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.

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…

Otherwise known as Březňák, Pivovar Velké Březno has one of the strangest and most tragic histories in the Czech lands. Located in the Czech-German border region that was once called the Sudetenland, for most of its early existence the brewery had a pronouncedly German clientele. Now, returning to its roots, the brewery has launched an excellent new beer for the German market: the so-called Doppel-Doppel Bock.

Of course, it’s never quite that simple when the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust are concerned, and Březňák is so weirdly mixed up in the situation that as you hear the story it’s hard to remember which level of irony you’ve reached. For example, this brewery proudly supplied beer to Rommel’s Afrikakorps throughout the war. But the man who posed for the picture on the label, Victor Cibich, aka Zippich — the very image of a once-Nazi brewery — was actually a German-speaking Czech Jew. And yes, it gets even weirder from there.

But first: the beer. I found this one at Pivní galerie, where owner Petr Vaněk said he thought it was one of the last such bottles in the country. (Though afterwards, I saw a few more at the new “Beer Gallery” bottle shop on Nerudova, which I’ll write about another time.) It is a German 500-milliliter bottle, and virtually everything on the label is in German, claiming that this is perhaps the first Doppel-Doppel Bock in the world, and noting that it was brewed at 21° and that it contains 10% alcohol by volume. Unlike most beers of this strength in the Czech Republic, it does not list added sugar as an ingredient: just water, malt, hops, hop extract and yeast.

Doppel-Doppel Bock (10% ABV) Clear amber with a thick, sandy head that makes a good effort to stick around, despite the high-alcohol odds. Very light carbonation. A nose of straw and nutty sweetness hinting at candied walnuts. In the mouth it is vinous, sweet and full without being cloying, lacking the saccharine aftertaste of most added-sugar strong beers. Instead, there is a lasting natural syrup with maple and honey notes that finishes with a pleasant hop tang. Additional sips bring out notes of almonds and baked apples. Remarkably well-incorporated alcohol for 10%. This is definitely a sipper, a winter warmer, and probably the best beer brewed at this strength in the country.

Tasting it, I was definitely impressed, and at several moments it struck me less like a beer than like something I would pour on pancakes — it is that syrupy. It is apparently not very well-known, as it was not listed on Březňák’s beers at Ratebeer.com. It seems a pity that this beer is not more widely available, but perhaps things will change. I’ve given a bottle to Max Bahnson, who’s planning to write about it soon.

Oh, and the rest of the story: so Pivovar Velké Březno supplied beer to the Afrikakorps, despite having adopted a Jewish man’s face for its logo as early as 1906. Victor Cibich himself died in 1916; his wife, Auguste, passed away in 1938. They left behind two grown-up sons, Bruno and Paul, who, as Jews, were sent to concentration camps during the war. Against all odds, the two Cibich boys survived and returned to Velké Březno after the war. But after a scant few months at home, they were forced to leave in the anti-German purges of 1946. That is to say: they were first expelled by the Germans for being Jews, and then they were expelled by the Czechs for being Germans. Bruno and Paul Cibich settled in Nuremberg, Germany, where they died within a few days of each other, in 1967.