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.

Although I believe in the importance of local ownership for breweries, I’m not totally convinced that that local owners are always better owners. Sometimes local owners can screw things up. Sometimes foreign owners can improve things. Look at what happened with Krušovice Černé, the legendary black lager from the brewery once owned by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II.

Pivovar Krušovice passed through many hands over the centuries, including foreigners like the Habsburg Emperor himself. Probably founded in 1517 when the local lords were granted brewing rights, it is first mentioned in print in 1581 as the property of Jiří Bírka z Násile, who had moved his brewery from Rakovník to a farm in nearby Krušovice, according to the history at Pivovary.info. In 1583 it was purchased from Jiří Bírka z Násile by Rudolph for 11,500 Meissner kopa, thus becoming the property of the Czech Crown, later falling into the hands of Bohemia’s Valdštejn and Fürstenberk noble families until after the war. It was nationalized by the Communists in 1948.

I’ve been told by brewers that, under Communism, Pivovar Krušovice produced pale lagers of such quality that they could — and probably did — pass for Pilsner Urquell on the export market. Krušovice Černé was certainly revered by people who know good beer. But something happened after the Velvet Revolution, while the brewery was under the ownership of Binding Brauerei group, part of the Dr. Oetker frozen-pizza and processed-food empire. As I put it in Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic, the beers sucked.

Part of that suck was the use of artificial ingredients, which, if I remember correctly, included both E150a, or caramel coloring, and E954, saccharine, in Krušovice Černé, which resulted in a medicinal, sickly sweet finish. So it was to my surprise when I tasted one recently for the first time in a while and found that I liked it plenty. The finish didn’t seem too sweet anymore. On draft at the Krušovická pivnice at Národní 7 in Prague, the beer had enough cola, coffee, spice and licorice notes that I stopped to pick up a bottle on the way home that night.

And then I read the ingredients. “Water, barley malt, hops, hop extract, yeast.” No E150a. No E954. Not even any E300, or ascorbic acid, another common additive in Czech beers.

So Krušovice Černé is once again made without artificial colorings and sweeteners and seems better off for it. The big difference between now and then is yet another change of ownership: Pivovar Krušovice was purchased by Heineken in June of 2007. The Dutch giant might not be everyone’s favorite international brewing conglomerate (and really, which one is?), but to judge by just one dark lager and how it tastes, it’s a step up from the frozen-pizza guys.

Run out and buy it? If you like dark lagers, definitely. The beer’s 3.8% alcohol — this is a desítka, or 10° Plato brew — makes it a very manageable lunch beer. Ratebeer also lists a version with just 3.5% alcohol in Sweden. In fact, both the domestic and the Scandinavian brews are much weaker than Krušovice Černé once was: the beer is descended from a celebratory brew called Grand, originally brewed at 14° and with around 6% alcohol, first made sometime around 1900. (That’s not a lunch beer by any means, at least not for me.)

I think this shows that not all foreign owners are equal, or at least not equally bad. Nor are all local owners universally good for breweries and beer lovers. One Czech brewmaster I spoke with recently noted that his beers improved remarkably once his brewery was bought by foreigners, who then provided enough capital to invest in better ingredients. Now it’s all Žatecký poloraný červeňák and Haná barley, all the time. But in the bad old days when his brewery was still Czech-owned, he said, they used Chinese hops and malt from Slovakia.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: It now appears that Heineken did not apply for the “Czech Beer” designation for its own brew, but rather on the part of Krušovice. This post has been corrected.

Today’s Prague Daily Monitor has a translation of a story from the Czech newspaper Hospodářské Noviny on the first beers to use the České Pivo (“Czech Beer”) label. Officially approved by the EU last autumn, the label is a mark of Protected Geographical Indication that indicates minimal levels of local products, traditional methods of production, and the beer’s place of origin.

And the first brand listed in the story is Heineken.

That is to say that Heineken, virtually synonymous with Holland, is said to be among the first brewers to apply for and use the official EU designation of “Czech Beer.” While an earlier version of this post assumed that Czech-brewed Heineken would qualify as “Czech Beer,” it now appears that Heineken has only applied on behalf of its Krušovice subsidiary. However, problems with the designation remain.

When we first reported this story, Honza Kočka commented that his brewery, Kocour, apparently wouldn’t qualify for the designation, despite traditional methods of production and Czech ingredients, simply because its location — inside the Czech Republic but very close to the country’s northern border — lay outside the area described by the regulations.

