Last Saturday afternoon began with a sip, a pair of raised eyebrows, a slight frown and a concession. I’d met Erik, a student from Pilsen, in the queue for the bar at the Sun in the Glass festival.
He’d been intending to buy a lager. I was trying to persuade him to try an ale. An extremely hoppy IPA to be exact. His face revealed a hint of shock as he took a swig of the citrus-bitter brew. Then: “It is different. I quite like it, I think.”
While the beer-drinking world was travelling to Munich to put on silly hats and celebrate the first day of the misleadingly titled Oktoberfest, I had made my way to another of the world’s beer capitals – Pilsen. You may never have been there, but the name will resonate with those who prefer their beer yellow and bubbly.
In 1842, brewer Josef Groll put the town on the map when he discovered a way of brewing clear, pale, crisp lagers. The beer took the name of its birthplace, and has become the drink to accompany barbecues in the sunshine.
But if Oktoberfest is about lager drunk from heavy stein glasses, Pilsen’s newest and most exciting beer festival is quite different – namely ales and other craft beers, served from tiny jam-jar-like beer mugs. Much easier to lift for those of us who don’t frequent a gym.
Sun in the Glass takes place every September in the courtyard of the Purkmistr brewpub in Cernice, an otherwise unremarkable suburb of Pilsen.
For someone with a habit of ordering the most unusual beers – not always an approach conducive to a good drinking experience – the festival is pure heaven.
It’s a gathering of the country’s most innovative small brewers. As the craft brewing scene has exploded worldwide, so too has it in the Czech Republic. When communism fell in 1989, there was just one craft brewer in a country dominated by state-owned producers whose remit was to make cheap lager for the masses. Now there are around 150. Forty-four were present, offering more than 150 different brews.
The Czechs are now brewing mad, bad and dangerously tasty beers: from coffee lagers to cherry-flavoured porters, and from stouts to Czech interpretations of smoky German rauchbiers, not forgetting heavily hopped American-style IPAs. Stalls sagged from the weight of bottles.
Hence the teeny-weeny cups – the experimentalist’s glassware of choice. Armed with one of these, you can try a drop of as many brews as your taste buds can take.
Though the festival is dominated by young people, there are older men here, too, beer-drinker clichés with fantastically cultivated beards and spherical stomachs. But they, too, chose to sup from the jam-jar glasses while Britney Spears and heavy metal rattled through the courtyard.
I tried as many as I could handle, but beer of the day for me went to Sumec, a brew from one of the most innovative brewers of Czech’s new wave, Kocour. It gives you a flash of grapefruit, before a mouth-filling dollop of marmalade and a lingering dryness, like ginger biscuits. Then it was my turn to raise my eyebrows – and head for bed at the adjoining hotel.
Purkmistr’s rooms, though basic, are a cut above much of the standard accommodation available. The rooms are modern, with free Wi-Fi, marble sinks, dark-wood furniture and little luxuries you shouldn’t take for granted here.
Pilsen and the festival was the final stop on my Czech beer tour. My journey through the Czech menu had begun in Prague. But if you’re here in search of traditional Czech lager, seeking it out will take you off the route most travelled.
But Prague remains – by virtue of its excellent transport links – an obvious place to start.
Well-known brewpubs include Pivovarsky Dum in the heart of the new town. The brewing equipment dominates the bar’s interior, and you can sample beers of unusual flavours including sour-cherry and nettle. But there’s too much to see outside the city to stay put.
I took a 30-minute bus ride to the village of Velke Popovice. Cycle routes criss-cross the 14th-century village, with its mill ponds and medieval houses – but it’s also home to the country’s third-largest brewery. You smell it before you see it, the sweet, toast-like scent of a fresh brew.
Housed in the original 1874 building, the brewery is picturesque, too. Kozel, meaning goat, is brewed here. Local operators combine the tour with an excursion to the 14th-century Konopiste château, formerly owned by Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose assassination triggered World War I.
As with many brewery tours, visitors pass through the brew house with its gleaming copper kettles, watch a film that explains the brewing process, and then pass an interactive display detailing the brewery’s history. Unlike most tours, you’ll also see a goat.
