So whatever happened to Beer Culture?

In the spirit of where Beer Culture plans to go in the future, I’d like to tell the story of Beer Culture’s past.

It should be obvious by the capital letters that I’m talking about Beer Culture the weblog, not the lowercase “beer culture” in the sense of “the customs, institutions, achievements and observable manifestations of the activities of producing, serving and drinking lagers and ales.” That particular beer culture is doing just fine, thank you very much. But in case you haven’t noticed, Beer Culture, formerly hosted by Prague Daily Monitor, has been on hiatus for the past six months or so. It’s returning now at a new address — please update your links to www.beerculture.org — as well as with a new sense of what it intends to address.

In fact, Beer Culture didn’t start out as a weblog: I launched Beer Culture in early 2003 as an old-media, dead-tree newspaper column at The Prague Post, the English-language newspaper in the Czech Republic, where for several years I ran the food & drink desk. If I’m not mistaken, just two Beer Culture pieces were guest-written: one by Prague Post staff writer Dan Macek on the SPP, the Czech beer consumers’ organization, when it became part of the European Beer Consumers Union in 2005, and one in which the award-winning beer writer Alastair Gilmour described a festival celebrating one thousand years of Žatec (Saaz) hops in 2004. The remaining 36 or so Beer Culture newspaper columns were written by yours truly.

When I left the paper in early 2006, the column left with me for what we could call its first hiatus. But just before the publication of Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic in early 2007, I wrote a couple of articles for my friends at the Prague Daily Monitor, the Czech Republic’s daily English-language news website. By the end of the year, we were ready to relaunch Beer Culture as a Prague Daily Monitor weblog, where it ran from December of 2007 until October of 2009, publishing over 100 posts on everyone’s favorite beverage.

By any measure, Beer Culture 2.0 did very well: by September, 2008, the weblog already had about 5,000 monthly visits and was serving up almost 9,000 pageviews per month. March of 2009 saw over 14,000 visits and just a shade under 20,000 pageviews.

But even by that point, it was clear that Prague Daily Monitor was about to go through some major changes. It took a few months of planning and negotiating, but on November 4, 2009, it was finally announced that Prague Daily Monitor had been acquired by Prague TV.

I think the world of the people at Prague Daily Monitor, who put out a great editorial product that remains an English-language must-read for anyone interested in Czech culture and news. And as a 10-year resident of the city, I’ve long been a fan of Prague TV. I remain good friends with — and a reader of — both publications. But the switch gave me the chance to publish Beer Culture entirely on my own, something I’ve been wanting to try for a while. In addition, it allows me to make a break and do things in a new way. Call it Beer Culture 3.0.

So what’s going to be different?

A bunch of stuff. Part of the new plan is visible in the new address at www.beerculture.org. Not having Prague in its domain name means a lot more than just a different URL. Perhaps just psychologically, that frees up Beer Culture to have a wider focus.

Another change is simply personal: at least for now, I don’t feel much like writing tasting notes or announcing the arrival of new pubs. And honestly, there are already enough blogs covering those subjects.

Instead, I hope to write more stories — to tell the tale of how something happened, in other words. How a beer got made, imported or drunk. To tell you who did it and why. And at the same time, I hope to add some light to the history of beer in central Europe: there is simply too much that hasn’t been written about the beer culture here, certainly not in English, and I have to imagine that you, as a reader, would be much more interested in reading those stories than in hearing my personal reactions. You can find personal reactions anywhere. But good stories? Those are hard to come by.

This won’t be a daily weblog, so please feel free to sign up for the Beer Culture RSS feed, or just check back to the home page whenever you feel like it. There’s more stuff coming, including the very material question of how Beer Culture will be able to support itself, which should be interesting. (And fun, or so one would hope.)

I leave you with a raised glass and a na zdraví. To Beer Culture, and to beer culture.

Ron Pattinson has written about U rotundy, one of his favorite rough pubs. It might have its charms, but for me there are two good reasons not to pick U rotundy: one, they serve Staropramen, which you could get just about anywhere else in Prague if you wanted it. And more importantly: just two doors down the very same street is Art-Café u Irmy, which you might call a “rough café.” In addition to great inexpensive Georgian food — as in the country, not the American state, nor the historical era — u Irmy is one of the few places in town where you can get draft Bohemia Regent.