If my reading of the “Czech Beer” regulations is correct, a highly hopped pale lager with more than the upper limit of 45 EBC units of bitterness will not qualify for the “Czech Beer” label, no matter where it is made.

Also interesting: the designation will include a range of beers from 2.6% to 6% alcohol by volume. Meaning if a beer has 6.5% alcohol, it no longer qualifies to call itself “Czech Beer,” despite having 100% Czech ingredients.

However, the beers that do qualify as “Czech Beer” don’t technically have to use 100% Czech ingredients — nothing close to it. Take wonderful Czech Saaz hops, for example, which might be considered a key element of Czech beer. The regulations state:

The minimum quantity of Czech hops or products processed from them is 30 % for pale lagers and at least 15 % for other types of beer.

That is to say: if a pale lager uses 30% Czech hops and 70% Chinese hops, it can still be “Czech Beer.”

Of course, Krušovice and other famous dark lagers can get by with up to 85% Chinese hops and still call themselves “Czech Beer.”

If there was any doubt about the efficacy of the label before, it is now clear exactly how much sense it makes.

By all means, have a Czech beer. But there’s no need to look for the “Czech Beer” label to do so.

Hungary is wine country, but it has a long tradition of brewing as well, with the legendary name of Dreher — as in Anton — the brand of one of the country’s best-known pale lagers. Unfortunately, finding good craft beer from the country’s small producers is tricky. Just about everywhere you go, you’ll come across Dreher (part of SABMiller) and Soproni (a Heineken brand). But great local beer? Microbrews? Not so easy to spot.

We spent most of the last two weeks in Hungary, first at Lake Balaton, then in Budapest, where we I finally found a couple of interesting beers. Or at least, what looked like interesting beers. My Hungarian is limited to the five words most commonly found on restaurant menus, but when I saw the sign above, I was pretty sure that “házi” might be something like “domácí” in Czech, the equivalent of “house-made,” and I knew that “sör” meant beer. So I picked up a bottle of each brew: a világos, or pale, called Gutberger, and a barna, or dark, called Braunger.

Both come from the Szögedi Sörfőzde, which says it was established in 1993. Both were bombshell-shaped plastic (PET) containers of 1 liter, or just about two pints. Each cost the equivalent of $1.50.

Unfortunately, the packaging and price turned out to be the high points of the bottles from Szögedi Sörfőzde. The dark Braunger had a decent appearance of clear amber with thick-set beige foam. There were some light cola flavors in the mouth, as well as a touch of gingery spice, and I detected some not-so-fun cardboard flavors in the finish. That was still better than the Gutberger, which poured a very light gold with an industrially white foamy head that immediately died. The Gutberger’s nose was only slightly grainy, and there was no discernible hop aroma or flavor. Or any other aromas or flavors of any kind.

It brought to mind Jean-Pierre Van Roy’s proclamation about industrial beers: like him, I would rather drink a good industrial beer than a bad artisanal beer, and in this case I’d rather have a glass of SABMiller’s Dreher (not a bad pale lager) or a dark Soproni Démon, which I quite liked, regardless of how much I want to support small producers.

And of course Hungary does have better craft beer producers: there’s the Gyertyános brewery at Miskolc, which has a great reputation among Hungarian foodies, and which was part of the V3 Rauchbier miracle produced in conjunction with Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf and Slovakia’s Kaltenecker. There is also Budapest’s “Only Good Beers!” store, Csak a jó sör!, which sells La Chouffe and other international specialities which are not found even in beer-loving countries like the Czech Republic.

When I return to Hungary, I’ll keep looking for good local brews. But I’ll probably settle for my favorite discovery from this last trip: a few bottles of cserszegi fűszeres, a lovely indigenous white wine, from an excellent local producer like Jásdi. “Only Good Beers” is a great name for a beer store. But sometimes good wines will have to do.

The St. Louis Business Journal is reporting that Anheuser-Busch InBev is negotiating with Heineken to sell its Czech brands to the Dutch brewer. The paper places Staropramen’s valuation between $255 million and $306 million.

We’ve seen this before. Almost exactly a year ago, Heineken’s takeover of the Czech Drinks Union brands was given the green light. That move pushed Heineken into third place on the Czech market, just ahead of the legendary Budweiser Budvar, but still lower than Heineken’s traditional market share. At the time, Ron Pattinson sagely noted that Heineken doesn’t enter a market to take third place.

