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

Beer geeks everywhere are talking about the small Scottish brewery BrewDog, and for good reason: despite being just a couple of years old — meaning very young — they’re already putting out some head-turningly good beers, and backing them up with a masterful PR game.

One of their recent nice moves on the marketing pitch: offering a sampler of prototype beers and asking drinkers to pick their favorites. Among the prototypes was Zeit Geist, “a 5.1% Black lager taking inspiration from the Czech classics.” As an imitation of a clasic Czech dark lager, it was just begging to be compared to three classics of the genre: Bernard’s speciální černé pivo, Bohemia Regent tmavý ležák and Budweiser Budvar tmavý ležák.

So how does the Scottish upstart compare to the old masters?

In terms of overall drinkability, I would say it wins. And in the case of Bohemia Regent and Budvar dark, Zeit Geist doesn’t just beat them — it pushes them in the gutter and takes their lunch money. Here’s how they stacked up.

Bernard speciální černé pivo: This beer had the nicest, fluffiest and longest-lasting head, pouring a very deep amber, almost black with a pronounced nose of Dutch cocoa. It was sweeter than Budvar but less sweet than Bohemia Regent, and much sweeter than Zeit Geist (more on this later). In the mouth there were notes of cocoa and biscuity malt. A great beer.

Bohemia Regent 12° tmavý ležák: This beer had the least long-lasting head and was lightest in color: deep amber, but far from black. There were cola notes in the nose and a gingery sweetness in the mouth. It was the sweetest of all four, with a clumsy, saccharine finish.

Budweiser Budvar tmavý ležák: This beer had the second longest-lasting head, fluffy creamy color, second darkest color, but the nose had weird cooked-vegetable notes. It had a thin body, and, in comparison to Bernard and Zeit Geist, was not terribly charismatic. It turned out to be the least appealing of all four, making me think that this was perhaps a bad bottle.

Brewdog Zeit Geist: Virtually identical in color to Bernard, though not as long-lasting in the foam department. The nose smells conspicuously like smoked malt, and there’s a pronounced Rauchbier taste in the mouth. Very nice, and reminiscent of their Rip Tide stout in the body with a strong astringence in the finish.

Bernard, as usual, was excellent; the Bohemia Regent and Budvar versions were disappointing. But here’s the thing: although I really liked Zeit Geist, I don’t think it tasted very Czech, certainly not like the other three beers, which easily stood together in a group: Zeit Geist was far more dry in the finish, far more of a German Schwarzbier than a Czech tmavý ležák. If I had known this, I would have compared it to Herold Bohemian Black Lager, one of the only dry dark lagers in the Czech lands.

In any case, it was interesting to see what Scottish brewers think a Czech dark lager should taste like. If I understand it correctly, Zeit Geist didn’t make the cut in the voting, so I’m not sure if we’ll ever see it produced: my prototype bottle, visible at the right of the picture at the top of the page, didn’t have a label or any means of identification beyond the cap. As it turns out, Brew Dog’s contest winner was a beer in the style of yet another country: Chaos Theory, an absolutely outstanding, extremely complex take on an hoppy, citrus-scented American IPA.

Almost exclusively, Czech brewing means lagers, beers produced with bottom-fermenting lager yeasts at colder temperatures and over longer periods of time. Today, some 95% of Czech production is composed of golden lagers, while about 5% is dark lager. The few beers made with top-fermenting yeasts — ales and wheat beers, brewed at warmer temperatures and usually over shorter periods of time — now make up less than one half of one percent of Czech production. And yet just a little over 140 years ago, ales and wheat beers were still the standard here.

But then came a change in Czech brewing which was so sudden and so severe that it counted as news even on the other side of the world. An article in the New York Times of December 3, 1876, detailed the “complete revolution” in brewing that was then taking place in Bohemia, the western half of today’s Czech Republic, noting the shift away from what it calls “high fermentation” breweries (meaning ales) to the new, “low fermentation” breweries (producing lagers). As the article shows, the arrival of lagers was swift and merciless, killing off more than 260 ale breweries between 1860 and 1870 in Bohemia alone.

Not only did the older style of beers get whacked, but lagers suddenly became ubiquitous. Between 1860 and 1870, the article says, “low fermentation” lager breweries rose in number from 135 to 831.

As brief as this unsigned article may be, it is filled with interesting details. A few quotes:

“When I was a student in Berlin, in 1851, there were certain places specially devoted to the sale of Bavarian beer, which was then making its way into public favor. This beer is prepared by what is called the process of low fermentation; the name being given partly because the yeast of the beer, instead of rising to the top and issuing through the bunghole, falls to the bottom of the cask; but partly, also, because it is produced at low temperature.”

“The other and older process, called high fermentation, is far more handy, expeditious, and cheap. In high fermentation eight days suffice for the production of the beer; in low fermentation, ten, fifteen, even twenty days are found necessary.”

“Vast quantities of ice, moreover, are consumed in the process of low fermentation. In the single brewery of Dreher, in Vienna, a hundred million pounds of ice are consumed annually in the cooling of wort and beer.”

“The sole reason for this vast change — a change which involves greater expenditure of time, labor, and money — is the additional command which it gives the brewer over the torturous ferments of disease. These ferments, which, it is to be remembered, are living organisms, have their activity suspended by temperatures below 10° C., and as long as they remain reduced to torpor the beer remains untainted either by acidity or putrefaction.”

“The beer of low fermentation is produced in Winter, and kept in cool cellars, the brewer being thus enabled to dispose of it at his leisure.”

“Hops, it may be remarked, act to some extent as an antiseptic to beer. The essential oil of the hop is bactericidal: hence the strong impregnation with hop juice of all beer intended for exportation.”

Though that is most of the article, there’s far too much left unsaid. Most importantly, if they were not lagers (which the article calls a Bavarian style), what were the beers in nineteenth-century Bohemia like?

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t tell us what the pre-lager beers were brewed from, nor how they tasted. Some have suggested that Bohemia’s pre-lager beers were probably brown, murky and slightly sour, if not completely sour due to the “torturous ferments of disease.” Certainly wheat beers were once famous in the Czech lands (though in an ironic twist, wheat beers are now widely thought of here as Bavarian).

As I understand it, the brewery in Český Krumlov, now known as Eggenberg, produced both wheat and barley beers before discontinuing the use of barley entirely between 1800 and 1837. (Today, it brews only lagers using 100% barley malts.)

As the article shows, there’s a lot to learn about pre-lager brewing in Bohemia. Here’s a thought: at a tasting of the beers from Bohemia Regent a couple of weeks ago, I asked the brewer if he was thinking about putting out a wheat beer. Not really, he said. In his opinion, a more traditional beer for his region would be brewed from rye.