[ Beer Culture ]

Lew Bryson had a funny story about trying to taste Pardubický Porter a few years ago while traveling around the Czech Republic under the guidance of Honza Kočka, whom Lew correctly identified as a “Czech beer demiurge.” The comments, naturally enough, went off on manifold tangents, but there was an interesting short thread about other Czech and Slovak porters.

Though one reader wrote “I do not remember ever seeing a porter in the CR or SR in the 90s,” Lew himself recalled finding Martiner porter in upstate New York some ten years back, then wondered if that beer is still being made under Heineken’s ownership.

In fact it is not: Heineken shuttered the brewery in 2003. Nonetheless, the Martiner name still exists in two also-ran pale lagers.

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A quick one on beer marketing and (not) name-dropping: at a time where it seems like just about every brewery wants to over-emphasize its history and tradition — “Anno 1366,” and so forth — when would a beer maker choose to ignore its history, or not mention certain parts of it? And if so, why?

What got me thinking was the coaster from Pivovar Dalešice I picked up last week. Dalešice makes some nicely malty — though not particularly well-known — lagers: the brewery is just a step above a brewpub in size with distribution in Brno and occasionally in Prague. The coaster lays out Dalešice’s history: the brewery was originally founded in 1609, and in 1882 the grounds “underwent a major reconstruction into an industrial brewery,” which functioned until 1977.

What’s missing is any reference to Anton Dreher the Younger, the man who paid for the reconstruction in 1882, and one of the most famous beer makers of the nineteenth century.

What the hell?

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There was a big storm the other night with a lot of wind; in the other room we heard something crash and fall. When I got up the next day I found a box in the office had overturned. Nothing was damaged but a chunk of brewer’s pitch I used for show-and-tell at our last beer tasting, which had been a dark, inscrutable lump. Now, on the floor, it was a pile of bright shards and a fine dust coating the parquets like ground glass.

I got a broom and swept up the mess.

Back in the days of making beer in oak, pitch was used to coat the barrels, both as a sealant and to keep the beer from picking up too many flavors from the wood. I’ve heard it said that brewer’s pitch is flavor-neutral, that it doesn’t add or subtract anything from beer, but the dust spread across my floor had a conspicuous odor. It smelled like tea.

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Despite its celebrated consumption — downing more beers per capita than yellow dogs got fleas — the Czech Republic is also a beer-exporting country. 800 kilometers away, Belgium is just plain beer crazy, cooking with beer, opening new breweries, making outdated styles no one really likes anymore, and drinking plenty of it, including stuff from other countries. (The most popular style there, according to Tim Webb’s excellent Good Beer Guide Belgium, is Pilsner.)

If the Czech Republic is the home of the Pilsner style and is hoping to export more beer, how many Czech beers do you think they have in Brussels?

Above is Délirium Café, a bar with a world record for stocking the greatest variety of beers: at least 2,004, with several hundred backups in case one runs out. I found its party atmosphere to be a bit much on Friday and Saturday nights, but when I stopped by on a Sunday afternoon it seemed like the best bar on Planet Earth: quiet, calm and cool, with surprisingly friendly staff who obviously enjoyed introducing people to great new beers.

And then there is the list: thicker than a bulletproof Good Book, impossibly well-organized, stocking things you’ve always wanted to try and things you never thought you would.

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The best thing I heard was when Jean-Pierre Van Roy said “Now we’re going to open the ‘75.”

We were talking about his life and work at Cantillon, the last remaining lambic brewer and geuze blender in the city of Brussels, and Jean-Pierre Van Roy decided that he wanted to open a beer he’d bottled 33 years earlier.

Someone asked “What?” in the way that means “Are you crazy?” Jean-Pierre just nodded and said “It’s time. It needs to be drunk.”

That was the second best thing I heard at Cantillon.

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There have been a few stories about the Abbey of St. Sixtus of Westvleteren in Belgium getting run over by the interest in its beer. Casual readers might need reminding that Westvleteren, a Trappist ale brewed by monks, is highly regarded by beer aficionados, often finding itself at the top of the list of both Ratebeer.com and Beer Advocate, and it’s been argued that the beer is partly so highly esteemed and sought-after simply because it is nearly impossible to get. Despite soaring demand, the abbey has not increased production since 1946, which, according to Wikipedia, is just 4,750 hectoliters.