By purchasing Staropramen — and thus the group’s other brands Braník, Měšťan, Ostravar, Kelt, Velvet and Vratislav — Heineken would move to a very solid second place behind SAB Miller’s Pilsner Urquell group, standing roughly three times larger than still-state-owned Budweiser Budvar in third place (with around 30% of the Czech market vs. about 10%). It would combine the above-mentioned Staropramen brands with its current Czech portfolio of Krušovice, Hostan, Starobrno, Zlatopramen, Velké Březno, Louny and Kutná Hora.

Interestingly, the exit of Anheuser-Busch InBev from the Czech market might finally put an end to the idea of American Budweiser ever buying Czech Budweiser. However, Budweiser Budvar is still on schedule to be privatized in the next year or two. With its expanding presence here, Heineken would be a natural suitor. That would move it to around 40% market share, right behind SAB Miller’s approximate 49%.

What remains to be seen with the current takeover is if the Czech anti-monopoly office will rise from its slumber (prediction: not freakin’ likely). So assuming the takeover of Staropramen by Heineken goes forward, it might be time to name your Czech Beer Brand Dead Pool.

In Slovakia, for example, Heineken has shuttered many of the breweries they’ve purchased (such as Martiner and Corgoň), keeping the brands alive but moving production to the massive Hurbanovo brewery. And many of Staropramen’s brands here are similar zombies: Braník is no longer brewed at Braník; Měšťan is no longer brewed in Holešovice.

So make your predictions now. What Staropramen or Heineken breweries will be closed? How many more zombie beers will we see here? And will Heineken really end up buying Budvar Budvar?

NB: of the Czech brands that Heineken already owns, Hostan is pretty much over: it’s been partly brewed at Starobrno for ages. And over at Pivní deník, Honza Kočka jokingly predicts that it is the Staropramen brewery — located in prime real estate overlooking the Vltava river — that will end up being sold and turned into upscale loft apartments, just like what happened to the Holešovice brewery after Staropramen sold it. As always, “irony follows hubris” seems like a fairly safe bet.

Last year I was invited to work for the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny as their weekly restaurant reviewer. For most of us, that might sound like a dream job, but I had already spent more than five years as the restaurant reviewer at the Prague Post, even seeing a story from there included in Best Food Writing 2005, and I had little interest in returning to the same task, especially since I was having so much fun writing travel stories from all around Europe. Despite being flattered by the offer, I passed, suggesting instead that the editors contact the Prague Spoon’s Laura Baranik, who has since taken to it swimmingly.

But resolutions are meant to be broken, and I’ve recently agreed to occasionally review a few restaurants for Lidové noviny, either when Ms. Baranik is on vacation or as a means of helping out with what I know is very stressful, very demanding work.

To be honest, I’ve enjoyed writing reviews again much more than I thought I would. I even managed to get something about good beer into this weekend’s article.

Here’s a piece on the expat-friendly restaurant Vermeer, which got the local spodní prádlo in a clove hitch when word of its classic American diner sandwiches first hit the food forum at Expats.cz. In case you’d rather read it in English, I’ll post the entire English version at some point, but for now, here’s the relevant paragraph:

This kind of food goes extremely well with a great beer, but Vermeer offers Krušovice Mušketýr (35 Kč per .5l) with Heineken (65 Kč) as its top choice on draft, which the owner told me is because he wants to provide what foreigners want. Speaking as a foreigner, I can tell you I didn’t move to the Czech Republic to drink Dutch beer. What I want — and what many other expatriates here are absolutely crazy about — are the outstanding, extremely flavorful beers from small producers like Pivovar Kout na Šumavě and Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf. Personally, I’d gladly pay a higher price for those beers. For Krušovice, not unless I’m very thirsty. For Heineken, absolutely never.

Call it one small strategic strike for craft beer in Prague. But the bigger picture is this: restaurateurs may care (or claim to care) about the food and drink they serve. But in a beer-loving country like the Czech Republic, a restaurant owner who cares enough to have food items imported especially for him will still offer the biggest, blandest, most mass-produced beer around.

I undertand it’s hard to watch over every single aspect of your restaurant, and if you haven’t had any kind of education in beer, it might be hard to understand what difference it makes. But believing that your customers prefer to drink overpriced Heineken — a so-called “Pilsner” — in the very country that invented Pilsner brewing? In a country that loves beer so much it drinks more of it than anyone else in the world?

