John’s Grocery – The Blog

Today was our last day in the Czech Republic. We were awoken by the door buzzer as a construction crew was going flat to flat trying to find out who parked their blue Skoda in the no parking spot out front. They needed to bring in their big crane and couldn’t get it through. We were driving a blue Skoda. To the other residents of Podvinny Mlyn 16, we are sorry for waking you up.

Our friend J.C. not only woke up this morning to the sound of the door buzzer, but also with a nasty cold so we decided to have a low-key day and forgo our hour and a half trip to Kunta Horna to see the bone church. Maybe next trip. Instead, Doug and I ventured back to the center of Prague to visit the Museum of Communism. We’ve been fascinated this whole trip with the personal stories people we’ve met have conveyed to us of their experiences living under the Communist regime. It was interesting to see an entire collection of items and stories about the 41 year Communist rule. We would highly recommend the museum to anyone who has an hour or two to spend in Prague’s center.

For lunch, we stopped at the Plzeňská Restaurace at the historic Obercnîm Domě. The restaurant was at time Pilsner’s Urquell’s largest beer hall in Prague. It has beautiful Art Nouveau architecture and traditional Czech food. It’s a bit pricy compared to the other traditional Czech meals we’ve had, but the ambiance is really nice and the food was great.

After the lunch, J.C. picked us up at a nearby metro station and took us about 30 minutes east to her weekend cottage in the Czech National Forest. A lot of Czechs keep a weekend or summer cottage which is handed down from generation to generation. The cottages are small and very rustic. Perfect to decompress after a busy week of working in the city.

Back in the city we prepared to fly home tomorrow and reflected on our experiences in the Czech Republic. For starters, we sampled 31 different beers totaling about 30 liters. Every beer we had, with the exception of an accidental non-alcoholic Radagast and a skunky bottled Budvar, has been excellent. Doug and I both agree that the B.B. Bürgerbraü strong dark lager was our all-around favorite. Straight from the lagering vessel in the cellars of the brewery, this beer had the most intensive malt flavor with wonderful smoked peat notes.

All along the way, we’ve been mapping out how we would plan the itinerary for the official May 2008 beer tour. The one thing we plan on adding that we didn’t get a chance to do on this expedition is a trip to a hop farm to see how hops are grown and harvested. We can say that this fact-finding mission has been a complete success. Our immersion in the Czech culture has taught us a lot that will come in great use when trying to lead a group of 20 beer enthusiasts around the Czech Republic.

See the last of our photos.

Na zdraví!

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.

In 1999 when we visited Europe, we always seemed to be prevented from visiting some monument or castle because it was undergoing repair. Today, we discovered that on Sunday, Český Krumlov is essentially closed. We assumed, incorrectly, that Sunday would be a big day for tourism as Český Krumlov is a large tourist attraction. Several souvenir shops were open, but virtually all the museums and specialty shops were closed. This also included the main attraction of the Český Krumlov castle which we were prevented from seeing in 1999 because it was undergoing repair. Thwarted again!

We did make a stop at the tourist information center where Doug picked up a pamphlet on an armory museum he would like to see. He asked the clerk where it was and she mapped it out on a map of the town. After lunch we decided to go find the museum as on the pamphlet it said it was open to 5 PM. After walking on the rough cobblestone for a quite a while we just could not find the museum. We went up and down twist streets, with our feet hurting more with each step and we could not find it. We went back to the information center and asked another clerk where the museum was and he pointed at the back of the pamphlet. The museum is in Prague. Today just wasn’t our day. At least we saw the sun all day. The first time the entire trip.

Tomorrow morning, after procuring another recharge card for our cell phone, we will be heading back to České Budějovice for our last brewery tour. Hopefully, we’ll get a straight answer from the Sampson brewery on who is the really the original Budweiser. Hint, it is not Budweiser Budvar.

View photos from today’s “sorry, we are closed” adventures.

