Tag: prague

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Beer history czech republic

Beer in Prague, 1958

Detail of 1958 Prague transit map.

Among the various piles of crap useful things that we hoard collect, there’s an ever-growing stack of old tourist guidebooks, including a 1958 guide to Prague, from the Czechoslovakian state tourism board. Here’s an abridged version of the section that caught our eye this weekend.

Prague Breweries and Beer-houses

And still our acquaintance with Old Prague would not be complete if we did not visit the places where the citizens of Prague used to go to quaff a tankard of foaming ale or a glass of wine. Innumerable are the beer and wine taverns in Prague. Many of them are of ancient standing. Of the old breweries (of which there were for instance in Dlouhá ulice alone no less than twelve) only two still survive. The older of these is the brewery “u Tomáše”, in the Malá Strana. Today nobody could count how many barrels of excellent black beer have been drunk here since the time of Charles IV, when the Augustinian monks brewed their first hops.

[…]

The counterpart to the St Thomas Brewery is the brewery on the New Town side of the river, “U Fleků”, of which we first hear in the 15th century. More perhaps than any other beer-house in Prague, “U Fleků” lives in Czech literature and has become immortal as the bohéme who frequented it at the turn of the century.

[…]

We must only add that in Prague there are several modern breweries, of which the largest is the Smíchov Staropramen — which takes us unto Prague of the middle of the 20th century where, in an up-to-date alchemist’s kitchen, hops and malts are converted into beer, the traditional Czech beverage.

And so, let’s raise our bedewed and froth-topped glasses and drink to this city that also provides so well for man’s material wants!

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture

The Global Aspect of Alterno-beer

Detail from a sign reading Praha, Prague, Praga, Prag.

Zak Avery’s latest blog post touches on the links between British and American brewing and how that has contributed to a ‘craft beer culture’. (The penultimate paragraph is particularly perceptive.)

Earlier this week, we set about trying to identify key turning points in the development of what we’re calling (for the moment) an ‘alterno-beer culture’ in the UK and, although we pondered the issue of cultural exchange, weren’t able to pinpoint many specifics.

Surely, though, the development of cheap trans-Atlantic flights from the seventies onwards; the opening up of Prague after the fall of Communism; and the birth of Brussels as a tourist destination with the coming of Eurostar, must all have contributed to a broadening of people’s beery horizons.

It’s certainly fascinating how many brewers, from all over the world, have official biographies which contain variations on this sentence: “Their interest in beer had originally been fired by a visit to Belgium in 1980.” (In this case, that’s beer writer Michael Jackson describing the founders of US brewery Ommegang.)

Of course, the only beer that tastes better than the free stuff is that which you drink on holiday, but isn’t it also natural to take for granted what you have around you? In our case, it took German and American beer to jolt us into really appreciating straightforward British ales, as per Zak’s Australian Chardonnay analogy.

Categories
czech republic

Memorable beers #7 – Like, really cheap and really strong!

A tram in Prague.

By Boak.

Sixth-form history trip to Prague, some time in the nineties; I’m all Doc Martens and shapeless homemade jumpers, as are my friends. Staying in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of town, in the middle of a huge housing estate, we decide to hit the bar and buy lots of bottles to drink in our dormitory.

I have no idea what beer it was but, at the time, two things struck me: first, that it was absurdly cheap – around 20 pence a bottle – and, secondly, that it was 10%. Ten! Three times as strong as Foster’s! We were all amazed by this but also pleasantly surprised to wake up the next day without enormous hangovers. We put this down to the amazing quality of the beer, coz, like, it’s all the additives in beer that gives you the hangovers, innit?

I maintained the daft belief for the next decade that you could drink vast quantities of strong Czech and German beer without feeling the pain the next day because it was ‘cleaner’.

With my subsequently acquired beer geek hat on, it seems obvious today that the ‘10% beer’ was no such thing but rather a ‘desitka’ (10 degrees Balling) and so much more likely to have been around 3-4% ABV.

How many British students have imagined themselves into a drunken stupor on three bottles of weak lager because they’ve made the same mistake?

Categories
czech republic homebrewing

Inspired by a memory of a taste

Inside U Fleku, Prague.

As we neared the end of the lager brewing season (the point when our utility room stops being cold) we decided to make something dark, and the beer that came to mind — what we found ourselves craving — was the one at U Fleku in Prague.

We did some research online and found a few recipes, all wildly different, and cross-referenced them to come up with the following.

Malt: 4kgs Weyermann’s Premium Pilsner Malt (EBC 3-5); 0.5kg Munich Malt (EBC 20); 0.5kg Crystal; 0.3kg Chocolate (EBC 500).
Hops: 50g Pioneer 9.4% (90 mins); 50g Liberty 3.6% (20 mins); 50g Liberty 3.6% (5 mins).
Yeast: White Labs WLP800.
Notes: single decoction mash.

Without going into tons of detail, this all worked very nicely but, when we took it out of secondary fermentation ready to bottle, our hearts sank: it in no way resembled U Fleku. It had that homebrew smell and taste; it was too pale; it was like a crappy English bitter.

We put five litres into a polypin and dry-hopped it, hoping to rescue at least a portion. The rest we bottled, just in case a miracle might occur…

The first glimmer of hope came when we tapped the polypin and, despite a lingering ‘homebrewness’, found it kind of moreish. We drank the lot. Surely, though, this was just the dry-hopping at work, making the best of a bad lot?

Then, last night, with low expectations, we opened the first bottle and were delighted to find that a transformation had taken place. In an appropriately Mittel-European handled glass, it looked darker, clear as a bell and healthy red-brown. The head was like  meringue. Tasting it didn’t quite take us back to U Fleku, but it certainly made us feel that, if we were to go outside, a tram might be passing, on its way to a grand square somewhere nearby.

The moral of the story? Er… bottle it anyway and hope for the best?

We asked Velky Al of Fuggled fame for an appropriately Czech name and he suggested “Odštěpek” which he tells us means “a chip off the old block”. Thanks, Al!

Categories
czech republic pubs

Czech waiters aren't that bad

Perhaps living in London, one of the rudest cities on Earth, has given us a twisted perspective, but it seems to us that Czech waiters are getting a bad rep. Here’s a typical comment from a 2004 column in the Independent:

I thought French waiters were rude until I went to Prague. I saw a bullet-headed Czech waiter terrorise a French family, who asked if they could have half a meal for a small child without paying the full price. “Is not possible,” the waiter repeated over and over. “Is not possible. You better go now.” Whether this is Czech behaviour or post-Soviet behaviour I’m not sure, but the phrase “Is not possible” seems to be the motto of all Czech restaurants, hotels and taxi firms

On our recent holiday, we had geared ourselves up for sullen indifference at best; Fawltyesque rudeness at worst. Would we get shouted at? Insulted? Ignored?

In short, no. We found all but two waiters fairly friendly. A couple of the better ones were, well, downright cheerful — almost as if there was a spark of genuine human feeling behind their professional smiles.

It might have helped that we’d mustered a few words of Czech (“Hello”, “two beers, please”, “thank you very much”).

Of course, another possibility is that, having noted the uniform disgust with which their manners are regarded across the internet and print media, some of Prague’s bar managers and landlords have had a word with their staff:

“OK, impromptu staff meeting… I’ve had a crazy idea. I thought we’d try making our customers feel comfortable and happy here. Apparently, that goes down well. Weird, I know, but there you go. Let’s give it a try, see how it pans out.”