Just hypothetically: if you opened a stylish restaurant in, say, Paris, how much attention would you pay to the wine? Do you think that if you offered a high-volume cabernet sauvignon or a so-called “Burgundy” from the biggest industrial winery in California, your customers would be into that? Would you tell people it’s because that’s what tourists want?

Well, just my 40 hellers. In any case, I’ll be reviewing regularly while Ms. Baranik is out this month; after that, I’ll continue to contribute pieces to Lidové noviny occasionally, in addition to my regular work for Concierge.com (where I cover Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana, Dubrovnik and the Dalmatian Coast), and the travel section of the New York Times (where so far I’ve reviewed restaurants in Prague, Budapest and Vienna). At the moment I’m not planning to sneak craft beer references into forthcoming restaurant reviews in any of those publications. But you know, sometimes plans change.

It’s the start of the travel season, and that means I’ve been on deadline for a handful of stories. Consequently, my thoughts are fairly well fragmented at this point. Here are some of the many beery notes that are bouncing around my cranium.

Yesterday I saw the first poster (at a bus stop) for the Czech Beer Festival. Considering the starting pistol is set to go off in just 10 days, you’d think there would be a wee bit more coverage — is the word getting out? Someone, at least, should follow-up on the fact that they told us they’re brewing and serving a beer for dogs.

I recently tried another Lučan Premium Tmavé, a once-great dark beer from Žatec, and found that it was nowhere near as dark — nor as flavorful — as it was in my earlier tasting notes. Max Bahnson came to a similar conclusion about the whole line of Žatec beers at Pivní filosof. It reminds me of how different beer (and beer writing) is from wine, given beer’s ephemeral nature: a great beer can become mediocre with the next batch, but a great wine often seems more permanent, or at least more permanently great, because everyone knows you’re talking about (at least if it were beer) the 2007 Lučan Premium Tmavé, not every Lučan beer ever made. This is different in the case of beers marked with a vintage, but how many of those are there, anyway?

I’m not sure if it had anything to do with our anti-Heineken email campaign (more on this later), but there’s clearly much less Heineken on display at my local Albert supermarket: it used to take up about a meter of shelf space, plus several grab-a-beer cases on the floor. Now it takes up half a meter of shelf space and that’s it. Did someone hear us?

In related news, I had a Starobrno Medium (owned by Heineken) yesterday and thought it was great. Not craft beer, but a good factory-made lager by any measure. So perhaps foreign ownership of local beers is not the end of the world — aside from the repatriation of profits, that is.

To judge by numerous recent tastings, Primátor’s Weizenbier is currently firing on all cylinders. Just in time for summer…

Among other assignments, I’m working on an article about Prague’s beer gardens, so I visited a small one nearby that is said to be an occasional haunt of Czech President Václav Klaus: Na krásné vyhlídce (Na Dlážděnce 35, Prague 8). Mr. Klaus wasn’t there, but just before I left First Lady Livia Klausová did stop by. The pub serves Pilsner Urquell and Gambrinus 10°, as well as Schöfferhofer pale and dark wheat beers, both of which were okay.

On that note, how hard would it be to get them to serve Primátor’s Weizenbier?

Even better, how can we get the Letná beer garden to serve it? More on this soon… I have a plan.

Pivovarský klub is holding the Days of Polish Beer starting on Tuesday 20 May with a tasting at — CORRECTION — 3 p.m., which lasts UNTIL 6 p.m., after which the four Polish brews will be on draft until they run out. If you want to attend the tasting, it’s 100 Kč for those who are not members of SPP or Pivoklub, and you’ll need to make a reservation at Tel. 222 315 777.

Budvar dark is a lovely beer. Herold dark is still my current favorite. But perhaps because I tasted that amazing 101 Oktan Imperial Stout in Stockholm, as well as the good Carnegie porter and Slottskällans Imperial Stout I brought home, I’m having trouble getting back into pale and golden lagers: it’s either wheat beers or darks at this point.

Thus I was very glad to read Pivní filosof’s take on Grado Plato’s Chocarrubica, a beer that deserves more attention. I’m working on my piece about Italy at the moment and I know I’m going to ask why this beer isn’t in more high-end restaurants, both in the kitchen and on the beverage list.

On that note, I had lunch recently at the Four Seasons’ Allegro restaurant, famous for earning the first Michelin star in all of post-communist Europe (take that, Moscow). Among many outstanding dishes, chef Andrea Accordi serves a rich trio of foie gras, prepared au torchon, “nature” with rhubarb, and as foie gras ice cream, cooked with Bernard dark beer and paired by the sommelier with Guinness Extra Stout. How many other high-end restaurants in Prague do anything of interest with beer?

