When my wife and I were preparing our research trips for Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic, we first had to make a map. We came up with a list of breweries based on information in the Pivovarský kalendář, a publication of the Czech Research Institute of Malting and Brewing, and cross-referenced it with the breweries’ own web sites. Once we had all the addresses, we bought a regular map of the Czech Republic and marked the breweries on it with little red dots. That homemade Czech beer map became an invaluable research tool, helping us to visit every brewpub in the Czech Republic at the time and most of the country’s industrial brewers.

Now a local publisher has put out a professional map of all the breweries in the Czech Republic.

Called “Pivovary České republiky,” or “Breweries of the Czech Republic,” the new map covers the entire country on one side, with detail maps of Prague, Pilsen and smaller regions on the reverse.

It is accompanied by a small booklet listing the various breweries, with a few words on their histories in Czech, English and German. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include much on the types of beers they make, or how to get there. And it won’t tell you how the beers taste.

Regardless, it’s a great addition to the Czech beer canon. Printed by Kartografie Praha in 2009, the new map includes 126 breweries, including new producers in Chotěboř, Varnsdorf, Pilsen and Moravskoslezský kraj. Both breweries and maltings are depicted, as well as brewing museums and the country’s three principal hop regions of Žatec, Ústěk and Tršice. It is currently available at most Czech bookstores for 149 Kč, or about €5.50.

Just as we did when we researched the original guidebook, we’re about to take off for some more research trips this summer. This time will be a bit different: we’ll be accompanied by our junior beer writer, for one thing, and we’re now stocked with a GPS navigation unit and constant access to Google Maps, as well as a bigger car and a better idea of how to do beer tourism in the Czech Republic. In the place of our old, homemade chart, we’ll probably plan our routes using this new map from Kartografie Praha.

And yet there’s still something charming about a homemade map. When I visited Beer Planet in Brussels for a story last summer, the guys there showed me the map they used to pick up beers from breweries around Belgium. I was instantly reminded of our old beer map of the Czech Republic. And I was suddenly very thirsty indeed.

Each year, the Czech Republic consumes the most beer per capita, regularly hitting around 160 liters for every Czech man, woman and child. But how does that compare to other countries?

The visualization above is part of a 12-nation comparison from Snippets.com, and re-posted here with kind permission. Each glass depicts the relative annual beer consumption per person for the specified countries, using data from a 2004 report by the Japanese brewer Kirin, whose retro recipes we noted earlier.

Here’s how the 12 nations stack up:

Poor Brazil. Poor China! Even people in the United States drink only about half as many beers as what the Czechs consume — and much of that, of course, is Bud Light.

NB: this is not a list of the first 12 places, but rather a comparison among various countries. According to Wikipedia’s list of beer consuming countries in 2004, Austria (not depicted here) would come before the UK, while Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Slovakia and Spain would all rank ahead of the United States. And you can forget about 12th place: China’s meager beer consumption of 22 liters per person would not even place it among the top 35 countries.

It’s worth checking out the visualization’s large-format original.

This weekend, on the first day of spring, something remarkable happened at one of Prague’s favorite destinations for beer lovers: the staff at Pivovarský klub put away the ashtrays for the last time.

So why is a nonsmoking pub in Prague such a big deal?

In part because it seems to mark a tipping point in the pub culture here. Over 26% of Czechs smoke, and cigarettes have long been ubiquitous in bars here. Last year, an attempt to ban smoking in public areas was rejected by parliament. As Radio Prague reported at the time, “Critics of the smoking ban claim that it would hurt restaurants and bar owners.”

But some customers — and pub owners — have started to prefer nonsmoking establishments. Just as I was finishing Good Beer Guide Prague & the Czech Republic in early 2007, I was surprised by the newly opened Moritz in Olomouc, both because of their great beers and because they were the first nonsmoking brewpub I’d found in the entire country. And yet instead of starving for business, as the opponents of the smoking ban would have argued, Moritz was so busy when I visited it was forced to turn away customers. The more recent Bar Chýše, which serves craft beers from Klášterní pivovar Strahov, takes great pride in noting that it is the first nonsmoking bar in Prague’s Čimice neighborhood.

As such, Pivovarský klub won’t be the first to go nonsmoking. But it is certainly one of the highest-profile destinations to do so, especially for beer lovers, and it is conceivable that this could inspire other pub owners to do the same. The owners of one well-loved Prague brewpub told me they weren’t against the Czech parliament’s smoking ban — they certainly didn’t think it would harm their business — but they probably wouldn’t go nonsmoking themselves without such a law.

That was a couple of years ago; Pivovarský klub’s decision to cut the smoke might have changed things. Many bar owners here look to Pivovarský klub for inspiration, and due to its tastings, beer menus and other special events, the pub remains the focal point for beer culture in Prague. Now it’s not just that some Czech beer bars are nonsmoking, but rather that one of the biggest and the best is.

Smoking may have long been a part of Czech beer culture, but it wasn’t always that way: Prague’s U Fleků pub predates the arrival of tobacco in Europe by at least 60 years, while U Medvídků was a nonsmoking establishment for a century or more. So you could call a smoke-free pub in Prague an unusual and exciting new development. Or you could think of it as a return to the way things used to be.

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.

It took a few months, but my feature story on craft beer in Italy finally appeared in the NYT travel section this weekend. Seeing it, I started thinking again about Italian beer culture and how different it is to the Czech Republic and other countries which are better known for beer and brewing.

