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.

Site news: as part of our tinkering under the hood around here, we’ve had Google Analytics functioning for the past two weeks. The results are surprisingly good — who knew that a bunch of old articles about beer would crank up thousands of pageviews every week?

What’s also surprising is seeing just what people are reading. Here’s the list of Beer Culture’s most popular posts and pages for the past two weeks:

For some reason, our post on Katarina Van Derham, last year’s St. Pauli Girl, really hit a nerve and is now our most popular read, even though the photos at that page don’t seem to display correctly. (If it’s working above, Ms. Van Derham is third from the left.)

Not so surprisingly, the story (and review) of Czech beer cosmetics is number 2 with a bullet.

Whatever happened to Beer Culture, our “we’re back” post, comes in at number 3.

A post on Pivovar Platan being purchased by K Brewery Trade is number 4, quite possibly because people are interested in knowing where the new beer called Lobkowicz is being made, since it’s not at the brewery that used to be called Lobkowicz.

The must-see visualization of beer consumption by country, courtesy of Snippets.com, is number 5.

Number 6 is about the return of Krušovice Černé, a legendary Czech dark lager that was once great, then bad, and now pretty good.

Our seventh most popular point is the page that pimps Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic. (Someday I’ll figure out how to get that page not to display the link to that page in the sidebar.)

The tag “Primátor,” calling up all articles related to the Primator brewery, is number 8.

Number 9 is the post that could have been titled “On First Drinking Pivovar Kout Na Šumavě’s Beer, in the Town of Domažlice.” (That’s from February of 2008. It’s hard to believe that just over two years ago, Kout beer — now a favorite of many — was completely unknown in Prague.)

And the tenth most popular thing you’re reading is on the Czech Republic’s beer map, which might already be in a second edition, according to scuttlebutt.

More soon. Now back to the wrenches, pipes and wiring…

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.

The early details:

Some 75 Belgian beers will be available.

As at last year’s Christmas Beer Markets, this event is organized in multi-hour sessions: Friday 3–5 p.m. and 6–9 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.–1 p.m., 2–5 p.m. and 6–9 p.m.; Sunday 2–5 p.m. and 6–9 p.m.

Each session is limited to only 250 visitors.

Tickets for each session cost 150 Kč (roughly $9, or €6).

There will be excellent food, as well as special beer-and-food pairings.

The event takes place at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel (Nebovidská 1, Prague 1—Malá Strana; tram 12, 20 or 22 to Hellichova).

In terms of exactly which beers you’ll be able to try, the early announcement only says “lager, Trappist beers, spontaneously fermented beers, Belgian wits and experimental beers.” I’ll post more information as soon as I get it.

This one sounds like a winner. Earlier events have proven to be great fun as well as nice opportunities to fill up the cellar, or wherever you keep your stash. (With otherwise-not-to-be-found-in-Prague bottles available at what I find to be very reasonable prices, I usually show up with a good-sized backpack.) Mark your calendars…

If you couldn’t make it to the Slunce ve skle beer festival last Saturday in Plzeň, here’s a YouTube video from the day. In a word: Awesome.

Above all, the one-day fest in Plzeň bears witness to the new diversity of the Czech craft beer scene. Two years ago, if you’d told me that at a regional Czech beer festival I’d be tasting a Czech Alt beer — newly arrived from Hastrman — or be able to sample domestically brewed stouts, Tripels, and American-style pale ales (and not those from Varnsdorf!), I’d have said you were just plain crazy. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Moreover, though draft remains king, many brewers — even tiny producers not far beyond the hobby horse — had their beer also available for sale in plastic bottles. And I was glad to see several Czech brewers going beyond the glass to offer glassware and even T-shirts for sale.

Personal bests of the fest: Klášterní Pivovar Strahov’s 14° wheat beer, a Weizenbock-like (though pale) Hefeweizen with a strong kick of Saaz and smooth, well-incorporated alcohol, as well as Hastrman’s new Velkorybnický Alt. In terms of atmosphere, you couldn’t ask for a better crowd or a better day. But you could certainly ask for more than one. Next year, can Slunce ve skle go all weekend?

Tasting it at the Krušovická pivnice on Národní in Prague, I found it to be quite pretty, pouring a cloudy, very pale gold with a loose white head. The aromas briefly touched on clove with none of the conspicuous banana notes of some other Weizens; I thought I got a whiff of Band-Aid, though certainly not too much. The mouthfeel was slightly thin with more wheat than barley notes. Though it was served too cold at a pale-lager temperature, it came through pretty well, easily picking up 3 or more points on a basic 5-point scale, and definitely worth trying more than once.

It seems to fall more on the light/acidic side of Hefeweizen, rather than towards the heavy/sweet versions: in Czech terms, closer to Primátor Weizenbier than Herold Bohemian Wheat. In many ways, it’s just a classic take on the style: originally brewed at a gravity of 12.3°, resulting in 5.2% alcohol by volume, using both hop pellets and hop extract, though finishing with minimal hop presence.

You’re walking down the street in Prague, completely minding your own, when your eye hangs on a sign announcing a new beer. What stops you is an apparent error in the picture: instead of barley, the poster is adorned with what seems to be wheat.

