Czech Lager

Like Burton-on-Trent and Munich, the town of Plzen (or Pilsen) in Bohemia, Czech Republic, is one of those rare towns where nature just happened to leave the perfect combination of ingredients lying around, and phenomenally gifted brewers happened to come along and find them.

The Czechs refer to beer as “Czech Bread”-they have always taken it incredibly seriously and drunk a great deal of it. But for most of beer’s history, the ability to brew beers to a high and consistent standard lagged behind the demands for quality. In the mid-19^th century, the citizens of Pilsen were becoming increasingly concerned with the quality of their beer, culminating in 1838, when an entire season’s brew was solemnly poured away in front of the town hall.

Something had to be done, and the citizens came together to build a new state-of-the-art brewery, the Burger Brauerei (Citizen’s Brewery), uniting their skill and resources-and stealing as many ideas and resources as they could from the neighboring Bavarians. Martin Stelzer was commissioned to design and build the new brewery. He traveled extensively around Bavaria and met the man he knew he wanted as Brewmaster, Josef Groll.

At the time, brown Bavarian lager was the most celebrated beer style across Europe, and Groll was briefed to recreate a Bavarian-style lager at the new Burger Brauerei. He recruited Bavarian brewing assistants and barrel makers and brought Bavarian Lager yeast with him.

But what came out of the tanks in October 1842 was not Bavarian Beer. The citizens of Pilsen were handed a “golden beverage with thick snow-white foam…(and) the drinkers having tried it sharp delicious taste, welcomed it with such cheers that had never been experienced in Pilsen before.”

Bavarian skill had met Czech ingredients. Moravian barley is sweet, Bohemian Saaz hops have little bitterness but a lot of aroma, and the very soft, sandstone-filtered Pilsen water allows these flavors to come through. Soon Pilsner beer was being discussed excitedly throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond.