Beer aficionados tend to go for extremes: the highest-rated and most sought-after beers listed on sites like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer are often extremely high in alcohol, extremely bitter, extremely sour — or some combination of all three.

But your average beer drinker isn’t into extremes. Most people who want a beer — here in Prague and elsewhere — pretty much want “just a beer.” In this country, the pint they reach for most often is Gambrinus, which occupies 25% of the Czech market between its two brands, Gambrinus Světlý and Gambrinus Premium, equivalent to 10° and 12° pale lagers.

Now the country’s most popular brand has expanded its lineup to a full troika with the new Gambrinus Excelent, also a pale lager, albeit at 11°. However, this beer is much more of a departure from its two stablemates than it sounds.

While the first two Gambrinus beers are actually variations on a single stronger beer brewed at 13° and then diluted to approximate the grades of 10° and 12°, Gambrinus 11° Excelent is brewed separately — and not at such a higher gravity, according to brewmaster Jan Hlaváček. While there can be some dilution, he said, it is on the scale of 0.2% or so, and only to ensure a standardization in the final product.

“We would like to be sure that it is exactly 11.3°,” Mr. Hlaváček said, referring to the equivalent percentage of sugars present before the beer’s fermentation.

Another difference: Gambrinus 11° Excelent is brewed with caramel malt, which is not in the other Gambrinus beers, using a traditional double-decoction mash. It is hopped with two doses of Sládek hops and a final late dose of the great Žatecký poloraný červeňák hops, all Czech varieties, all in the form of pellets.

So how does it taste?

Surprisingly nice. In appearance, it is a medium gold that at first glance could even pass for Pilsner Urquell, with a very thick white head that lasts and lasts. It has fine carbonation, approaching fizziness. The nose gives up notes of caramel and whole grains. In the mouth there’s a lightly sugary body — a perfect Czech “medium” — with notes of maize and just a hint of maple syrup with a very moderate hop bitterness, finishing more on the sweet than the bitter side.

Don’t get me wrong: Gambrinus 11° Excelent isn’t going to please everyone, and certainly not most hardcore beer fans. Despite the names being thrown around, there’s not a lot of Saaz hop aroma going on. But in the daily-drinker category that Gambrinus completely owns in the Czech Republic, this is a nice addition.

If you don’t regularly drink Gambrinus already, this probably isn’t the beer for you. But if you find yourself in a pub that only has Gambrinus, you might enjoy Gambrinus 11° instead of ordering water or whatever iffy wine they have there. And if your friends are all Gambrinus drinkers, this might be a way to introduce them to some slightly different tastes.

And who knows? One of them might become a hardcore beer fan because of it.

When you spend all day at Pilsner Urquell, you learn lots of things.

Above is a shot of senior trade brewmaster Václav Berka in the maltings with the crew from the Discovery Channel. During a full day of shooting, I had time to ask a number of questions about the brewery and how it operates. The malt house is a case in point: it’s not on the standard tour at Pilsner Urquell, so few visitors get to see it. And yet it’s a rather special feature: Pilsner Urquell is the only major Czech brewery which still has its own maltings, buying raw barley from Czech and Moravian farmers and producing just one type of malt which constitutes 100% of the grist of Pilsner Urquell. Any extra malt is sold to Czech homebrewers and small producers, or used to make Kozel.

And while many people assume Pilsner Urquell and Gambrinus to be the same brewery, there are enough differences to consider them as separate entities. To start, the Pilsner Urquell brewhouse is only used for that beer; Gambrinus has its own, separate brewhouse.

More factoids gleaned during a day at Pilsner Urquell:

• Yes, Gambrinus is now produced through high-gravity brewing: there is just one original Gambrinus beer which is brewed at 13° and then diluted to make the two Gambrinus beers on the market.

• Gambrinus and Pilsner Urquell are produced in two different brewhouses using two different yeast strains: Gambrinus uses the company’s W strain, Pilsner Urquell the H strain.

• Every week a new batch of yeast is started from a single yeast cell.

• Each batch of yeast is used three or four times.

• Pilsner Urquell today has 40 IBUs. The hops, in the form of pellets, are 100% Saaz, added in three hoppings.

• Pilsner Urquell has about 35 days of lagering, which the brewery says is the same as in Josef Groll’s time.

