door at the taproom of the Vyškov brewery, maker of the very good Jubiler and Generál beers, somewhat ominously recommends that guests have a final brew before leaving. “Have another glass of beer,” it says, “who knows what awaits you outside!”

While the German beer expression “Hopfen und Malz — Gott erhalt’s!” is fairly familiar among the international beer set, most Czech beer expressions — usually in the form of rhyming two-liners — are unknown outside of the country. Nearly every pub here is decorated with the traditional brewer’s greeting, Dej Bůh štěstí, or “God give happiness.” But there are many more, many of which are listed in Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic. A few favorites:

Lepší pivo v žaludku, nežli voda na plících.
Better beer in the belly than water in the lungs.

Kde se pivo vaří, tam se dobře daří.
Where beer is brewed, things go well.

Kde se pivo pije, tam se dobře žije.
Where beer is drunk, life is good.

Do půlnoci u pěny, od půlnoci u ženy.
On the suds until midnight; after twelve, on the wife.

Kdo pije mok pěnivý v posteli je lenivý.
Whoever drinks foamy liquid is lazy in bed.

Píme pivo s bobkem, jezme bedrník! Nebudeme stonat, nebudeme mřít!
Let’s drink beer with bay, let’s eat pimpernel! We won’t get ill, nor will we die!

Pivo dělá hezká těla.
Beer makes a beautiful body.

Pivo hřeje, ale nepálí.
Beer warms, but it doesn’t burn.

Pivo hřeje, ale nešatí.
Beer warms, but it doesn’t clothe.

Vláda, která zdraží pivo, padne.
A government which raises the price of beer will fall. (Jaroslav Hašek.)

Lepší teplé pivo než studená Němka!
Better a warm beer than a cold German girl! (Jára Cimrman)

Pivo mladé čep vyráží.
Young beer bursts from the tap.

Teprve pivo udělá žízeň krásnou.
Only with beer does thirst become beautiful.

That picture shows how I knew it was working: a bit of brown liquid had blown through the rubber gasket on the swing-top. At the height of activity, the bottle was hissing like an asthmatic cat, releasing built-up carbon dioxide as the yeast did its work. It meant that my first experiment in beer hacking was successful, at least as a proof-of-concept. What remained to be seen was how it would taste.

What I started with was originally straight Pardubický Porter, a Baltic Porter from the Pernštejn brewery here in the Czech Republic. I liked the beer plenty, but sometimes I thought it was too sweet. And I wondered if I could change it using a minimal amount of effort. In particular, I wondered what it would taste like if it was inoculated with brettanomyces. So I filled a couple of swing-top bottles with draft Pardubický Porter and dosed them with the dregs from a bottle of Orval, which I knew should contain some brettanomyces.

I called it “beer hacking,” meaning “modifying a commercial beer to suit your own tastes.” The idea got some attention. Jeff Bell commented that he didn’t think it would end well. William Brand wrote in to note that Orval actually has two yeasts in each bottle, so I’d be getting regular ale yeast as well as brett. And some dudes on Reditt started debating if it would work or not.

Oh yeah. It worked.

My original thought was that the yeast in the Orval bottle might be dead, so all I would end up with would be the effects of autolysis. But when I found the bottle spitting and wheezing in the beer room, I knew there was enough life for the beer to undergo a secondary fermentation. I let it sit upright at winter room temperature for five months, and then opened it at the end of a recent kitchen table tasting.

It spewed like Champagne.

Once the gushing stopped, we poured four good glasses. Instead of coffee and cocoa sweetness, the nose had loads of horse-blanket and barnyard aromas. There was a tack-like leatheriness in the mouth, with a lovely tannic structure. It was sour — not lambic sour, but sour-sweet like a Flemish red. And the mouthfeel was quite different for me: the hacked beer gave the impression of being more substantial, vinous and heavy in the mouth.

If you put it in stemware and gave it to an unknowing guest, he’d probably ask what kind of wine it was.