One comes to mind: on Friday 16 May I’ll be giving a lengthy talk entitled “Czech Beer: Beyond Plzeň” at Essensia, the restaurant inside Prague’s Mandarin Oriental hotel. The talk will include tastings from some of the country’s best small producers, all focusing on beers that are not made in the Pilsner style, along with an array of Essentia’s excellent pan-Asian cuisine. For more information: Tel. +420 233 088 888.

The news yesterday was that Czech regulators have given a big green light to Heineken’s takeover of the four Drinks Union breweries (Zlatopramen, Louny, Velké Březno and Kutná Hora). According to Reuters, the Czech anti-monopoly office has no problem whatsoever with the deal.

There’s a great quote at the end of the story: “The office came to the conclusion that the merger will not result into a substantial breach of competition given a relatively low market share of both competitors and the existence of significant competitors.”

In other words, “Since SABMiller already has 49% of the market, what difference does it make?”

Perhaps not much, at least for now. And some have said that Heineken helped, rather than hurt, Starobrno in its takeover there. (I noticed better logos and a redecorated brewery taproom.) But Ron Pattinson noted that Heineken is unlikely to aim for a small share of any market it enters, predicting that the Dutch would shoot for something closer to 30 or 40%.

There are only a few ways to get there from here, and all of them involve buying whole groups of Czech breweries. I know of one great small brewery in sale negotiations at the moment, but that by itself wouldn’t get Heineken even another 2% of the market.

Think K Brewery Group, with its shares in Platan, Svijany, Černá Hora and Rohozec, and which is listed in the commercial register as a real-estate agency. Or PMS Přerov, whose three breweries (Litovel, Zubr and Holba) together brew about 900,000 hectoliters annually, giving the group around 5% of the domestic market.

In any case, more takeovers are coming. If the anti-monopoly office doesn’t have a problem with them now, will they possibly take a stand against them later?

And where is our CAMRA in all this? Where oh where is our Danske Ølentusiaster?

Heineken announced yesterday that it is taking over the four great brands of the Czech Republic’s Drinks Union brewery group (Zlatopramen, Velké Březno, Louny and Kutná Hora), which have an overall market share of 4%. The takeover will make Heineken the third-largest player in the Czech market after SAB-Miller and InBev, bumping Budvar to fourth place.

It’s not exactly a surprise — news of the proposed sale was floated last autumn — but it still caused ripples across the small pond of the beer world: within a few hours I was contacted by friends at CAMRA about the purchase, and EBCU members apparently all got the message via email. Back here at home, Pivní deník reported the story, posing some interesting questions.

To paraphrase: If Heineken decides to close some of its newly acquired breweries in the name of streamlining and efficiency, who will be the first? Louny, which is closest to Krušovice, which already has plenty of unused brewing capacity? Or Kutná Hora, which Drinks Union doesn’t actually own but only rents from the town? Or one of the twinned breweries of Zlatopramen and Velké Březno? Would two breweries in the same town really survive a takeover by such a major international brewing group?

No one in the know has breathed a word. Here’s what we have so far: Heineken’s market share just jumped to around 12–14%. Newspapers have quoted Jiří Fusek, head of the association of Small and Independent Breweries, as saying that Heineken is likely to seek more acquisitions here, according to Prague Daily Monitor’s Czech press review (subscription required). Heineken already owns Krušovice, Hostan, Starobrno and Zlatý Bažant in Slovakia. They’ve been pushing their own beer in local supermarkets, which are conveniently owned by a company back in Holland.

We also know what happened to the Starobrno brewery after Heineken’s purchase there: a lot more money was invested in image, creating new logos, cleaning up the premises and renovating the on-site bars and restaurants (including a new, upper-level Heineken bar, pictured above — metaphorically suggesting that Heineken exists on a level above Czech beers, apparently in a place with lots of plants). Beyond the new paint and furniture, some believe that the taste of Starobrno has improved under Heineken’s ownership, though that’s hardly an achievement, considering that beer’s reputation before the sale.

Perhaps a more important question is this: Why does it matter? What difference does it make if foreign conglomerates purchase small Czech brewers?

