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.

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.

In just nine days, the first annual Czech Beer Festival takes its shot at establishing a springtime Oktoberfest in Bohemia. Not only are the first advertisements starting to show up, but I’ve just received confirmation that the beer list has expanded well beyond Pilsner Urquell, Budvar and Staropramen. In fact, it seems a slew of smaller producers will be represented.

According to the organizers, the beers on tap now include 16 brands. First, the usual suspects:

• Budvar
• Pilsner Urquell (SABMiller)
• Kozel (SABMiller)
• Gambrinus (SABMiller)
• Radegast (SABMiller)
• Staropramen (InBev)
• Ostravar (InBev)
• Braník (InBev)

That leaves us with nine smaller producers, some of which are rather unusual picks. (As in there’s no Bernard.) Witness the fitness:

• Černá Hora
• Janáček
• Jihlava
• Platan
• Svijany
• Rohozec
• Konrad
• Rakovník

Not a bad selection. However, it does bring up a few questions:

Whatever happened to Primátor, which was supposed to be included when we first wrote about the Czech Beer Festival?

Does this mean that Primátor’s special beer for dogs is also off the table?

Where did Krušovice go — and why?

What beers from each brewery are going to be present? Will Janáček serve its Comenius? Will Jihlava offer Jihlavský Grand? Or will it all be 10° and 12° světlý ležák, the pale lagers that dominate 95% of all local consumption?

In other words, it’s a great thing that the Czech Beer Festival plans to offer sixteen beers, a few of which are rarely seen in Prague. But are all sixteen going to be more or less imitations of each other?

In nine days and about an hour and a half, we’ll all find out…

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.