John’s Grocery - The Blog

This morning we again awoke to the sun shining and left Český Krumlov and headed north 30 minutes to České Budějovice. Today, our objective was the Budějovický Měšťanský Pivovar (aka Samson Brewery) who brews B.B. Bürgerbräu. Unfortunately, the only map we had of the city didn’t have any street names (much like the streets themselves), so we ended up getting quite turned around in the city center trying to find the brewery. Eventually, we found a nice person who directed us to the brewery when Doug looked really lost and said “Sampson Pivovar?”.

The Samson brewery is the real “Original Budweiser”. The brewery is the city’s original community brewery who has the documents to prove that they predate Budweiser Budvar by ten years with a founding date of 1795. The brewery has been undergoing a good deal of renovation during the past ten years and more planned for the future.

As we talked with people from the brewery, we got this general feeling that they feel like the underdog against the bigger breweries. They have a capacity of 400,000 hectoliters but are currently only producing 150,000 and having to battle the bigger breweries like Pilsner Urquell and Budvar for each liter. Like some of the smaller breweries we’ve visited, they don’t have the cash required to buy on-premise accounts. Our host told us that a new restaurant down the block recently opened and Budvar paid the restaurant owner $70,000 to be the exclusive brewery for the restaurant. The small breweries just can’t compete in the big boy’s game.

On of the effects of Samson’s claim to be the original Budweiser is a ton of litigation with Budvar and Anheuser-Busch over the use of the term “Budweiser” or “Budweiss”. This has led the brewery to develop several different brands. They have three current brands, B.B. Bürgerbräu, 1795, and Samson. B.B. Bürgerbräu used to be known in the United States as Crystal until Miller Brewering sued them on cause that the beer might be confused with a Peruvian brand they owned by the name of Crystil. Um, yeah. B.B. Bürgerbräu is leagues better than Budvar. We sampled it straight from the closed stainless fermentation casks and found to be very malty with a dry crispness. The real treat was sampling their new strong dark beer they are brewing for the Nordic markets. The brew lagers for three months and has an incredible malty sweetness with a notable smoked peat flavor like you would find in some Scotch ales. We are crossing our fingers they can get it to America soon.

We left České Budějovice after a quick lunch of Indian food with our host from the brewery and headed back to Prague for a relaxing evening with our friend J.C..Tomorrow, we’ll be enjoying our last day in the Czech Republic visiting the center of Prague.

Check out today’s photos.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Beer, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.