The Czechs in a Nutshell

It was only with the nineteenth century’s technological inventions that Czech beer brewing became a virtual industry and a business. In fact, all members of the current “Big Five” — Prazdroj and Gambrinus in Plzeň, Staropramen in Prague, Budvar in České Budějovice and the Velké Popovice brewery in Central Bohemia — were established around 1850. It’s no coincidence that all of them are situated in Bohemia. In Moravia, people tend to compensate their less-excessive relationship to beer with a correspondingly excessive consumption of local wine.

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

Now, you might object that several local breweries are marketing their products with the slogan “Brewed in this city from 1575”. Well, they’re certainly not speaking about the same type of beer as the one they produce today. In sixteenth century Bohemia it was, according to the Brewery Museum in Plzeň, not uncommon for brews to be “improved” with the bones of executed criminals, dog’s faeces, sawdust from dug-up coffins, splinters from scaffolds or other delicacies. Therefore, the only thing a Pilsner beer brewed in, say, 1615, has in common with the light and delicious Prazdroj which is produced today, is the city of Plzeň as its place of origin, and barley and hops as its raw materials.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Czechs had emerged as the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s ultimate beer nation. Of the 1,050 breweries that were operating in the entire empire in 1912, 666 were situated in Bohemia, Moravia or Silesia. After the founding of Czechoslovakia, the number of breweries started to decrease (by 1937, there were 374 left), but, due to rapid modernization, production steadily increased. Obviously, not only thirsty Czechs benefited from the larger brewing capacity. In the 1920s, Czech beer exports skyrocketed, which hugely contributed to making the young republic visible on the global market.

There’s not much to say about the unlucky combination of Czech beer brewing and communism. By 1948, all breweries were nationalized and the management centralized, which inevitably led to poorer quality. As late as in the 1980s, when people were shopping for beer in their local grocery, it was perfectly common to turn every bottle upside-down to check that it didn’t contain deposits or other filthy things.

The Bolsheviks, however, by no means prevented the Czechs from flocking to their hospodas and drinking their beer as they always have. Actually, cheap and relatively tasty beer was one of the main enticements with which the communist regime bought support from the broad masses. Before 1989, some pundits even considered a dramatic hike in the price of beer to be among the few things that could make the Czechs revolt against the communists (see: Velvet Revolution).

As in almost all other fields of society, the fall of communism also had a positive impact on the breweries. With the exception of Budvar in České Budějovice, all members of the “Big Five” have been privatised (several of them, such as Prazdroj in Plzeň, by foreigners), and this also goes for the vast majority of the small- and medium-sized breweries. There have also been some new ones established, most of them microbreweries, so currently, the Czech Republic can boast about 84 breweries with total production approximating 19 million hectolitres. If this doesn’t say anything to you, just try to imagine some 3.8 billion pints in a row...

Now, let’s have a look at the practical part of this foamy subject.

If beer drinking is not a national sport (see: Beauty Contests; Ice Hockey), then at least it is a basic part both of the Czech lifestyle and traditional Czech cuisine. In fact, there are those natives who even consider beer to be a soft drink. A doctor, whom the author of this manual once visited, claimed in dead earnestness that fewer than four pints of beer does not count as alcohol. Some of his foreign colleagues might disagree about that, but he still had a point: about 60 percent of the beer consumed in the Czech Republic is of low gravity (ca. 3 percent alcohol), while stronger beer, popular, for instance, in Belgium, is more or less unknown.

This brings us to two basic terms from the Czech beer world: desítka and dvanáctka.

The first means ten-degree beer and the latter twelve-degree beer, and both correspond to the two main types that are consumed in this country. Many people, including lots of native Czechs, confuse this marking with the alcohol content, which is actually a big mistake. The term desítka means that the beer contains 10 percent (or degrees, as the brewers used to say) extract of the original young beer, while the dvanáctka has twelve percent.