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bristol czech republic

Craving Czech beer in Bristol

When you get the urge to drink Czech beer, as we have lately, Bristol isn’t necessarily the best city to be in. But there are options.

First, though, you have to accept that it’s the big names or nothing. Unless we’re missing something (we’d be delighted to discover we are) it’s Budvar and, if you’re very lucky, Pilsner Urquell.

What about Staropramen? The draught stuff we get in the UK is not imported, it’s brewed by Molson-Coors in Burton. Honestly, we’ve found it fine when we’ve drunk it in recent years, and it is distinctly different from, say, Stella Artois. But delightful and authentic it is not.

And don’t get us started on ‘Pravha’ – a “light tasting pilsner inspired by Prague” which brings to mind Lidl’s evasively named Italiamo range of vaguely Italian foods.

There are also occasional attempts by local breweries to brew Czech-style beers. We’d like to see more of this, not least because freshness strikes us a key part of what makes those beers so remarkably satisfying on their home turf.

Lost & Grounded’s Altogether Elsewhere, for example, has been a pleasure to drink recently, even if it perhaps lacked the full body of the real deal.

As it happens, the Budvar rep has been through Bristol lately, and some pubs that didn’t sell it a year or so ago now do. The Old Stillage in Redfield, for example, had it last time we visited, and it’s turned up at The Swan With Two Necks from time to time.

This brings us to another problem: a glass of Budvar is much less enjoyable when it’s served in a bog standard British pint glass, with no foam, rather than in a branded mug with a good head.

We don’t demand perfect Czech-style ‘pours’ and utter reverence – only an acknowledgement that it’s a bit more than a pint of lager.

When that rep visited The Old Stillage, and The Swan, they apparently left behind boxes and boxes of pretty convincing Czech-style mugs. Round, ribbed, slightly squat. The beer looked and tasted great.

For a few weeks, at least, after a new beer arrives on the taps, you’ll get that full experience. Slowly, though, the supply of this handsome glassware begins to dwindle, being slipped into rucksacks, handbags and coat pockets, and migrating to kitchen cupboards across the city.

We actually have one of these glasses at home. And, no, we didn’t nick it – we found it at the end of our street. Perhaps someone had walked home from the pub, finishing their beer on the way, and then abandoned it. At any rate, we rescued it, gave it a good clean, and now have it in steady rotation.

When the fancy glassware has gone, and while the pubs await resupply, you get your Czech beer in whatever glass might be at hand. Perhaps even one branded for Guinness, or Thatcher’s cider.

It’s only superficial, we know. It shouldn’t matter. But…

This weekend, having seen Ben Palmer’s photos from a trip to Brno, we had a particular craving for something Czech, served properly. With Jess rehearsing and singing in a concert, however, Ray had to strike out on his own.

The first place he thought to look, at Jess’s suggestion, was The Llandoger Trow.

It has an excellent list of draught lager, mostly German, but generally has unfiltered Budvar.

And though it doesn’t always have good glassware (the bar manager has often mentioned, sadly, that it usually gets stolen within a few weeks) when they do have it, they use it.

On this occasion, it turned out to be very much the right choice of pub.

Perhaps spurred on by the aggressive advance of the Budvar reps, the Pilsner Urquell people must have been through, because there it was in the top slot on the menu on the blackboard.

It was served with considerable care in a branded mug – albeit a tall, straight one that didn’t feel like anything we’d ever encountered in Czechia.

And here’s the best thing: it cost £5 for a pint – pretty competitive for a pint of lager of any description in Bristol in 2025.

In every possible sense, it scratched the itch.

Find out more about our local pubs and their specialities in our Bristol pub guide, updated for 2025.

Categories
czech republic News

News, nuggets and longreads 21 March 2020: the show must go on

Here’s all the news and commentary on pubs and beer that grabbed us in the past week, from takeaway beer to brewery-side blending.

First, sigh, some news: pubs, along with other hospitality businesses, have been commanded to close by the Government. The situation will be reviewed every month but even the most optimistic pundits seem to think we can expect them to be shut for three months.

In our view, this is sad, but necessary.

If you’re someone who relies on pubs for your social life, we’d recommend investigating the various virtual meet-up options, from Twitter drinkalongs to video conferencing.

And if you make your livelihood through the pub trade, we hope the various business support measures the Government has introduced will go some way to cushioning the blow.

Categories
bottled beer czech republic marketing

The Ethereal Form of the Spirit of a Place

Where exactly is the Staropramen we get in 330ml bottles in UK supermarkets brewed? Probably not Prague, but good luck pinning it down any more precisely than that from the packaging.

We don’t dislike Staropramen (or haven’t disliked it, of which more in a moment) and have drunk a fair few pints and bottles of it over the years, despite knowing that it’s not generally highly regarded by experts in Czech beer. If we want a lager to drink at a barbecue or to swig from the bottle at a party — come on, this is one of life’s great pleasures! — we’ll sometimes pick up a four-quid four-pack at the supermarket. That’s how we ended up holding bottles in our hands on Sunday and, for the first time in ages, really looking at the packaging.

Staropramen.

Established in Prague. Proudly brewed since 1849. #1 Prague beer in the world. The spirit of Prague. Then, in tiny print, “Brewed and bottled in the EU for Molson Coors Brewing Company (UK) Ltd.”

That all reads to us like the most weaselly possible way of saying NOT ACTUALLY BREWED IN PRAGUE.

So, where is it brewed if not there?

Molson Coors has brewing plants elsewhere in the Czech Republic, and all over the EU, from Bulgaria to Burton-upon-Trent. But we have a suspicion if this version of the beer was brewed in the UK they would be less shy about it, on the basis that they’re reasonably open about the fact that Pravha, the 4% draught variant, is brewed here.

