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.

“Throughout the Middle Ages, the general populace, from peasants to kings, produced beer within their own households” (page 277).

This seems to contradict Ludvík Fürst’s 1941 monograph Jak se u nás vařilo pivo, which notes that brewing was outlawed or banned for the general public in the Czech lands during much of the Middle Ages. For example, St. Adalbert (956–997) banned brewing under the threat of excommunication, a decree which lasted over 200 years until it was lifted by Pope Innocent IV at the urging of the first King Wenceslas, Václav I (1205-1253).

At this point, things actually went from bad to worse, as brewing in all forms started to become subject to the Mílové Právo, or Mile Right, which granted noblemen or small groups of burghers in many Czech towns and cities an exclusive monopoly on producing beer (and occasionally other products) within a radius of one Czech “mile” — a distance equal to about 7,530 meters, or 4.6 miles by our measure. Thus, brewing was prohibited — “occasionally under the punishment of death,” as Fürst notes — for everyone except the holders of the Mile Right, generally within an area of about 66 square miles in each location.

Pivovary.info’s piece on the Mílové Právo notes that the monopoly was instituted in Opava in 1224, in Olomouc in 1230, in Kroměříz in 1240, in Brno in 1243, in Trutnov in 1260, in Louny in 1265, in Prague in 1278, and in České Budějovice in 1351, among other settings. This ban lasted for much of the late Middle Ages, from the early 13th century until about the late 15th century, though the law continued to exist in some areas and in some form until its definitive abolition in 1788. 

Meanwhile, in the countryside, “the right to brew beer for members of households was gradually transferred to manor houses,” writes Fürst, noting that this exclusive brewing right of local lords was — later — explicitly confirmed by Vadislav II in the year 1485.

Jak se u nás vařilo pivo does include some evidence of home brewing by the Czech populace during the Middle Ages, but, given the numerous prohibitions on brewing and the area’s many brewing monopolies, it seems incomplete — if not downright incorrect — to claim that brewing in households was commonplace “throughout” the Middle Ages here.

“Bohemian brewing became famous in the 13th and 14th centuries when some of the aforementioned towns were granted brewing privileges and banlieu [sic] rights (which meant that within a certain distance of the town only beer brewed by the town’s burghers could be legally sold)” (page 140).

It is not clear why we are using a French word here, nor why that word is misspelled — it should be banlieue — though in any case this is not exactly what was meant by the Mile Right, as noted above. Under the Mile Right, it was not merely forbidden to sell beer from somewhere else: it was against the law, sometimes as a capital offense, for anyone but those holding the Mile Right “to brew beer, produce malt, or open a tavern.” Moreover, it should be noted that this right was not enjoyed equally by all burghers in each town: “The older, established burghers later claimed this right for themselves and did not grant it to the new [burghers].” (Source: Jak se u nás vařilo pivo.)

“Martin Stelzer, founder of the Burgher’s [sic] Brewery of Pilsen” (page 408).

A celebrated local architect, Martin Stelzer was one of two principal builders of the Burghers’ Brewery in Pilsen, but it is wrong to call him a founder. Most importantly, Martin Stelzer was not among the twelve prominent Pilsen burghers who requested the construction of a new brewery on January 2, 1839. Nor was he one of the 250 Pilsen burghers who held brewing rights at the time of the brewery’s founding. (Source: Měšťanský Pivovar v Plzni 1842–1892). He might have been hired by the founders, but he was not a founder himself.

(Obviously, the correct spelling should be “Burghers’ Brewery,” as this is a plural possessive. This shows up again as incorrect on page 277, though it appears in a different incorrect form, as “Burgher Brewery,” on pages 74, 102, 393, 419 and 597, and is translated differently — and perhaps equally correctly — as “Citizens’ Brewery” on page 386.)

“Groll smuggled a Bavarian lager yeast across the border” (page 409).

According to the 1892 chronicle Měšťanský Pivovar v Plzni 1842–1892, “seed yeast (yeast, material) for the first batch and fermented wort were purchased from Bavaria.” There is no mention of Mr. Groll’s involvement.

More importantly, it was clearly not the case that lager yeast needed to be “smuggled.” The book notes that, by 1841, fully one-tenth of all breweries in the Czech lands were already using bottom-fermenting lager yeast (including one of the largest producers in nineteenth-century Bohemia, the Wanka brewery in Prague, just 57 miles away). Well before the first batch of Pilsner Urquell was brewed in 1842, the town of Pilsen was already “flooded” by bottom-fermented beer, as the founders of the brewery stated the situation in 1839.

“Smuggled” might be romantic, but it is clearly not accurate.

“A legend in Pilsen says the wrong type of malt was delivered to the brewery by mistake but this seems fanciful” (page 653).