The point I stressed in my first post from the Italian beer trail is part of it: in Italy, the enthusiasm for beer is very high. But beyond mere enthusiasm is something that seems to be missing from the beer culture in the Czech lands and in Germany: education.

Take a look at the photo above, and in particular the big sign on the right. This was taken in the fabulous Eataly grocery store in Turin — a sort of massive, Italian take on Whole Foods — and the sign stands at the entrance right when you walk in, quite far from the store’s extensive beer department in the cellar.

The sign asks if you know the difference between Belgian white beer and German Weizenbier, and then goes on to explain the differences between the two styles in terms of ingredients, tasting notes, and suggested dishes to pair with each. It then lists some examples from its stock.

Please tell me if you’ve ever seen a display in any other grocery store which explains the nuances of two  similar wheat beer styles.

I know that I’ve never found anything even remotely like that in the Czech Republic, though it sounds like a great idea: there isn’t much awareness that such things as beer styles even exist here, let alone beer styles beyond our borders. (And it’s not just the average consumer who remains in the dark. At a tasting last month in Prague, I heard a brewer mention to someone from the beer consumers’ movement that a particular Hefeweizen tasted like a Belgian wit, and the man from the consumer movement had to ask what that was.)

Of course, if you only sell one type of beer, there’s no need to educate consumers about what kind it is and the distinctions between it and another style. Considering the Czech Republic’s pale lager consumption rate of 95% and the country’s continuing mergers and brewery closures, I’m afraid most people would say there isn’t much point to beer education here.

But there are forces working against the tide. Last week I stopped by Tlustá Koala to try the new stout from Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf. Not only did I recognize the distinctive Kocour logo and colors on the tap, but when I took my seat I was surprised to find a brochure from the brewery explaining just what a stout is, how it is made and how it should taste. “Don’t be afraid,” it said.

No, I thought. Suddenly I wasn’t afraid at all.

Today’s trash is tomorrow’s treasure, and nowhere is this truism more applicable than in the field of culinary anthropology: if you don’t take your bottles out quickly, they’ll soon form a big, stinking mess. But if you wait long enough, that pile of recycling could become a priceless collection of art, as well as a storehouse of historical information about the way we live and what we consume. This, effectively, is what happened at the Salesian Beer Museum in Prague.

Properly known as the Salesians of Don Bosco, the Salesians are a Roman Catholic religious order known for their work with young people, running community centers and outreach programs around the world. In Prague, they have a youth center at Kobyliské náměstí, a beautiful functionalist complex housing a theater, soccer fields, basketball courts, a climbing wall and rehearsal spaces for young musicians. In the middle of all this is the Salesian Beer Museum, an almost accidental collection of historic bottles, labels, openers, cans and beermats from the Czech Republic and around the world.

Due to a growing interest in breweriana, I made an appointment to visit the collection last week. I was shown around by Brother Antonín Nevola, the center’s director and the founder of the museum.

My first impression was one of awe: there is almost too much information to be gleaned from beer bottles. I’ve always wondered when exactly the Czech Republic switched from the little fat vessels used before the Velvet Revolution to the standard European half-liters today. With more than 2,000 bottles in the collection, you can track the changes year by year. (It looks like a gradual process over several years starting around 1995. Polička, struggling at the time, was the last Czech brewery to make the switch, shipping its beer in fatties until 1999.)

What about beers that don’t exist today? Something like Gambinus cerné (“black”), a dark lager available in both 10° and 12° versions, or Gambrinus bílé (“white”), the long-discontinued wheat beer from Pilsen?

Of course, the Czech lands were once known for their wheat beers, before the spread of industrial Pilsner-style brewing in the late nineteenth century, and along with amber lagers, strong darks and quality non-alcoholics, pšeničné pivo has become one of the country’s current beer trends today: Primátor’s very good Weizenbier is doing quite well, and several microbrewers and brewpubs are now offering wheats in a welcome return to a traditional style. Before their resurgence, one of the last Czech wheats to die was Prior, the Hefeweizen from Domažlice, a brewery that was shuttered by Plzeňský Prazdroj in 1996. Naturally, you’ll find a bottle here.

The collection includes more than 4,000 beermats, many of which come from long-closed pubs and breweries, as well as bottles going back a century and more (the oldest of which are shown up top). There’s even an unopened Pilsner Urquell from November of 1984, probably not okay to drink today, and some unusual promotional materials, including a massive two-liter bottle of Budvar, proportioned just like a normal Budvar half-liter. (Once you see it, you’ll think you’ve been miniaturized.)

There’s a lot more to learn about our brewing history, and often the only remaining resources are labels, beermats and advertisements — sometimes even fake ones. Going through the list of counterfeit Czech beer labels at Pivety.com, I was surprised to learn that several local producers once made a beer called “porter,” not just Pardubice (Slovakia’s Martinský Pivovar as well as Bohemia’s Broumov, often called Opat, both made porters). You can also see that the term “granát” was used by some brewers for a tmavý (dark), not an amber or half-dark.

So, there it is: what could have been trash, if not recycling, is now a treasure-house of information about Czech brewing history. As it turns out, the Salesian Beer Museum was founded by accident: Brother Nevola says he took a long bike trip and came back with five unusual bottles as souvenirs. The kids visiting the youth center saw those five bottles and started bringing in more bottles from home. Others contributed coasters, glasses and beermats. Someone found a placard for the old Vinohrady brewery in an attic — not a worthless item for collectors of breweriana by any means — and brought that in. Within just a few years, the collection had expanded to cover several hallways on several floors of the complex. It has been evaluated by authorities as having the only copies of several historical beer bottles in existence.