This morning we awoke to the cold and rain of a late Czech winter. We left the Equitana Resort without having a chance to ride horses or do any hunting, but we had a monastery to find. As I’ve said before, our rental car is a small Skoda (a Czech-version of a Volkswagen). Specifically, we have the smallest model with a little 1.2 liter engine. Despite its small engine, Doug still thinks it is a rally car and we spent the entire trip from Březnice to Želiv on two wheels as raced through all the gears taking hairpin corners on the Czech country roads. No four-lane highways for us on our adventure.

We arrived in Želiv and easily found the monastery. The monastery dates back to 1149 which would make it the second oldest brewery in the world if it weren’t for the Communist-takeover in 1948. Much like an American microbrewery, much of the equipment in Želiv’s brewhouse is handmade. The fermenters and kettles are only two years old and they are producing three micro-brewed beers. They have a very limited capacity and are happy selling to local patrons and a couple specialty restaurants in Prague. Father Richard has been in talks with one the American importers we do a lot of business with and we are hopeful they can work out a deal for a very limited distribution in the States.

As a working Abbey with 7 priests in residence and 26 priests in the parish, the beers they produce are truly Abbey ales. The members of the Abbey are not in the Trappist order, but rather the Premonstrian order. Their flagship ale, Gottschalk, is named after Father Gottschalk who founded the abbey in 1149. We sampled it straight out of the secondary fermenter in its unfiltered glory. It is a dubbel with a rich chocolate character a significant hop bite. The brewmaster, who we chatted with through Father Richard, said they used a combination of Saaz and some other rare type of Czech hops whose name did not translate into anything Doug nor I was familiar with. Nonetheless, it was an awesome beer. The second beer we tried was a mixture of Gottschalk and Slovakian mead called Castulus. This drink had a bizarre aroma and made the Gottschalk even more drinkable while lending it a bit of sweetness and a thinner mouthfeel. Their third beer, which we did not sample, is a brew infused with sour-cherry.

After a quick lunch of soup and spaghetti with father Richard and his fellow priests and novices, we were given an incredible tour of the monastery. When you get up close and personal with the Czech and Slovak people, it is just incredible to imagine the tyranny they faced under the Communist regime. In 1948, the Communists gathered-up priests from around Czechoslovakia and imprisoned them here at the abbey for two years. Then, in 1950, they turned the monastery into a psychiatric facility. During the next 41 years, the Communists would destroy much of the original furniture and other religious artifacts in the buildings. Some very important pieces were smuggled out of the abbey and kept safely hidden by locals in their homes. Finally, in 1991 the psychiatric hospital was closed and the monastery was returned to the church.

Surprisingly, some areas of the monastery were left unharmed. Our tour of the building included the library, rectory, and several other significant rooms which had frescos that looked like they were recently conserved, but haven’t been touched since the 17th century. Other areas, like the main church, are undergoing extensive reconstruction with the help of the European Union. By the beginning of the next decade, this monastery will be one of Bohemia’s crown jewels.

Father Richard offered us their guest room in the cloister so we decided to spend the night with the brothers. After a few hours of kicking back in the abbey to “rest and reflect”, we attended the 52nd birthday of one of the priests in a nearby parish of the abbey. It has been a tradition for the past ten years on his birthday to have a smoked pig and Father Richard promised it would be very tasty. A lot of the priests at the abbey are Slovakian so instead of offering us the traditional Czech before-dinner shot of Becherovka, they gave us Slivovice (sp?) which is a pear brandy. It does not taste like Christmas and we’ll leave it at that. It was a very interesting night being surrounded by Czech and Slovak priests, brothers and the abbot of the monastery. Father Richard was kind enough to share many stories with us including the following:

When we woke up this morning, we knew we would be going to a monastery to sample some beer, but we had no idea we would end up being immersed this deeply in Czech/Slovak culture. Tomorrow, we will be driving south to Český Krumlov for a day of sightseeing.

View photos from today’s spiritual adventures.