One short piece from 2005 in the New York Times detailed how the monks had stopped selling their beer after it hit the top rating at Ratebeer.com. Last year, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Westvleteren which mentioned that the abbey was asking resellers of the beer to stop doing so, and the abbey’s own web site carries a warning:

“Westvleteren Trappist is only sold to individual customers. Every customer promises not to sell the beer to others.”

So is it working?

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From the Trip to Brussels file: Prague Airport’s Terminal 2 is the spot for flights to Schengen countries, which are unified by an agreement on border controls and common immigration policies. In a way, this means that these countries have a commonality of culture as well. It’s unlikely, for example, that any of the 25 Schengen countries would be places where Pilsner Urquell might be really hard to find.

Which is what makes the pricing at Porto Café and Shorty’s Pub so annoying. The bar and restaurant inside Prague Airport’s Terminal 2 sell Pilsner Urquell as if it were hand-made in small batches on a remote mountaintop by Alpine virgins: a budget-busting 150 Kč per half-liter, or the equivalent of €6.25 or $9.65 per glass at today’s rates. (A high price in Prague for Pilsner Urquell is anything over 37 Kč, or about $2.40.) They don’t even offer to rub your back afterwards.

Oh, but there’s more.

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That’s Brasserie de Tubize, one of Belgium’s newest breweries — or at least it will be one of Belgium’s newest breweries once construction finishes in October and Tubize finally starts its own production. For now, the beers from Tubize are made (like many others) on contract at De Proef, where they seem to be under the radar of most beer afficionados: there’s currently just one rating of the excellent De Proef version of Betchard Blonde at Ratebeer. (Others have rated an earlier Betchard Blonde under a separate listing from Brasserie de Senne.)

If you’ve been to Brussels, you might know it already — it’s the house brew at In’t Spinnekopke, a restaurant with an outstanding beer list and very good (though not fussy) cuisine à la bière. The proprietor of both Spinnekopke and Tubize, Jean Rodriguez, showed me around yesterday afternoon, noting that most of the brewery’s equipment and furnishings is already in place. After the restaurant and brewery are finished, the top floor of the old factory (the three windows in the top of the picture) will become a beer museum, housing equipment from 1860’s De Vaux brewery in Philipville, including an impressive set of copper filters.

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An incident illustrating beer’s sometimes miserable reputation here: I walked into Kratochvílovci, Prague’s largest specialty malt shop, to buy a gift. Kratochvílovci has whisky (and whiskey) for days, from Japan to Kentucky and — especially — Scotland, where the single-malts start with a 1988 Aberfeldy and stop at the 1993 Tullibardine.

The intended gift recipient was a wine lover, however, so I picked up a nice Rioja. (They’re not malt snobs — Kratochvílovci also stock brandies and eaux-de-vie, as well as good vino.)

Just as I was about to leave, something clicked in my head and I asked if they also had beer. I got a look somewhere between condescension and confusion, so I said, “Specialty beer. Like from Belgium or England.”

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Herold beer has had a long and winding path over the past few years. Less than a decade ago it was found fairly often in expat hangouts like the Globe, though not always in the best condition, and sometimes in downright terrible condition. Although things had markedly improved by the time Michael Jackson came to Prague to promote Herold in late 2004, the brand’s image had been damaged by the occasional bad pints from before.

And yet Herold was making great beers, including one of the country’s first widely distributed wheat beers, the first Czech dark wheat most of us had ever seen, and a full line of quality lagers, including what must have been the country’s best bottled dark. They were always a bit hard to find in Prague, but then they became much harder to find, until only a couple of places carried the beer by the time I was finishing Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic.

One of them was the Dívčí skok restaurant in Prague’s Divoká Šárka park, a favorite setting for hiking and sunbathing. When the temperatures moved up earlier this summer, I went out there to have a pint.

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