Tag: lager

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bristol czech republic

Craving Czech beer in Bristol

A tall handled mug full of golden beer. It has a Pilsner Urquell logo.

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.

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Generalisations about beer culture marketing

Where is that lager with your town’s name on really from?

Bristol in the abstract

We’re back on this again: should consumers be told, at point of sale, if a beer is brewed somewhere other than at the brewery whose name it bears?

Bristol Beer Factory is a substantial, well-established brewery, so we had no reason to doubt that its Infinity lager is brewed here in Bristol. And because we never doubted it, we never thought to research it.

If we had, we’d have found this page on the website which explains its provenance in some detail:

For lager that was particularly important and challenging for us with our restrictions on space to fit the necessary bespoke lager tanks into our compact site on North Street. Anyone who has been on a tour of our brewery will know that space is already at a massive premium. Thus, the reason we have not brewed a lager before now: we did not have the space to add the necessary tanks and equipment to brew a world-class lager. So, it became clear, we needed to find a creative solution… We started looking all over for a partner brewery… Utopian Brewery, near Crediton Devon, had recently been set up by Richard Archer and were now producing fantastically brewed, British lagers… [and] we quickly established that Utopian were the brewery that we were looking for.

That is a pretty decent degree of transparency, isn’t it?

You might observe that this important information is delivered quite a long way down quite a long page, after a history of Helles as a style – why not put it in the first paragraph?

But maybe that’s quibbling.

The problem is that where we really need the information, as buyers, is on the front of the can, or the font in the pub, or the beer menu, or the blackboard with the beer list.

When we Tweeted about this the other night we certainly didn’t think it was a ‘scoop’. If anything, we felt a bit daft.

How could we, living in Bristol and reasonably switched on to goings-on in the industry, have missed this important detail?

And if we didn’t know, what are the chances that most people ordering a pint in the pub will have any idea at all?

“But they probably don’t care!”

Well, imaginary heckler, we come back to a point we’ve made before: if it doesn’t matter where it’s from, why put Bristol in the name of your brewery? There’s clearly some perceived value in local, independent, and all those other nice ideas.

People in Bristol, perhaps more than in many other parts of the UK, like to buy Bristol Things – or, if they must, Somerset or Gloucestershire Things. Devon? Might as well be Tasmania.

On Twitter, Ed Wray provided a reason why transparency might be difficult:

That makes sense. 

Let’s say Bristol Beer Factory decides to put ‘Brewed by our friends at Utopian in Devon’ on packaging and in point-of-sale copy.

Then, two months later, they decide they need to increase capacity and start working with a second partner, or switch to a bigger brewing partner.

They’d have to reprint labels, reissue font lenses, update website pages, brief staff and customers…

Keeping it vague certainly makes sense in terms of efficiency.

As consumers, this is very much not our problem. But we get it.

What this has done is reminded us to check the origins of craft lagers.

Is (some) Lost & Grounded Helles still being brewed in Belgium, for example? We think so, but there’s no easy way to find out.

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Beer history

Harp: the cool blonde lager born in Ireland

Harp Lager
Harp Lager was once a household name in the UK but, never much loved by beer geeks, and outpaced by sexier international brands, has all but disappeared.

It was launched in Ireland in 1960 as Guinness’s attempt to steal a slice of the growing lager market, hitting the UK in 1961. It is still brewed in Dublin and apparently remains popular in Northern Ireland. We can’t recall ever seeing it on sale in England, though – even in the kind of social clubs where you might still find Whitbread Bitter or Bass Mild.

There’s always something fascinating about brands that arrive, dominate, and disappear. Harp Lager in particular is interesting because of the sheer amount of time, money and energy which Guinness sunk into it over the course of decades; because it provided a glimpse into the era of multinational brewing that was just around the corner; and because it tells a story about the early days of the late 20th century UK lager boom.

The tale begins in the post-war era when, for reasons that are much debated, British drinkers began to turn away from cask ale and towards bottled beer, with hints that lager might be the next big thing.

Guinness was then very clearly an Anglo-Irish business, with major brewing operations at both Park Royal in London and at St James’s Gate in Dublin, and managed largely from London.

Continue reading “Harp: the cool blonde lager born in Ireland”
Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

The UK loves Helles – or Hells, at least

Helles
Camden Town Brewery has done something Michael ‘The Beer Hunter’ Jackson never managed: it has made a specific style of German lager, Helles, ‘a thing’ in British brewing.

