John’s Grocery - The Blog

When we left for this trip, Prague was experiencing Spring in its fully glory so we packed accordingly. When we left our friend’s house this morning to explore Prague, it was barely above freezing. At least it wasn’t snowing like it was yesterday when we visiting Pilzen. Our original plan for today was to visit a Czech beer glass manufacturing plant. Scheduling conflicts prevented us from making the trip over into Moravia to visit Sohm glass plant so we were left to explore Prague.

After getting lost on the tram because of construction (it is nice to know some things are constant the world over), we did finally manage to make it to the center of Prague to search out some local beer culture. Our first stop was U Flecku. Possibly the world’s oldest brewpub dating back 1499. It can be a bit touristy, much like the Hofbraü House in Munich, but it is must see for a beer lover in Prague. They produce one beer, a strong dark and spicy lager which the wait staff deliver to your table before they present you with a menu. They also push Becherovka, a spiced liquor the Czech people believe settles the stomach. A shot or two before your meal and a shot or two after the meal. The best way to describe it is that is tastes a lot like Christmas. Lots of holiday spices like nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon.

Our next stop was U Medvídků, a new microbrewery and brewpub started in 2004. The building has a brewing history dating back to 1466, but its current owners put the building through extensive renovations turning it into a combination microbrewery, beer hall, hotel, museum and cabaret. Nice combination. They produce two beers. Oldgott which is a amber-colored lager that has a super mouthfeel and amazing balance between the malt and dry finish. They also produce a strong lager called XBeer33 which we bought a bottle of, but haven’t tried it yet. They claim it is as strong as Samiclaus so we are eager to try it when we return to the States.

The rest of the afternoon we spent wondering the freezing streets of Prague. Doug got a notion that we should walk to the “old town” and see Prague Castle. So, we trekked up the steep hill surrounding the old city to Prague Castle which is the seat of the Czech government. By the time we finished climbing the hill, which we were later informed by our friend J.C. was the hardest possible way to get there, just about everything was closed. Oh well.

Tomorrow, we are back on the road and heading south to Brevnice to visit the Herold Brewery. We aren’t sure if our hotel tomorrow will have any Internet connectivity and we certainly won’t have any at the monestary on Saturday (if we can get that visit arranged — still trying to get a hold of a certain Father Richard there).

View photos from today’s adventure.

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

Today is when this beer trek’s rubber meets the road, literally. If our 1999 trip taught us anything is that navigating the roads of a foreign land can be incredibly frustrating. I prefer to take the train whenever possible as it is very clear that a particular train will get you from point A to point B without too much hassle. Doug, on the other hand, prefers to drive. So, we got a rental car. Our friend was very kind and had arranged for a rental car to be delivered to her apartment building the day before so first thing this morning we were ready to head out.

Our major goal for today is the town of Chodová Planá, about 40 minutes northwest of Plzeň. To get there we need to drive through Plzeň (home of Pilsner beer). Luckily for us, Plzeň is a pretty big town so there were clearly marked directions as we drove through Prague. We only flubbed up once trying to leave the city and even then we managed to recover pretty quickly. Prague is a very large city. Unlike major cities in the States, Prague doesn’t have major arterial highways surrounding it, so our path to the highway connecting Prague to Plzeň required us to cut through the twisty heavy trafficked streets of Prague. Lots of stop and go and many chances for us to crash as we carefully tried to find street markers, but there were no casualties. We never did find any street markers we could recgnize on the map, so we just followed the arrows pointing to Plzeň. I doubt we’ll find our way back.

We had thought about stopping in Plzeň to do some sightseeing, and we did exit off of the highway to drive into the city center, but we couldn’t find an easy place to park. Since we did have an appointment at 2 PM at the Chodovar brewery in Chodová Planá, we thought it just better to get to our destination rather then get severely lost.

We are staying at the brewery’s hotel, Hotel U Sládka. The rooms have all the basics including private bathrooms and appear to have been recently remodeled. Downstairs in their basement is their Beer Spa which we be giving a try tomorrow morning. To get the brewery’s restaurant, you have walk outside 200 meters around the building. The entrance to the restaurant is an old entrance to the underground cellars carved out of solid granite. The cellars date back to the 12th century and seeing how large they are, it has probably taken eight centuries to carve them out with pick and shovel.

Lunch at the restaurant was basic Czech fare. I opted for my favorite Czech dish, goulash while Doug went for the recognizable smoked ham with cabbage and dumplings. Czech goulash, as I’m familiar with the dozens of times I’ve had it at Zindrick’s, the Czech restaurant at the Czech Village in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is made with chunks of roasted beef and a liberal amount of paprika. This yields a spicy stew traditionally served with potao and bread dumplings. Today, I was given a completely different presentation. The sauce was completely lacking in spice as the spice component was provided by two long and slender roasted green and red peppers garnishing the dish. I suppose I should expect something different as any Czech cookbook I’ve ever seen has about a dozen different interpretations of goulash. Oh yeah, Doug’s meal was good too.