It most certainly is fanciful, as the original Burghers’ Brewery was constructed with its own malthouse on the premises, a crucial element from its initial concept. The title of the 1839 document which founded the brewery reads “Request of the Burghers with Brewing Rights for the Construction of Their Own Malt- and Brewhouse.” In it, the founding burghers’ fifth point highlights the importance of being able to produce their own malt, declaring that a brewer who would trust his barley and malt to someone else “threatens his capital with fire.”

This essential part of the brewery was even given priority in construction: “At the end of September, 1842, the whole brewery, interior and exterior, was completed, and because the malting had begun even earlier, brewing could begin without any further delay in early October.”

(Some background: in Czech, the main word for “brewer” is “sládek,” meaning “the man who prepares the malt,” or “maltster,” as for centuries here, the task of many brewers — like Mr. Groll — was, in large part, to make malt. This is still done today by the brewer Jaroslav Nosek at Pivovar Broumov, a small brewery which spends the bulk of its late spring and early summer malting its own barley for use in the coming brewing season.)

And in point of fact, the historical record clearly notes that the brewery’s very first load of “hard barley” — definitely not malt, and definitely not the wrong kind — “was purchased at the then-weekly market at an average price of 3 florins and 12 crowns.” (Source: Měšťanský Pivovar v Plzni 1842–1892.)

Martin Stelzer “toured Europe and Britain to study modern breweries” (page 653).

Strangely, The Oxford Companion to Beer’s previous entry does not even agree with this statement, noting on page 652 only that “Martin Stelzer was commissioned to design and build the new brewery. He traveled extensively around Bavaria,” period, with no mention of any trips elsewhere.

According to Měšťanský Pivovar v Plzni 1842–1892, the two architects who were hired to create the new Burghers’ Brewery both took trips to see bottom-fermenting breweries — though not to Britain. The builder František Filaus “made a trip around the biggest breweries in Bohemia which were then already equipped for brewing bottom-fermented beer,” while in December of 1839, Martin Stelzer “traveled to Bavaria, so that he could tour bigger breweries in Munich and elsewhere and use the experience thus gained for the construction and furnishing of the Burghers’ Brewery.”

More obviously, the goal of the new brewery — clearly stated in the founding document in 1839 — was to produce bottom-fermenting beer, also called “Bavarian beer.” Obviously, Mr. Stelzer would have been unlikely to find many producers of Bavarian lager in Britain in 1839.

This entry seems to be confused with the story of Gabriel Sedlmayr and Anton Dreher, who did travel around Britain visiting breweries a few years earlier.

“It’s more likely that Martin Stelzer brought back from England a malt kiln indirectly fired by coke rather than directly fired by wood. This type of kiln was used to make pale malt, the basis of a new style of beer brewed in England called pale ale. A model of a kiln in the Pilsen museum supports this theory” (page 653).

This is simply wild speculation. As noted above, the brewery’s own chronicle has no record of Martin Stelzer — one of the most prolific architects of his age, the author of hundreds of buildings in Pilsen — taking time off to travel all the way to Britain. Given his task — to construct a Bavarian-style, bottom-fermenting brewery — there would have been no reason to do so.

However, it is apparent that the Burghers’ Brewery was originally outfitted with a noteworthy kiln, whose description in Czech (“dle anglického spůsobu zařízený hvozd”) seems to make it clear that this was not, in fact, a kiln which had come from England, but rather “a kiln equipped in the English manner,” according to Kniha pamětní král. krajského města Plzně od roku 775 až 1870, an extensive chronicle of Pilsen published in 1883. (According to this book, this kiln was “vytápěný odcházejícím teplem z místnosti ku vaření,” or “heated by heat leaving the boiling room.”)

“Plzensky Prazdroj [sic],” page 654 and page 277.

A small mistake to outsiders, but technically a misspelling in local terms, as N and Ň (and Y and Ý) are considered different letters in Czech. (Strangely, The Oxford Companion to Beer itself spells the name correctly, as “Plzeňský Prazdroj,” on pages 74, 103, 140, 386, 651 and 652.)

At Budvar, “Soft brewing water comes from a deep natural lake beneath the brewery, using a well that dates back several thousand years,” (page 191).

The town of České Budějovice was founded in the year 1265 AD, though the Budvar brewery was only built in 1895, in a much younger northern suburb there.

A well is a man-made structure, “a shaft sunk into the ground in order to obtain water, oil or gas,” while “several” means “more than two but not many.” Thus, this passage reads as if part of a brewery from 1895 somehow dates from around 1000 BC, making it many centuries older than the arrival of the Celts in Bohemia, and thus one of the oldest man-made structures in the country. This is preposterous.

Budvar’s own claims for the age of its wells on its company website sound far more reasonable: “In 1922 the first artesian well was bored and after some further time an additional two artesian wells were also bored.”

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?

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.

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!