Why do we credit Camden in particular? Because every time we order a Helles from any other brewery it’s presented to us by waiters and bar staff as ‘Hells’.

But Hells, minus the extra E, is Camden’s own brand name, and one they’ve invoked lawyers to protect.

It’s also the word that people have been seeing on keg fonts and packaging since 2010 – and even more so since the brewery was taken over by AB-InBev in 2015 and got heavy distribution.

It was a clever move, that slight tweak to the word. It gave them ownership, for one thing; it also removed any ambiguity over pronunciation. How would an English speaker naturally be inclined to pronounce Helles? As hells, of course, about, what, 80% of the time? German speakers and people who Simply Live to Travel will sound that second E – sort of like ‘hell-ezz’.

Helles means ‘light’. Beers badged as such tend to be very pale, light-bodied and with relatively low alcohol content. It’s got broad commercial appeal, as Camden Hells has proved, because that basically describes most mainstream lagers.

Calling your lager a Helles is a great way to have your cake and eat it: it’s simultaneously (a) a normal, non-scary lager that people will actually want to drink and (b) a craft beer with heritage worth an extra pound a pint.

See also: the fetishisation of the Willibecher beer glass.

Our impression is that the term Pilsner performs a similar function in the US market. In the UK, though, that sub-style is already associated with, for example, Tennent’s, Carlsberg and Holsten.

Whatever the reason, there seem to have been quite a few beers around with Helles on the can in the past decade, such as…

  • Hofmeister, 2016 (!)
  • Thornbridge Lukas, 2016 (?)
  • BrewDog Prototype, 2016
  • Purity, 2019
  • Cloudwater, 2019 (?)
  • Brick Brewery, 2020
  • Amity Brew Co Festoon, 2020
  • Lost & Grounded, 2021

You can also possibly, maybe, see the growth of interest in the term in the post-Camden era via Google Trends, based on frequency of searches:

Of course Camden wasn’t the first UK brewery to produce a Helles. Calvor’s first produced theirs in 2009, for example, and Meantime had one in 2004 – and would like everyone to know it.

It’s worth noting, we suppose, that brewer Rob Lovatt went from Meantime to Camden to Thornbridge, leaving Helles beers behind him as he went. Perhaps he deserves the credit, or the blame.

Categories
beer reviews bristol

Walking in a lager wonderland

Dark lager at Lost & Grounded
Baltic porter, Schwarzbier, Helles, Kellerpils, Dunkel, Altbier, Saison, Tripel – Lost & Grounded’s embrace and mastery of Continental beer styles continues to delight us.

For our third round of drinking out since things sort-of reopened on 12 April we went, again, to their taproom about ten minutes from our house. It’s peaceful, well managed and, of course, convenient. That we are developing a crush on the beer doesn’t hurt either.

On this most recent trip, we started with Helles, at 4.4% and £5 a pint. It is still excellent – although perhaps this time it seemed a little softer and more hazy than when we first encountered it a few weeks back.

Long Story, a table beer at 3.2% with pronounced Belgian yeast character, was less successful, with a stale, papery note haunting its tail. But Ray was less bothered by that than Jess; perhaps you’ll love it.

We then moved on to the Schwarzbier, Amplify Your Sound, at 5.2% and £5.50 a pint. Billed simply as ‘dark lager’, you might expect a Dunkel, but this is definitely a degree beyond that – vinyl black, with a coffee-cream head. There is perhaps a passing note of grassy hops but, in the main, this is about the treacly bass notes. Mild without the mud; more well-polished Porsche than Morris Minor.

How often do you see a Baltic porter on offer? We reckon that, for us, it’s been maybe five times in our entire 14-years of beer blogging. So, even if you’re already feeling a bit giddy and 6.8% seems scary, even if it’s £6.50 a pint, you’re obliged by law to order at least a half.

Fortunately, with Running With Spectres (a play on the name of their regular beer Running With Sceptres) Lost & Grounded have nailed it. Rich without being sickly, figgy pudding fruity, it feels like a dignified rebuke to the marshmallow sundae imperial stout merchants. You could also label it ‘double stout’, we reckon – another style that barely exists but which tends to be more warming than intimidating.

Between L&G and Zero Degrees, we’re a little spoiled in Bristol for serious attempts to brew in European styles. But we’d still welcome perhaps one or two more – especially someone who might fancy cloning Jever.