[ Beer Culture ]

What do you do when you find a production beer you wish were a bit different — more of this, less of that? If you could improve the taste of a store-bought lager or ale, would you?

For example, take Pardubický Porter from Pivovar Pernštejn in Pardubice. The Czech Republic’s premiere Baltic Porter and perhaps the southernmost traditional exemplar of the style, Pardubický Porter is a very filling, strong black lager with lovely treacle and licorice notes. I like it a lot, but I sometimes wish it weren’t so damn sweet in the finish. It would be nice to have an oak-aged version, or one with a sour bite, or one with more complexity than the stock model.

So I’ve decided to do some basic beer hacking: in this case, take some flip-top bottles, fill them with the production-model Pardubický Porter and inoculate them with brettanomyces yeast, which should produce some sourness and other flavors.

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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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That’s the beautiful village of Štramberk, way out in the microbrew hotspot of Moravian Silesia. Štramberk’s got it all: a hilltop citadel, castle ruins, verdant fields, cobblestone lanes and narrow passageways leading onto an immaculate Renaissance square. And, of course, there’s great beer.

This weekend the Městský Pivovar (City Brewery) in Štramberk rocks out with their fourth annual beer festival, Saturday and Sunday, August 30–31. They’ve got blues and rock bands, sausages, the city’s own bizarrely named traditional baked goods (Štramberské uši, or “Štramberk ears”) and lots of great lagers from small producers around the region.

Herewith the beer list — listen and be thirsty:

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First thank Pivnízub for pointing this out. Then mark your calendar with the following: on Friday, October 3, you can taste all of the Zoigl beers in Neuhaus.

That’s Neuhaus in Bavaria, just over the border from the Czech Republic, and that’s Zoigl, the legendary-by-way-of-being-unheard-of beer produced in just five villages in Germany’s Oberpfalz, sometimes called the Upper Palatinate. Usually cloudy, malty and deep gold in color, Zoigl is brewed in community brewhouses by the village families with brewing rights, then brought back to each family’s home for fermentation and lagering, just as it was done 800 or so years ago.

For some time now, I’ve had a feature on Zoigl in at Saveur, one of the glossy American food magazines, waiting to run whenever space appeared. I reported my story from Windischeschenbach, though I did manage to try one of the beers in nearby Neuhaus, and stopped to snap the shot above in Eslarn. The tradition of communal brewing is fascinating, as is Zoigl’s longstanding use of a sign — or a “Zoigl” in the local dialect — to indicate which family is currently serving the beer.

That sign is the Star of David.

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Q: Is there any supermarket in town with a good selection of rare beers, especially rare and unusual Czech beers?

A: Yes and no. In terms of good foreign beers, we seem to be doing worse than before. Before Tesco bought Carrefour, the latter occasionally had gems like Saison Dupont, and when we used to have Delvita, you could sometimes find Cantillon (though if I understood correctly, Jean-Pierre Van Roy said that Delvita parent Delhaize stopped carrying his beers). With the narrowing of the supermarket market, the beer selections seem to have narrowed as well.

But there are still some good supermarkets with interesting beers in Prague.

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Prague’s Klášterní pivovar Strahov has an outsize reputation among Czech beer fans. On Ratebeer’s list of the country’s top brews, three of Strahov’s Svatý Norbert beers earned places in the top 10. A fourth Svatý Norbert model is rated #16. In the past few years, these beers have been excellent, much better at this point than the ratings I gave them in Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic. (Either my tastes have improved or the beer has. Perhaps it’s a mix of both.)

That said, the Strahov brewpub itself is a tough sell. First, the service has never been all that hot. Second, the portions are small: in the place of .5-liter glasses, you’ve got .4-liter servings. Third, prices are high: a .4-liter mug of Strahov’s excellent 13° amber lager is 59 Kč, twice the cost of other brewpubs in town.

But if you wanted to taste Svatý Norbert beers, you had to go to Strahov.

Until now.

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I’d love to write a more complete review of Martyn Cornell’s delicious new book, Amber Gold & Black, but I haven’t finished it yet. That’s a way of saying that it is quite a substantial text — 232 pages of rich history, fascinating trivia and exquisitely diverse detail about the development of beer in Britain. That’s also a way of saying that this is a book to linger over.

O is there great stuff here! My most recent “I had no idea” moment came in the chapter on barley wine, when the book quotes Elizabeth I, complaining in 1560 that London brewers had stopped brewing beers of normal strength, and instead were producing “a kynde of very strong bere calling the same doble-doble bere which they do commonly sell at a very greate and excessyve pryce.”

I want doble-doble!

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Pilsner-style beers are often slandered as being bland, boring and fizzy. But the pale lagers here in the homeland of the Pilsner style rarely have much carbonation. Often you’ll get a half-liter with just a single bubble rising slowly every few seconds. Sometimes even a bit less than that. Our beers aren’t lifeless, but they’re certainly not fizzy.

Chalk it up to local tastes. Here in the Czech Republic, international soft drink brands often have to undergo “de-bubblification” to make it on the market, reports the newspaper Hospodářské noviny (English translation via Prague Daily Monitor; subscription required).

From the article:

“Czechs clearly prefer fewer bubbles,” says Tomáš Kadlec, CEO at the Czech branch of Coca-Cola.

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Hospodářské noviny is reporting today that a new Czech brewery is slated for construction in Chotěboř, near Havlíčkův Brod; here’s an English summary via the Prague Daily Monitor (subscription required). If completed, this would be the first entirely new industrial brewer to appear in the Czech lands since the Radegast brewery was built in Nošovice in 1970.

That’s not the brewery in question above (the picture is from when I joined the TV crew for filming at Pilsner Urquell). At this point, they’re only talking about starting construction this November and possibly releasing the first brew in the summer of 2009. Capacity is planned for 25,000 hectoliters annually, roughly the same level as Herold, Opat and Žatec, and most of the production is said to be slated for distribution in Britain.

At this point, I have my doubts. It’s not just that the brewery might not ever get built. But creating a business plan based on exports is tricky. For one, Pilsner-style beers often don’t travel very well. And the pasteurization for export often knocks the flavors down to disappointingly bland levels, meaning people at its final destination might not buy it.

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From the Primátor file: Pivní deník recently reported that the Náchod brewery won the prize for Best Lager at the World Beer Awards.

The surprising part? They didn’t win it for their Premium, a Pilsner-style beer, generally considered the flagship model at most Czech breweries. Instead, the beer rated the World’s Best Lager was the oft-overlooked Primátor Exklusiv, a strong lager brewed at 16° Plato and ending up with 7% alcohol by volume. It’s a fine bottle: it picked up four stars in Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic with an appreciative note on its caramel finish. But it still comes as a surprise, especially considering the other fine beers produced by Primátor.

Oh yeah: there’s news about those as well.

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