I’ve still got one bottle left, which I’ll try again in a few months. And another project with a different beer — a simple hack of a standard Czech pale lager — is currently underway in the refrigerator right now, which I’ll report on in a few weeks. I still plan to age Pardubický Porter in an oak barrel someday, or at least put it on oak chips. The possibilities for beer hacking are endless.

Of course hacking a beer is not the same as brewing one. But at least it’s slightly more involved than the basic, open-bottle-pour-in-face type of beer consumption. Not every experiment in beer hacking is going to land butter-side-up: my attempt to make an Eisbock last month resulted in two very flat, very unfrozen, very ruined half-liters of Czech strong lager. But it is all in the name of science.

Our thoughts are with Bill Brand. We’re raising a glass of hacked beer to him tonight.

Last year I was invited to work for the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny as their weekly restaurant reviewer. For most of us, that might sound like a dream job, but I had already spent more than five years as the restaurant reviewer at the Prague Post, even seeing a story from there included in Best Food Writing 2005, and I had little interest in returning to the same task, especially since I was having so much fun writing travel stories from all around Europe. Despite being flattered by the offer, I passed, suggesting instead that the editors contact the Prague Spoon’s Laura Baranik, who has since taken to it swimmingly.

But resolutions are meant to be broken, and I’ve recently agreed to occasionally review a few restaurants for Lidové noviny, either when Ms. Baranik is on vacation or as a means of helping out with what I know is very stressful, very demanding work.

To be honest, I’ve enjoyed writing reviews again much more than I thought I would. I even managed to get something about good beer into this weekend’s article.

Here’s a piece on the expat-friendly restaurant Vermeer, which got the local spodní prádlo in a clove hitch when word of its classic American diner sandwiches first hit the food forum at Expats.cz. In case you’d rather read it in English, I’ll post the entire English version at some point, but for now, here’s the relevant paragraph:

This kind of food goes extremely well with a great beer, but Vermeer offers Krušovice Mušketýr (35 Kč per .5l) with Heineken (65 Kč) as its top choice on draft, which the owner told me is because he wants to provide what foreigners want. Speaking as a foreigner, I can tell you I didn’t move to the Czech Republic to drink Dutch beer. What I want — and what many other expatriates here are absolutely crazy about — are the outstanding, extremely flavorful beers from small producers like Pivovar Kout na Šumavě and Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf. Personally, I’d gladly pay a higher price for those beers. For Krušovice, not unless I’m very thirsty. For Heineken, absolutely never.

Call it one small strategic strike for craft beer in Prague. But the bigger picture is this: restaurateurs may care (or claim to care) about the food and drink they serve. But in a beer-loving country like the Czech Republic, a restaurant owner who cares enough to have food items imported especially for him will still offer the biggest, blandest, most mass-produced beer around.

I undertand it’s hard to watch over every single aspect of your restaurant, and if you haven’t had any kind of education in beer, it might be hard to understand what difference it makes. But believing that your customers prefer to drink overpriced Heineken — a so-called “Pilsner” — in the very country that invented Pilsner brewing? In a country that loves beer so much it drinks more of it than anyone else in the world?

Just hypothetically: if you opened a stylish restaurant in, say, Paris, how much attention would you pay to the wine? Do you think that if you offered a high-volume cabernet sauvignon or a so-called “Burgundy” from the biggest industrial winery in California, your customers would be into that? Would you tell people it’s because that’s what tourists want?

Well, just my 40 hellers. In any case, I’ll be reviewing regularly while Ms. Baranik is out this month; after that, I’ll continue to contribute pieces to Lidové noviny occasionally, in addition to my regular work for Concierge.com (where I cover Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana, Dubrovnik and the Dalmatian Coast), and the travel section of the New York Times (where so far I’ve reviewed restaurants in Prague, Budapest and Vienna). At the moment I’m not planning to sneak craft beer references into forthcoming restaurant reviews in any of those publications. But you know, sometimes plans change.