• Pilsner Urquell recently switched to flash pasteurization, using a very moderate amount of 15 pasteurization units.

• The only unpasteurized beers from the Pilsner Urquell group are sold in tanks. There is tank Pilsner Urquell, tank Gambrinus, tank Kozel, tank Radegast, and even tank Birrell, the group’s non-alcoholic beer which did so well at the World Beer Cup.

• Nine coopers remain on staff to maintain the oak barrels shown in the brewery tour at Pilsner Urquell. This year the coopers made the brewery’s first new wooden fermentation vessels in 35 years.

There’s a fair amount of beer in the Swedish capital, and much of it seems to be Czech. Step into a bar in the trendy neighborhood of Södermalm and you’ll probably see Krušovice and Pilsner Urquell as often as anything else. Czech lagers seem to be frequently sold as premium imports here, an in the case of Starobrno’s position at the top of the list at Pet Sounds Bar, a chic offshoot of a legendary local record shop. A few other Czech brands — including Primátor — show up at the many outlets of Systembolaget, the Swedish government’s alcohol monopoly.

And then there’s Stockholm’s Švejk pub.

Despite the similarity of the name, Krogen Soldaten Švejk is unlike any of the Švejk pubs — or any pubs — you might have seen in Prague. To start, look at the beer list.

On draft, Krogen Soldaten Švejk offers:

1. Bernard 12° světlý ležák.
2. Bernard kvasnicový ležák.
3. Bernard 13° tmavý.
4. Primátor Premium.
5. Primátor Polotmavý.
6. Platan Premium.
7. Bohemia Regent 12°.
8. Krušovice Mušketýr.
9. Rohozec Skalák.
10. Pilsner Urquell.
11. Gambrinus 12° světlý ležák.

That is to say that while most bars in Prague carry just one brand, Krogen Soldaten Švejk offers eleven Czech beers on draft, most of which the pub imports itself.

“Urquell we buy from an agent, Krušovice too, but the others we bring in ourselves,” said Jari Ounasvuori, the pub’s manager. “Every two months, we bring in a truck filled with kegs of our beers, and we have a lagering facility about 30 kilometers outside of town.”

Founded by a Czech émigré — Ounasvuori’s father-in-law — way back in 1974, Krogen Soldaten Švejk had to wait until 1996 to serve its first real Czech lager. (The first was Bohemia Regent; others were added over time. At one point, the pub also stocked Budvar, Ounasvuori said, but it was given up due to difficulties with that brand’s local distributor.)

To pair with the pivo, there’s Czech grub as well: goulash, potato pancakes, schnitzel and vepřoknedlozelo. And as a digestif, Krogen Soldaten Švejk has Czech slivovice. Due to the draconic nature of Swedish alcohol taxation, however, slivovice creates a black hole, at least in business terms.

“Because of the alcohol level, I pay so much in taxes on the slivovice that I don’t make any real profit,” Ounasvuori said. “But I wanted to have it.”

While there’s nothing quite like Krogen Soldaten Švejk anywhere else in Stockholm, Ounasvuori said that there’s been some talk of Pilsner Urquell opening one of their Pilsner Urquell Original Restaurants in the Swedish capital.

“But they have to realize that won’t work here,” Ounasvuori said. “People here won’t go to a pub with just one kind of beer. This isn’t Prague.”

Amen to that. It is ironic, however, that it’s easier to find a Czech beer like Skalák on draft in Stockholm than in Prague. In fact, I can’t think of a single pub that serves eleven beers on draft anywhere in the Czech lands. The closest might be the legendary Modrý Abbé, but that’s more than a few taps shorter than Krogen Soldaten Švejk.

As for the beer, I thought that Bernard’s kvasnicové tasted a bit different when I tried it at Krogen Soldaten Švejk: slightly spicier and denser in flavor than normal, perhaps due to the trip, or maybe to the extended lagering. The only other significant difference from home was the pub’s vibrant atmosphere, with a great mix of young and old and a bustling, neighborly feel that is sadly lacking in most Prague beer halls.

I’ll be happy, however, if pubs in Prague merely followed Krogen Soldaten Švejk’s lead in offering a greater variety — and greater quality — of draft beer. If they do that, the improved atmosphere will surely follow.