Called Dožínkové pivo, the Czech Republic’s newest wheat beer started to show up at pubs around the country this week. There are two surprising things about the appearance of a new wheat beer in Bohemia, not the least of which is the brewery making it. (Drumroll, please…)

First, the early word is that this beer is made by Heineken-owned Krušovice. Unless Dožínkové pivo is a total disaster, this move is going to earn them love from local craft beer fans even beyond the repair they seem to have done to the now-drinkable Krušovice Černé.

Second, Dožínkové pivo is only the second new Czech wheat I’ve heard about in the past 20-odd hours. Fans of Černá Hora might like to know that the makers of 1530 and Black Hill are coming out with their own wheat beer, Velen.

That’s a doubling of Czech wheat beers (beyond brewpub offerings), from two to four, just this summer. Actually, before the return of Pivovar Herold’s wheat beer this spring, only the well-loved wheat beer from Primátor was widely available in this country, meaning we’ve gone from one to four in just six months.

I saw Dožínkové pivo at the Krušovická pivnice on Národní 7 in Prague; it’s apparently available at a few other Starobrno and Krušovice pubs around. The big question, of course, is how does it taste?

Quitting time’s in about an hour and 20 minutes. I’ll let you know after that.

The phenomenon of the čtvrtá pípa — or fourth pipe — just keeps on growing: slowly but steadily, more and more pub owners in Prague are switching over from monopolistic suds to beers from independent brewers, often on a tap they own themselves, rather than the three taps installed and owned by a major brewing group. It’s an interesting concept: when I wrote about it earlier this year for Prague Monitor Magazine, the term earned a note at the Schott’s Vocab weblog (“a miscellany of modern words and phrases”) at the New York Times.

Max Bahnson just covered two new čtvrtá pípa pubs at his Pivní filosof weblog, with not such great results. But there’s another fourth pipe pub which is a total winner: the Klášterní pivnice near Letná in Prague 7.

Klášter fans, have no fear: they still have 11° Klášter dark and pale beers in good shape and well-tapped, at 19.50 Kč — just over a buck and a dime — per half-liter.

In addition, the pub runs a special event with a new 12° beer from a different brewery every weekend. It was Rychtář when I was there last; the time before that saw Slovakia’s Steiger appear on draft. Herold fliers around the room offer evidence that Březnice was an earlier choice.

That’s three taps. To fully embrace the fourth-tap concept, Klášterní pivnice pours a rotating special beer: Telčský Zachariáš on my last visit.

Not enough to get you to Letná? Try this: in addition to the taps, Klášterní pivnice now lists a nearly complete line of Primátor’s specialty brews in bottles, including Weizenbier and English Pale Ale.

But the reason to go to Klášterní pivnice really isn’t the rare beers. It isn’t the buck-the-system independent streak, and it isn’t the low prices. The reason to go to Klášterní pivnice is this: in an era of homogenization and plastic culture, it remains a very real Prague pub, with some of the best atmosphere anywhere. Neighbors stop by and greet each other in the afternoon. Dads sneak in for a quick cold one while the kids are at the park. It’s the kind of place where it’s not strange to order one beer and nurse it over the newspaper in the middle of the afternoon or late in the morning, because that’s what you do there.

Max Bahnson wrote a nice piece about the place before it got all indie. It’s the same as before, only better: just eight tables in the main room, banquettes all the way around, wood paneling, coat hooks and bottle-bottom windows. There’s only room for about 40 lucky people.

Much like comedians and the Aristocrats, travel writers have a question they often ask each other: if you found someplace wonderful that was still undiscovered, would you write about it and potentially ruin it? Or would you keep it for yourself? All I can say about Klášterní pivnice is this: don’t ruin it.

I’ll be off in Franconia for the next week, drinking Landbier and researching beer tourism among the 200 or so breweries there. Until I return, I’ll leave you with a shot from a perfect afternoon in Prague:

Klášterní pivnice
Ovenecká 15 (at Jirečkova)
Tram 25 or 26 to Letenské náměstí
Tel. +420 233 376 150

In this part of the world, three of the most important words in contemporary beer culture are draft, draft and draft, with bottled beers making up a smaller (though growing) percentage of sales. For a long time, one of the only bottled beers from Prague’s Pivovarský dům brewpub was their Champagne-like Šamp, made off-site at a local producer with excess capacity. But now, the Czech capital’s revered brewpub is offering its classic dark lager in swing-tops.

But there’s a catch.

As I understand it, the only place you can get these bottles is the city’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where dark Štěpán is now the house brew. (I’d be surprised if Pivovarský dům didn’t offer them too, but that’s what I was told.)

This marks at least the third hotel in town with its own beer: there’s Hotel Beránek, which offers a specially labeled version of Chodovar as “Hotel Beránek Beer.” And the Augustine, Prague’s newest luxury hotel, offers a specially brewed version of the original Svatý Tomáš dark lager served in this location when it was still the old Pivovar U svatého Tomáše, an ancient monastery brewery in Prague which rivaled U Fleků until 1951, when it was closed by the Communists:

Considering the great potential (and, full disclosure, my own interest) in Czech beer tourism, it’s great to see hotels in Prague taking beer seriously. In addition to serving dark Štěpán in bottles, Mandarin Oriental has done much for beer here, offering a quality beer list in its hotel bar, holding regular beer tastings (some of which I’ve led), and hosting a couple of great beer festivals so far.

On that note, it’s not too early to get the word out about another event taking place at the Mandarin Oriental in October: a festival of Belgian beers beyond the Trappist brews we can now get at our local supermarkets. More info on the Belgian Beer Festival as it becomes available…

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.)