One reason has to do with economics: foreign companies tend to do something called repatriation of profits, which is to say that if people here spend their money on a beer that is owned by a foreign company, the profits from that purchase are distributed and reinvested somewhere else far away. (Multiply this by enough beers and a large enough market share and you end up with the entire Czech nation sending a not-insignificant part of its income straight to Holland. I’ll take pains to point out that this is still a transitional economy — if you’ve seen the roads in the Czech lands, you know that our money is needed here.)

Another reason is that many significant decisions for these breweries are going to be made at the head offices in the conglomerate’s home country. That means that the decisions about how to brew a Czech Pilsner-style beer are going to be made by a company that thinks Heineken is a Pilsner-style beer. And Heineken doesn’t really compare.

A related reason has to do with the vitality and variety of our beer culture. Will those who have purchased Heineken’s shares on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange really want the company to keep brewing oddball lagers like Velké Březno’s excellent Doppel-Doppel Bock? The name of the game for large brewing groups is increasing profit through larger market share and greater efficiency. Diverse product lines and redundant breweries with excess capacity are inefficient. Invariably some breweries and some unusual beers will be shuttered. The winners will be the shareholders, who will see more profits. The losers will be the consumers, who will have fewer choices.

At one of the recent tastings at Pivovarský klub, Aleš Dočkal mentioned a scenario whereby every Czech town of any size would have a brewpub — and in the entire country there will be only four or five large brewers distributing a handful of similar beers in kegs and bottles. That scene hasn’t arrived just yet. But we might have just watched the opening credits.

Radio Prague has a piece on a story that made headlines here this week: Pilsner Urquell is now cheaper in Germany than in the Czech Republic. I performed the role of the talking head in the story, a complicated mess of pricing, market share and currency fluctuations which ultimately boils down to the following:

Pilsner Urquell is now cheaper in Germany than in the Czech Republic.

Not everything I said made it into the web version, and there were quite a few things I didn’t get to mention before the interview ended. One part that got cut off from my take on the German appreciation for Pilsner Urquell was the fact that German Pilsner-style beers use a place name as an adjective in connection with the word, such as “Bamberger Pilsner,” in homage and in deference to the original.

However, I did get to mention something that has been bugging me for a while: Heineken is being promoted in the Czech Republic at the expense of quality local beers.

Recently my neighborhood supermarket was selling a half-liter bottle of Heineken “Pilsner” for 19 Kč, then about 72 cents in euro terms, about what it might cost in a supermarket in Amsterdam (now more, due to the recent strengthening of the Czech crown against the euro). This is not what anyone would possibly consider a fair trade: Pilsner Urquell is more expensive at home than outside the country, and supermarkets here compensate by offering us Heineken? (Edit: more to the point, this particular supermarket doesn’t stock any beers from small brewers like Primátor, Svijany, Opat, Herold, Černá Hora, Platan, Rebel, Louny, Velké Březno or Rychtář. From Klášter, it only stocks the 11° světlý ležák; from Bernard it only stocks the sváteční ležák. Everything else is a mass-production brew like Heineken.)

It’s hardly coincidental that the supermarket chain in question, Albert, is part of Ahold. Ahold is based in Rotterdam, while Heineken is based in Amsterdam. From the outside, this appears to be a case of “o nás bez nás,” or “about us without us” — in other words, decisions affecting consumer choice in the Czech Republic seem to be made in far-away countries without regard for local tastes, history and traditions.

It’s enough to make you want to write a letter to Ahold Czech Republic, saying “Please improve your beer selection at Albert. We don’t want Heineken. We are in the Czech Republic. We want to buy a variety of quality Czech beers, including beers from small producers like Primátor, Svijany, Herold or Opat.”

Or:

“Prosím zlepšete svou pivní nabídku v Albertu. Nechceme Heineken. Jsme v České Republice. Chceme mít možnost nakupovat různá kvalitní česká piva, včetně piva od malých výrobců jako jsou Primátor, Svijany, Herold nebo Opat.”

Feel free to copy and paste. And if you have the time to print that up and stick it in an envelope, the mailing address is:

Ahold Czech Republic
David Šátek, Purchasing Department
Radlická 117
158 00 Praha 5 — Nové Butovice
Czech Republic

In any case, Czech beer prices are all going up, as I mentioned last week, meaning we’ll have to get used to paying more for everything, not just Pilsner Urquell. The photo at the top of this page was taken in July of 2006, when you could still buy a half-liter of the original Pilsner in Prague for 23 Kč. Heineken may be many things, but it is no substitute for a great beer from a small Czech producer.