Later, I headed south from Prague (a two-hour bus ride) to Ceske Budejovice, whose German name is “Budweis”. This is home to the Czech beer known as Budvar Budweiser – no relation to the mass-produced fizz produced with the same name in the US.
The brewery is still state-owned, and it still makes lager in the traditional way. The beer is aged for 90 days.
Here, I tried the unpasteurised and unfiltered version – a nuttier, smoother sup, which you can buy from the Masne Kramy beer hall off the main square.
At Masne Kramy, I was offered delicacies such as duck liver in fat and blue cheese on toast with chilli. But Petr, my guide from Budvar, was not eating. With a straight face, he said: “When you have too much food, you are not able to drink afterwards.”
South Bohemia is the preferred holiday destination for residents of the Czech Republic, its landscape punctuated by lakes, castles and forests. Ceske Budejovice itself is a mix of gothic, fairy-tale architecture and the butch utilitarianism of the Soviet era.
About 25km down the road is Cesky Krumlov, a Unesco World Heritage Site that contains towering castle fortifications and hodgepodge houses carved from childhood bedtime stories.
The 140km rail journey to Pilsen takes two hours aboard a hulking Soviet-era train. Pilsen itself is an ancient city, with some staggeringly beautiful buildings: the town-hall façade looks as if it has been spun from lace.
Its selection as 2015 European Capital of Culture will almost certainly provide visitors with even more reasons to visit, but the primary lure will probably always be the Pilsner Urquell brewery – a sprawling city within a city, with miles of 150 year-old dank cellars cut from the bedrock, and the biggest beer hall in Bohemia, seating 550 people.
It’s a heady mix of the quaintly old fashioned and really, really great beer. Much like the Czech Republic itself.
Man cannot live on beer alone…
Czech cuisine is rich in meat – the favourites are pork, beef, chicken and duck but you’ll find goose, rabbit and venison dishes too.
They are prepared in many ways but one thing is certain: they’ll come with a generous portion of sauce – usually of the rich, creamy variety – and dumplings to mop it up with.
The most common types are bread dumplings and potato dumplings. After the dough is prepared, they are formed into loaves, boiled in water and then sliced.
Dumplings are so popular with Czechs that they created a sweet variety – usually filled with fresh fruit and sprinkled with farmer’s cheese and powdered sugar. Fruit dumplings have even been elevated to main dish status.
Classic Czech dishes
Pork, dumplings and cabbage – baked pork with dumplings and sweet ’n’ sour cabbage.
Duck with cabbage and dumplings – baked duck with potato dumplings and cabbage.
Roast beef in cream sauce – interlarded roast beef in cream sauce, served with cranberries and bread dumplings.
Beef in tomato sauce – boiled beef in a creamy tomato sauce served with bread dumplings.
Potato pancakes – the batter is made of finely shredded raw potatoes, flour, eggs and spices, and then fried.
Snacks to nibble with your beer:
Utopenec “drowned man” – pickled sausages with onions.
Olomouc tvaruzky – ripe cheese with a very strong aroma, served with onions and mustard.
Marinated hermelin – a Camembert-type cheese marinated in oil with hot peppers and spices.
And a sweet treat
Czech buns with poppy seed, plum jam or cottage cheese filling.
(source: www.prague.biz/czech-food)
Getting out and about
l Trains and buses run between Prague, Ceske Budejovice and Pilsen. See idos.cz for times. Student Agency (studentagency.eu) runs an hourly bus service between Pilsen and Prague.
l September’s Sun in the Glass festival takes place at Purkmistr brewpub in Cernice, Pilsen. For details of next year’s event see purkmistr.cz
l Velke Popovice Brewery, Velke Popovice, near Prague (pivovar.kozel.cz).
l Budweiser Budvar Brewery, Ceske Budejovice (budweiserbudvar.co.uk/brewery).
l Pilsner Urquell Brewery, Pilsner (prazdrojvisit.cz/en)
l Czech Tourism: uk.czechtourism.com - Sunday Tribune