Our guess as to what’s going on, at least in part, is that there is no single point of origin, and that they’re keeping their options open with regard to logistics. Perhaps some of the Staropramen we get in the UK is sometimes brewed in Prague, or at least elsewhere in the Czech Republic, but there might be occasional periods when additional demand is fulfilled by plants in, say, Croatia. Being more specific on the labels would make this kind of flexibility difficult.

So, who can say for sure? We’ve emailed to ask this specific question and will let you know if we hear back.

As to the quality of the beer… Well, we’ve stuck up for it longer than some but it really did taste a bit rough to us this time; harsh and nasty, with the same odd hot, plasticky tang we also pick up in Stella Artois and San Miguel in particular. Perhaps that’s the result of the brewing taking place away from home; or because the beer now only uses “ingredients including Czech hops” (our emphasis); or because the lagering time is a mere “couple of weeks”. Most likely, it’s a combination of these and a lot of other smaller corner cutting exercises, themselves the symptom of a lack of respect for the beer, even if the brand continues to be worth milking.

And why is the brand valuable? Because people think they’re buying something from Prague — a genuine import, a reminder of adventures past, something for which it is worth paying a (small) premium — just like we did on Sunday afternoon.

Where a beer is from, or appears to be from, does matter, at least to the marketing people whose job it is to persuade consumers to buy it.

Categories
czech republic News

News, Nuggets & Longreads 17 February 2018: Koduõlu, Tmavé Pivo, Buck’s Fizz

Here’s everything that grabbed us in the world of beer and pubs in the past week, from inclusion to IKEA.

Before we start, though, here’s a reminder that other links round-ups are available: Stan Hieronymus posts every Monday (latest) and Alan McLeod has nabbed Thursday. Do take a look if our list below leaves you hungry for more.

Illustration: "Odd One Out".

First up, for Gal-Dem magazine Alexandra Sewell (@wehavelalex) has written about her experience of the British beer scene as a black woman, and explored the possible reasons more black women might not be involved:

Alcohol was never a feature in our family household. My British-born Jamaican mum never kept lowly bottles of brandy hidden in the kitchen cupboards and we weren’t accustomed to anything more than a non-alcoholic “Buck’s Fizz” at Christmas time. As a small kid, Sundays were for church. As a bigger kid, I was too preoccupied with school. And as far as I was concerned, alcohol was something that was out of sight, and therefore entirely out of mind. I knew of it; I knew other people that liked it and drank it, but the only education I had about such a big part of the culture I was born into was from those borderline hilarious Channel 4 documentaries about people binge-drinking and puking up onto the street.

Categories
czech republic News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 24 September 2016: Camouflage, Machines, Monks

We’re still snowed under working on The Big Project but we’ve found time to read a few interesting articles and blog posts in the last week.

First, the author of the Running Past blog profiles a South London landmark, The Northover, which was built in the 1930s, camouflaged during World War II, and made a brief appearance in The Long Good Friday. (Highly relevant to our current obsessions.)


Picture by Michael Kiser for Good Beer Hunting, used with permission.
Picture by Michael Kiser for Good Beer Hunting, used with permission.

Good Beer Hunting continues to sign up great writers to its team. The latest addition is Evan Rail who debuts with a portrait of an American brewer in the Czech Republic:

Despite the American approach, the name itself—which translates, roughly, to something like Brewery Zhůř-guy—is almost ridiculously Czech, containing not only the language’s almost-impossible-to-pronounce ‘ř,’ but also the bizarrely long ‘á,’ to say nothing of the ooh-sounding ‘ů.’ (Oh, and the ‘z’ and the “h’ in ‘Zhůřák’ are pronounced separately. Good luck with that.) 


TV screen showing a monk on the brewery tour.
SOURCE: The BeerCast, used with permission.

It’s difficult to get an interesting post out of a mass junket but not impossible as Richard Taylor demonstrates with his latest BeerCast post contrasting the tour brewery tour at Cantillon with that at La Trappe:

But the problem with Cantillon is that when you combine it with Twitter and Facebook, and become used to breweries communicating with their customers directly 24/7 you develop the worst possible affectation – a sense of entitlement. It doesn’t afflict me very often, but for some reason it did at Koningshoeven – I just expected the monks to be there, mashing in and pausing to answer questions in broken English…


tavern

For the Recipes Project Dr James Brown and Dr Angela McShane of the like-minded Intoxicants Project share an account of a discussion around the question ‘Were Early Modern People Perpetually Drunk?’ It’s a fascinating read with this section on the hearty, nutritious quality of very sweet beer a particular eye-opener:

Indeed, even had they had the technical means to achieve… high levels of fermentation, they would probably not have wanted to: in the more expensive beers, using a lot of malt, they were likely to have been pushing for ‘sweetness and body’ rather than maximum alcoholic strength, which could lead to thinness and an astringent taste.


At Beer and Present Danger Josh Farrington brings news of a brewing project based on machine learning:

Devised by machine learning firm Intelligent Layer and creative agency 10x, the process combines artificial intelligence with the wisdom of crowds, using it’s own algorithms and feedback from drinkers to constantly update, refine, and reiterate the four styles currently being made – a Pale, a Golden, an Amber and a Black. Just as early-adopters can beta-test an app, now you can help develop a beer, responding to an online bot’s questionnaire after each drink, allowing IntelligentX to bring out a newly refined generation each month.

Marketing gimmick, or the future? And will it create beers perfectly engineered to appeal to geeks, or blanded out brews that offend no-one?


Dave S is still struggling to answer a question that bugs him: which British bitters are most highly regarded by beer geeks? This time, he’s crunched some numbers from RateBeer to come up with a ranking.


And finally, another call for help from us:

https://twitter.com/BoakandBailey/status/778587500495380480