Many thanks to reader James for the tip, as well as pointing out the café’s excellent atmosphere, like a wacky house party where all the characters come from different corners of the old soviet sphere of influence. The food, as well, is an eastern treat: great dolmas, outstanding lobio (Georgian red beans with red onions, pomegranate seeds and coriander), borscht, chačapuri (cheese bread), čachochbili (chicken and red-pepper stew), sacivi (walnut sauce) and chinkali (beef dumplings). How could U rotundy possibly compete with that?

And then there is the beer.

Once widely considered the second-best mass producer of beer in Bohemia (after Pilsner Urquell), Regent has virtually disappeared from taps in Prague. And yet its dark lager remains one of the country’s best, certainly when in good condition. My half-liters (40 Kč) were at the very top of their game, in excellent shape, rich and coffee-like with the bitter notes perfectly balanced by the sweetness of the malt, or at least that’s how I described it in my review of U Irmy in Lidové noviny two weekends ago.

I love rough pubs. But I think I like rough cafés even better, especially when they serve great beer, great cheap food and have convivial, Borat-esque atmosphere. In fact, just across from U Irmy is Duende, which serves Bernard, another one of the country’s great smaller brewers — and many times better, for most beer lovers, than the ubiquitous Staropramen.

If you want two great stops for great beer and a fun scene in the heart of the touristic center, you know where to go on Karolíny Světlé.

Art Café u Irmy
Karolíny Světlé 19
Praha 1-Staré Město
Tel.: 775 565 868

If you want to figure out what’s happening — or not happening — with Czech beer, it might help to look at how some of the other guys do it. Take, for example, the Punk IPA from Scotland’s BrewDog.

But I don’t mean the beer itself. I just mean the packaging.

In contrast to most Czech beer labels, the Punk IPA label goes almost all the way around the 330-ml bottle, and as such it has room for a lot of information. (Also in contrast to most Czech beer labels: it contains a lot of information.)

Some of this will sound familiar to those who remember the thoughts on Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf post which disappeared down the server wormhole. Indeed, many aspects of the BrewDog packaging are similar to Kocour’s, such as the use of a logo — “a symbol or small design adopted by an organization to identify its products” — beyond the brewery’s name. In Kocour’s case, it’s a stylized K that looks like a tomcat.

Similarly, BrewDog has its howling dog.

I can’t recall any Czech craft brewer beyond Kocour that has a functioning logo. Avar, maybe? (By contrast, think of Heineken. A certain shade of green and a red star, right?)

Another point from the Kocour post was “never miss a chance to talk about your beer.” Even the Punk IPA’s crown cap makes use of available space — you’ve got the brand name and the logo on top, with phrase “Aberdeenshire’s Mega Microbrewery” written around the side.

Other parts of the label tell us the brewers, Martin Dickie and James Watt, as well as “the BrewDog Promise,” which includes putting “no preservatives, additives or other junk in your beer.” This is a lot of information, and it represents a concept that is completely absent in Czech beer marketing: start a conversation with your consumers. This label even suggests that such communication could possibly go both ways: “Let us know what you think of Punk IPA: punkipa@brewdog.com.”

However, there are two suggestions from the Kocour post that the Punk IPA packaging doesn’t follow. The first is to tell consumers more about the ingredients and how you used them. We don’t know what kind of hops were used in the Punk IPA (Fuggles? Kent Goldings? Styrian Goldings?) and we aren’t told what kind of malt (Maris Otter? Weyermann?). Nor do most Czech brewers do this, though they certainly should.

The second aspect from the Kocour post that is missing here: don’t bullshit us. In fact, the BrewDog label contains a massive shovelful of BS, though in this case the bull comes off as the kind of funny and harmless joshing between good friends: “It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to appreciate the depth, character and quality of this premium craft brewed beer.” (Really? Try me, ace.)

The overall impression, though, is really positive: the design, like it or hate it, is not an afterthought, as it often seems with most Czech beer packaging. Much like the Kocour typeface, BrewDog’s stencil-like block caps suggests street smarts and punk rock, not a bad image for an upstart brewery, and perfectly in line with a beer BrewDog calls “aggressive” and “post modern.” If this beer were made by a Czech brewer, it would probably have a dead baroness on the label and a name written out in some kind of ridiculous Baroque script.

And for the beer itself: it’s really very good, quite hoppy, nicely bitter in the finish, though not nearly as aggressive as it claims. N’est pas gourmand qui veut, as the man said, and the same holds true for punks.