Today we left Prague in search of the Herold Brewery in Březnice.We had carefully mapped our route and were confident that we could get there without a problem. When we finally found the little village of Březnice we discovered it to be a small farming village with no sign of a brewery. Since we couldn’t find the brewery on our own, we called our contact, David, at the brewery and asked where it was exactly. He asked if we could see any landmarks. I could clearly see the distinctive cooling stacks of a nuclear power plant off in the distance so I relayed that bit of information to him. He responded by saying that there was no nuclear power plant anywhere close to Březnice. Turns out there are three towns called “Březnice” in the Czech Republic and we were clearly in the wrong one. We were in southern Bohemia close to České Budějovice and the Březnice we were looking for was in western Bohemia closer to Plzeň. Opps. A quick drive across the country brought us to the slightly larger Březnice and home of the Herold Brewery.

The brewery was founded in 1503 and has been constantly brewing uninterrupted since. Under the Communists, the brewery was used mainly as a laboratory where it received some hand-me-down parts now and then, so the brewery’s equipment is ancient. Most of it is steam-powered by a large coal-fired boiler. They cannot operate their bottling line, brewhouse, and malting area at the same time because there is simply not enough steam power to drive it all. The brewery is now owned by a group of American investors who are trying to turn it around and make it profitable which is no easy feat.

It was very interesting to see a small Czech brewery like Herold operating in comparison to a incredibly large brewery like Pilsner Urquell. When you see the equipment at Herold and you taste the end-product, it really makes you wonder how they extract such a wonderful product out of such “well-used” equipment. The brewhouse was last refurbished in 1952 and the kettles in the room are clearly a decades, upon decades older. Most of the historical papers about the brewery were destroyed by the Communists. Walking through their cellars, which are currently undergoing a maintenance cycle, you find it amazing that the lagering tanks don’t have leaks from the all the rust that forms in the damp cellars.

David, the brewery director, told us he would love to install a new brewhouse with half the capacity the current brewhouse has so he could produce some more novel beers for the Czech market. Currently, Herold produces basically four beers; two traditional Czech blond lagers and two dark Czech lagers. They are known for their dark lagers as it is virtually unknown for a Czech brewery to bottle or keg dark beer. The Czech beer market is just beginning to open its eyes to the wider variety of beer styles in the world and Herold wants to be on the forefront of that awakening.

Right next to the brewery is a castle. In fact, the town of Březnice used to have two breweries. Herold was the castle brewery and the other was the municipal brewery. The castle was closed by the time we finished touring the brewery, but he assured us it was certainly worthy of a stop if we could find the time.

We are spending the night at the Equitana Hotel Resort 2 km outside of Březnice. It is a modern hotel with modern amenities like a pool, whirlpool, bowling alley (bowling is big in the Czech Republic), high-speed Internet access and horse riding. We had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant (more pork) where I finally managed to get a salad that consisted of more than a few carrot shavings and some cabbage. I also learned the word for non-alcoholic beer the hard way. I didn’t know the Czech people would even attempt to make such a foul-tasting liquid. After two sips I ordered a Pilsner Urquell. Surprisingly, they didn’t serve Herold beer. David said that there is a very strong relationship between pubs, restaurants and breweries with the breweries giving the owners of the eating and drinking establishments significant cash payments to insure exclusive serving rights for their products. Herold, being a smaller brewery, simply cannot afford those cash payments.

After being immersed in Czech culture for a total of five days now, I can now understand why Bohemians are the brunt of so many jokes around the world. Between the quirky language that has very few similarities to other Slavic languages, bribes that grease the wheels of government and business, and a laid-back attitude about life in general, it is amazing to both Doug and I that this country has made the great strides it has since 1989. We really can’t complain that much. The beer is good, the food tasty, and the people are nice. What more do you need?

Tomorrow, we are on the road again to the Želiv monastery which I’m sure promises to be an interesting experience. It might be a couple of days without a new post as I don’t think we’ll have Internet connectivity until we reach our hotel in České Krumlov on Sunday.

See photos from today’s wanderings around Bohemia

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.