A bath and the original Pilsner
We started our morning off with the much anticipated beer bath at the Chodovar Beer Spa. We didn’t know what to expect exactly except there would be a tub and beer involved. When we entered the spa a very polite Czech man, who naturally did not speak a word of English, motioned to us to disrobe. Now to me, that is a command you don’t want to mistake for something like “please keep your towel neatly folded on the chair next to you until instructed to fold it into the general shape of a flightless bird”.
The bath “water” itself was not so much all beer. It was actually a mixture of mineral water from the brewery’s artesian spring and several gallons of dark beer. On top of the bath water was a mixture of beer foam, active yeast cultures, and a mixture of herbs and spices. Actually, when you think of it, it was kinda like taking a bath in a marinade. I suppose as long as the nice Czech man didn’t pile logs underneath of us and light a fire to start cooking us, we’d be okay. We each had twenty minutes in the bath before being escorted to another room for a 25 minute relaxation period while being swaddled in a warm towel. All-in-all, it was a very relaxing experience.
After we finished with the beer bath, we drove back to Plzeň for a visit to the Pilsner Urquell brewery. Our tour guide, Vaclav, spent a total of four hours taking us around the brewery and the brewery’s museum. We can say, without a doubt, it was the most thorough brewery tour we’ve ever received. Vaclav showed us the brewery’s new state-of-the-art bottling and packaging facility, a fruit of the merger with Miller Brewing. The highlight of the tour was the trip into the brewery’s cellars. Up until 1999, the brewery fermented and lagered all of its beer in wooden casks stored in a vast network of underground caverns. Today, the brewery ferments and lagers only a small amount of beer in the wooden casks as a reference beer to insure that the new modern methods are holding true to the traditional brewing methods. The best part of the tour was actually sampling unfiltered Pilsner Urquell straight from the wooden casks. While fresh Pilsner Urquell is awesome, this special draught had an incredibly soft mouth feel with a bright hoppiness.
The brewery museum is a short one kilometer walk away and situated in an old brewery house that dated back before the breweries in the city consolidated into the single Pilsner Urquell brewery in the mid-19th century. The museum encompasses not only the history of Pilsner Urquell and many of the brewery’s relics, it also includes background on the history of brewing around the world.
After the brewery and museum tour, we headed back to Prague. Our experience driving out of Prague made us a bit anxious about trying to find our way back to our friend J.C.’s house. Again, the Czech people don’t seem to believe in street signs so we haven’t exactly figured out how people find their way around over here without SatNav/GPS systems. Our little Skoda doesn’t have one of those so our trip back into Prague involved carefully tracking our way back into the city with a detailed city map.
Tomorrow, we are back in Prague with a possible visit to the Sahm glass manufacturing plant.
Check photos from today’s adventures