This post marks Beer Culture’s return to regular publishing after the wormhole incident and is part of a joint project with Fuggled and Pivní Filosof on the same subject. Go read their posts now.

Wow… this place is full of old beer bottles.

And cobwebs!

Thus Beer Culture is back online, though the electricity isn’t hooked up and we still don’t have hot water. We also lost the last three months, which included some of our most popular posts and comments ever.

Did we just dream that whole thing about Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf?

More soon…

A quick post before heading out to Pilsner Urquell, whose distinctive water tower is pictured on every bottle of that brew, as well as in the snapshot above. (Not in the frame off to the left is the gigantic Pilsner Urquell chess set, whose toddler-size pawns look like Pilsner Urquell bottles.) I’ll be working with a crew shooting a Discovery Channel television special on beer, which, back home, will include brewing stars like Sam Calagione from the offensively good Dogfish Head and Professor Charlie Bamforth from my old alma mater, the University of California, Davis.

But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing to say that no matter what you do, you have to go to Pivovarský klub next week to taste the new saison beer from up-and-comer Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf, a brewery so new it doesn’t even have a website yet.

Last night we had our second beer tasting and dinner at Essensia restaurant, inside Prague’s Mandarin Oriental hotel. All of the beers were great. (The biggest surprise might have been the Mary-Jo from Regent, because it looks terrible but tastes quite nice.) But Kocour’s saison completely turned heads, even from the few people there who weren’t all that into beer. It is a cloudy light gold with a thin, easily quaffable, semi-sweet body, followed by an eye-opening amount of hop bitterness and a slight squeeze of citric acidity in the finish. It’s an excellent summer ale, the kind of beer you’d want to change your calendar for, only we don’t know the exact date when it will be first served at Pivovarský klub. (I’d recommend keeping the entire week open and stopping by regularly, just in case.)

The word on the saison echoes the news from the Ratebeer European Summer Gathering last weekend, whereby the attendees had a sampling of many kinds of Czech beer. When I showed up for the Grand Tasting on Sunday, I was told that the most popular beer, by far, was the Varnsdorf 12°.

Off to Plzeň…

There’s a new trend in Prague pubs: rotating beer selections. The widest range is probably at Pivovarský klub, whose six taps change constantly to include various brews from around the country and around Europe (mostly from small, regional producers, with Pivovarský dům’s Štěpán and Primátor’s Weizenbier enjoying near-štamgast status at taps 5 and 6, respectively).

Other Prague pubs with rotating taps include the great První pivní tramway and Zlý časy, described by Max Bahnson as a font of great beers and good goulash. Following that post, Jay commented that the same sort of things were taking place on at U Radnice in Prague 3, a Žižkov stronghold for Podkováň beer when I listed it in Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic, but which switched breweries to Rohozec after Podkováň closed before branching out to include a wider selection.

This week I stopped by to see what they’ve got on tap.

Plenty of good stuff, it turns out. Despite the signs out front and throughout the pub, there was nothing from Krakonoš to seen. When I visited, six beers were listed (a few with dubious spellings):

• 14° Kvasar from Černá Hora.
• Světozor from Pivovar Nová Paka (brewed for Prague’s Světozor cinema).
• 10° světlé výčepní pivo from Rohozec.
• Zázvorové (ginger) pivo from the brewpub Pivovarsky Dvur Zvíkov.
• 13° dark from Pivovarsky Dvur Zvíkov.
• Pardubický Porter (listed as “19° Poter”)

I ordered a Pardubický Porter, which fared well in a recent comparison of beers in the Baltic Porter style, and which I’ve found myself enjoying more and more of late: a strong black beer, treacly and hinting of licorice.

And then I was stuck. The first three were too familiar; Zvíkov’s great 13° dark turned out to be out of stock. And I’ve never been crazy for ginger-flavored lager. But I couldn’t remember trying Zvíkov’s version, so I knew what I had to do.

Fellow beer traveler Rob seems to be flexing his musculature behind the two glasses, and I myself felt I had to get somewhat pumped up before trying it (I hate ginger-flavored beers, I kept saying, I just hate them).