The brewery traces its history back to 1573, but the brewery as it stands today was started in 1862. Compared to the other Czech breweries we will be visiting, this one is pretty small. They brew only three days a week and provide beer to about 90 establishments, mostly local. The tour didn’t give us a lot of information as the guide’s English was a bit rough and our Czech is virtually non-existent. We can say that the brewery’s operations haven’t changed that much in the past 140 years. There is no computer automation as we would expect in comparatively-sized German or American breweries. All of the equipment looks old and well-used, but they produce a really high-quality product with it. See the gallery for photos of the brewery.

With lunch we both enjoyed their Černá destilka (dark kellerbier). I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve never been a big fan of dark Czech lagers. Something about the liberal use of Saaz hops with the sweet darker malt is perhaps to blame. Since Chodovar is so close to Germany (only about 20 km), I think their version is a bit more German in style. It certainly lacks the bitterness I was expecting. Instead, I was presented with a very smooth unfiltered beer with just a hint of malty sweetness.

Tomorrow we’ll be experiencing a bath in beer and a tour of the Pilsner Urquell brewery and brewery museum in Plzeň.

See photos of our Czech travels

We made it. After a six hour layover in Frankfurt to catch a flight into Prague, we have arrived out of our friend’s residence in a residential neighborhood of Prague. A relatively quick taxi ride through the back streets of the city revealed a city that still has two faces almost twenty years after the fall of Communism. At one turn you can find a city with clean office, residential and beautiful historical buildings. You then turn down another road and see the grungy decaying legacy of the Communists.

Despite our bodies not having a clue what time it was, we still managed to muster enough energy to walk over to a restaurant with our friend J.C. and have a couple beers and good Czech food. I couldn’t tell you what exactly either Doug or I ate, but I do know my meal involved chicken and rich cream sauce with some scalloped potatoes. Doug ate something breaded, perhaps pork. It was a long day of travel so anything that wasn’t served wrapped in plastic was a welcome site.

There are quite a few beer enthusiasts out there, who don’t feel that Czech beer is anything special. Sure, they recognize that Pilsner-style lager is the most popular beer style the world over and that the style originated in the Bohemian city of Plzen. But is that something to get excited over when Belgium boasts the most distinctive styles of beer. You don’t hear about too many American beer geeks getting excited about finding a bottle of Czech beer from some unknown regional producer, but you tell them we just received a shipment of new Belgian farmhouse ales and their eyes light up like its Christmas.

So, what is so special about Czech beer? Well, for starters it is very dear to our hearts. Doug and I are descendants of Czech immigrants who immigrated to the United States with the desire to settle in Iowa in 1868. So, just like a kolache, a decent pastry by all standards and worthy of a festival or two, Czech beer connects us to our past. Pilsner, and Pilsner-style beer (we have to acknowledge the significance of the Pilsner appellation), is also just a very quaffable beer.

Well-made Pilsners and Pilsner-style lagers have a legendary crispness that makes them so easy to drink while also having a full body and tons of flavor. There is a reason that the enormous brewery boom of the late 19th century in America was led by German and Czech immigrants where they made the tasty lager beer of their homeland and sold it by the wagon-load to their fellow thirsty immigrants. What happened to the those great American breweries is another posting.

One of our goals with this trip to the “beer fatherland” is to try and find some unique Czech brews that are a bit off the beaten path. Perhaps we’ll find some new and exciting high gravity lagers or maybe even a rare ale. Who knows. It’s an adventure.

In mid-March 2007 Doug “the bier guy” and his brother Mike will be traveling to back to the homeland. Unlike their 1999 Drunken European Vacation, this trip is a bit more business in nature. First, they will be investigating some new exciting Czech beer import potentials from smaller breweries in Bohemia. Second, they will be gathering information to prepare for a trip in 2008 where they will lead a contingent of fellow Czech beer lovers from Iowa with help from the National Czech-Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids.

Some of the exciting places they hope to visit include a beer spa where they will get to literally bath in a tub full of beer. It’s not like they couldn’t facilitate that kind of craziness now with the vast quantities of beer at their disposal, but there is a certain cool factor to consider at the thought of a place that specializes in that type of craziness. Another stop will be Klášterní pivovar Želiv. Situated in the heart of Bohemia, this abbey brewery claims to make Trappist-style ales. We just have to visit the monks and sample their brews to see if they are worthy to sit on our sacred shelves near the real Trappist ales like Rochefort and Orval.

We also have plans to make a pilgrimage to České Budějovice to visit with BB Bürgerbräu and perhaps that other brewery in that historic brewing city. We are also excited to be making a trip to the Sahm glass factory to see how all those beer glasses we sell are manufactured.

Come back and visit this blog between March 18 and March 29 to see where we’ve been and where we’ll be next.