One of the big events of American brewing is called the World Beer Cup, which took place last weekend in San Diego, California. Also known as the “Beer Olympics,” every two years the World Beer Cup hands out gold, silver and bronze medals in 91 beer categories, including one for the so-called “Bohemian-style Pilsener.”

Unlike the strangely named World Series, the World Beer Cup actually claims to have an international scope, noting that it had entries from 56 countries and judges from 18 different lands at the last event in 2006. At least a few Czechs served as judges at the 2008 competition, including Jan Šuráň from Pivo Praha / Pivovarský dům and Honza Kočka from Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf and Pivnidenik.cz.

The results are out. Two Czech beers won medals at the World Beer Cup.

For the world’s best “non-alcoholic malt beverage,” a gold medal — first place — to Radegast Birell from the Pilsner Urquell group.

For the world’s best “Bohemian-style Pilsener,” a bronze medal — third place — to Gambrinus Premium from the Pilsner Urquell group.

And that’s it.

(Silence.)

Ahem.

If you’re a fan of Czech beer, these results are surprising.

How can I put this? I guess I could say that Gambrinus Premium is not widely thought of as our country’s best brew.

In fact, it’s not even thought of as the Pilsner Urquell group’s best brew. If Gambrinus Premium wins a medal for “Bohemian-style Pilsener” and Pilsner Urquell doesn’t even place, something is off: as you might expect, Pilsner Urquell is the brewery’s flagship, and widely considered the beer of the highest overall quality among high-volume Pilsner-style beers in the Czech lands. By contrast, it would be an understatement to say that Gambrinus has a less-than-glowing reputation here.

Was Pilsner Urquell not entered?

Were no other Czech beers present in San Diego?

Are we supposed to understand that Gambrinus Pilsner actually is the best golden lager from the Czech lands?

(What fools we are! All this time we’ve been drinking rich, luscious lagers from regional producers, when we could have been enjoying Gambrinus!)

So much for Bohemian “Pilsener.” (On that note, how can I trust a competition that claims knowledge over, for example, German brewing styles, but which has trouble using the correct German orthography? Forget the extra E on Pilsner, I’m talking about when the Brewers Association guidelines repeatedly spelled Leipzig’s great sour beer as “Göse” instead of Gose.)

And while Radegast nonalcoholic doesn’t have the same reputation, it’s hard to believe it’s the best such beer in the world when a couple of other Czech nonalcoholic brews taste better: mainly, those from Bernard. SPP, the Czech beer consumers’ organization, seems to agree, awarding Bernard the prize for nonalcoholic beer of the year at their awards ceremony in 2007. Even people who don’t like beer rate Bernard’s nonalcoholic above Radegast.

It’s hard to think much of the awards announcement without knowing more about who was present and who was judging. For now, it gets a big meh.

But I can add this: from Europe, the World Beer Cup does seems a lot like the World Series — another American event that claims a global perspective while reinforcing a widespread opinion of American myopia.

And when I say widespread, I do not mean “widespread in America.” I mean widespread in the world.

Czech beer has inspired imitations, reproductions and outright ripoffs around the globe. There’s the world-wide use of the term Pilsner, which is only applied to one beer in the country of its birth. At least two beers from Anheuser-Busch have taken Czech names, only one of which is Budweiser. (Who’s quick enough to tell me the second?)

Way out in Utah there’s the Bohemian Brewery, founded by a family of Czech émigrés, which joins National Bohemia from Maryland, Bohemia from Mexico, and Sagres Bohemia from Portugal. And then there’s this.

The picture above — taken by Mark Lowerson of the Stickyrice food blog and used with his permission — is from Gammebeer, a Czech-style brewpub in Hanoi, Vietnam. In a brazen use of seriously copyrighted material, the glasses achieve two noteworthy feats:

It misspells Gambrinus (Gambrinuz? Gambrinu2?), and swipes the trademark G of the other beer from Pilsen, now part of SAB-Miller.

It conflates Gambrinus, the fourteenth-century king of Flanders, with the nineteenth-century railway stationmaster who became Pivovar Velké Březno’s Zippich mascot.

Separated at birth?

I’ll call it an homage and leave it at that. Of course, the lawyers who work for the breweries might have other ideas…