It was the last of the keg, and the beers arrived as cloudy as hell. At first they seemed to be well on their way out, with a surprising amount of horse blanket and barnyard in the nose, suggesting brettanomyces. And then it became clear that this was not one of the ginger-flavored lagers I’d had (and hated) before, but rather what seemed to be a ginger wheat beer, which contributed the slightest spicy notes to the finish, and which probably also added to the tastes of pink grapefruit and Meyer lemons. It might have been on its way out, but it was still a deliciously light beer for a hot afternoon.

We ordered two more half-pints which were even cloudier and which tasted even better, spicy and sour like a Central European take on a great Belgian Wit. Finally convinced, we asked for a third: this time two large beers.

No dice, the bartender said. Those were the last of what we had.

When will you get more of it? I asked.

Maybe never, the bartender said. The beers here rotate — it’s different every week.

The Czech Republic is home to a whole bundle of brews from specific places: known quantities like Pilsner Urquell (from the West Bohemian town of Plzeň) and Budějovický Budvar (from České Budějovice), as well as rarer birds like Žamberk’s fantastic Žamberecký Kanec, Pardubice’s Pardubický Porter, Velichov’s impossible-to-find (but oh-so-worth-it) Velichovský Forman, along with about 500 other truly outstanding local faves. But in the midst of this very rich beer culture, what we don’t have are many brews that are specific to a certain time of year. One of the few exceptions is showing up right about now: Vánoční piva, or Christmas beers.

Occasionally called sváteční piva (holiday beers), Christmas beers are brewed at higher gravities than standard Czech lagers, generally starting at 13° and heading north fast, resulting in slightly (or much) higher alcohol than normal. (It’s cold here, people — we need something to get the blood going.) Unfortunately, these are almost always limited editions and can be very difficult to find, either on tap or in bottles.

But just this weekend, the Vánoční pivní trhy (Christmas Beer Markets) takes place at Prague’s Výstaviště exhibition grounds, serving about a dozen of these unique winter warmers, as well as a one-off special created especially for the festival.

Taking place Friday through Sunday, December 14-16, the Christmas Beer Markets are set to include tastings, seminars on food and beer pairings, a commemorative tasting glass from Sahm, as well as the release of Old Ale, a top-fermented Czech brew with 8.2% ABV. The Old Ale has been brewed especially for the Christmas Beer Markets at Minipivovar Žamberk using a recipe from Jan Šuráň of Pivovarský dům and a blend of eight yeasts selected by David Bryant of Colorado’s Brewing Science Institute. (This is only one of several Czech-American co-productions that have been showing up lately, but more on that another time.)

The hours for the festival are Friday 13-19h, Saturday and Sunday 10-19h. Entry is 25 Kč (about $1.50, or just under €1), with an extra 50 Kč for the Sahm tasting glass. It’s certainly not hard to find: Výstaviště is the very large exhibition grounds in Praha 7-Holešovice, a massive Secession building next to the even-more-massive T-Mobile Arena. It has its own tram stop (“Výstaviště”) and is served by the 5, 12, 14, 15 and 17 trams. If you catch a 17 tram at Staroměstská (direction Sídliště Ďáblice), you’ll be there in about 10 minutes.

The growth of Christmas beers is a welcome addition to our local beer culture: it wasn’t long ago when most brewers here just added a Christmas label to their regular beers without changing the recipe in the slightest. Recently, however, it’s become a time for breweries to show off what they can do with a touch more alcohol and stronger flavors. For example, the Christmas beer currently on draft at Prague’s Klášterní pivovar Strahov is brewed at 19° and ends up with 7.7% alcohol. According to my colleague Max Bahnson, el Filosofo Cervecero, it’s a rich amber in color and is amazingly hoppy in the finish.

By way of contrast, this year’s Vánoční special from West Bohemia’s Chodovar is brewed at 13° and ends up with 5.1% alcohol. It’s a clear deep gold with very mild carbonation, a malty nose and a full malt body and flavor in the mouth, followed by a pleasantly bittersweet finish. However, it’s worth noting that this is exactly the profile of Chodovar’s year-round special, which also is brewed at 13°, and also with 5.1% alcohol. So is this really a Christmas beer, or is it just the standard special with a new label?

The point of this column is to ask exactly that kind of question — and to answer as many such queries as we can. In the coming weeks and months we’ll bring you regular news on beer and brewing from around the Czech Republic and further afield, including a more detailed look at that 19° Christmas beer from Strahov and two new brewpubs set to open in Prague. Got questions? Send ‘em in. Got comments? Post away. Until then, na zdraví!