Did They Really Need One?
For the Czech Republic, beer is king.
They are the number one beer drinkers per capita in the world. Per
capita is a fancy-shmancy term where they take the amount of beer
sold in a year and divide it by the entire population. It's easy
math wherein even babies drink. Per capita is the only way to get a
decent head count, because some countries are bigger than others, and
because some people can drink 10 times more beer than a baby. So it
goes. You probably thought Germany would be the largest beer
consumers, what with the lederhosen and that Oktoberfest thing.
Well, they were. But Oktoberfest is more than half foreigners, so
that shit doesn't count. That and Czechoslovakia split in half and
the Czechs dropped their wine-swilling Slovak cousins into the dust
while listening to Bohemian Rhapsody. When a city map is redrawn into
specific districts in order to favor one political party, this is
called gerrymandering. With beer consumption and countries, it is
called beerymandering.
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| Photo by Gabriela Sarževská |
Back in The Day (the day I first
arrived in Prague, a fine day in 1997 to be exact), every Czech pub
was pretty much the same: smokey, wall-to-wall wood paneling, small
tv high on a corner shelf, and full of young and old drinkers from
opening to closing. There were slight variations of course. The most
notable was the type of beer offered. You could walk down a single
street in working-class, punk rock, gypsy
Žižkov and see at least a
dozen different beer signs from an equal number of Czech towns. They
had 3 things in common:
they were all good
they were all cheap
one day a week topless bar babes
served you the beer.
The reason the beer was (and still is)
cheap is simple. Czechs would overturn the government if they levied
a beer tax and/or raised the price of beer too much. So beer was
classified as 'liquid bread' so as to be taxed as a basic foodstuff,
a necessity, a staple, and a mainstay of Czech existence. Clever
bastards. Topless beermaids.
So many beers back in The Day, so
little sobriety. There were pubs every 50 feet and a different beer
sign sticking out of each one. It was like staring down a row of
colored squares on a life-sized Beer Monopoly board. There was
Pilsener Place, Gambrinus Gardens, Kozel Avenue, Samson Street and
Budwalk. I saw it as a challenge to try them all. At about a
quarter per pint (back in The Day, nowadays about a buck fiddy), the
only challenge was not to get too wasted before noon. I never used
to be a daytime drinker before I lived in Prague. But you can't pay
double for a soft drink. It's bad beer math. One thing hasn't
changed: Czech beer is cheaper than water. And who the hell would
pay 50 cents for a small glass of warm, flat Coke with no ice when
you can get a tall, cold beer for a quarter? Only a MADMAN, I tell
ya.
BEER WARS AND THE END OF CHOICE
Prague survived all the major world
wars intact by just giving up and being annexed by whatever bastard
sons of bitches were in power at the time. This saved all the old
precious buildings and even more precious breweries from being
leveled. But Czech beer was in true jeopardy when all of the
breweries were being bought up by foreign beverage distributors.
UK's Bass company held sway for awhile, then sold off the Czech
breweries it had owned to the Japanese. ABMiller bought up many of
the major Czech labels, and as is always the case with corporate
conglomeration, something gets diluted in favor of profit.
Globalization equals Bud/Coors/Miller. Anhauser-Busch, the purveyor
of the worst and most popular bilge water beer known as Budweiser,
takes the And How's Your Douche Prize for stupidest legal move. They
tried to sue Czech Budvar, the original Budweiser (from
České Budějovice, aka Budweis in German) for use of the name Bud. Oh yeah,
that went over really well. Hey, Douchebags! Czechs invented
Budweiser in 1785, a hundred fuckin' years before your piss even
passed the first Bowery bum's bladder. All they managed to win in
the suit was the right to keep American beer fucking close to water.
Again. Budvar beer is renamed 'Czechvar' when imported to the
States. Wouldn't want to confuse the rednecks with actual beer.
So just like in the Monopoly game, that
previously-colorful Žižkov pub street became one massive Pilsener
Place, with every sign becoming Pilsener Urquell and Gambrinus (owned
and brewed by Pilsener). Every pub started serving the same beer.
Even the topless beermaids started to look a little tired and droopy.
Pubs started closing (or worse, being sold and turned into biddie
bistros where squared headed, burgundy-haired, middle-aged women met
over cheap wine and squealed about how they got the house and car in
the divorce).
I left the Czech Republic and lived in
Berlin for 6 years. They have more breweries, and many of them are
run by monks. Especially in Bavaria. Ohhhh, mighty monk beer.... A
nice German guy told me the best (and probably only) German joke:
'How are sex in a canoe and American beer the same? Both are fucking
close to water.' Damn right. So I dove into the monk beer and was
baptized in the rheinheitsgebot (German beer purity law of 1516).
On several return visits to Prague for
photo jobs, I started to notice a change. On one particular visit to
my favorite pub district of Žižkov, there was a new phenomenon
brewing: the Czech craft beer. One pub I stumbled into had not only
the usual 3 Czech beers, but a whole line of 9 taps serving beers I
had never even heard (or dreamed) of. There were even a few
microbrewery mainstays like IPA, the once-staple strong ale of
microbrewery fame. There were porters, stouts, ales, bitters and
blondes, all foaming at the mouth and screaming for my attention. It
was about. Fucking. Time. Apparently the peasants revolted. Didn't
want the same 3 beers. Hated the corporate oligarchy. Missed the
days of old.
Since that glorious day, I've seen a
host of microbreweries, craft beer pubs and guest beer tap lists
sprouting and hopping up around Prague—even in the outlying areas.
My latest cheap-ass apartment in the run-down, industrial district of
Praha-Libeň houses several such fine and dandy beer bases. You can
sip a strong stout in the cellar bar
Napalmĕ at Palmovka Metro (or
sit ouside in sunny weather), or you can even go to the Kolčavka pub
just up the road, where they are raking steaming malt and hops out of
steel cauldrons right in front of you while you sip your ale. It's
like a 3D film for the beer enthusiast. With smell-o-vision.
Something fondles my nostalgia when I smell beer being brewed. It's
like Mom's
Malt-O-Meal or oatmeal on the stove mingled with the smell
of burning coffee. If I were to ever get rich and famous and be in
need of my own fragrance line, that would be it.
Today I went to the
Pivovar Kolčavka brewpub up
the road. As it was lunchtime and I have no compunction whatsoever
about daytime drinking, I sampled 3 different beers. I also had
fried smoked cheese to wash the beer down with. Cuz
I am all about the smazhak. The first (and best) beer was the Summer Ale, 13
degree. Czech beers are sold by degree: 10 (most common), 11, 12
and... you get the pic. The degree is something about specific
gravity or something hoppy or jumpy—I don't care about the geeky
bits. I just drink the stuff. But the higher the degree, the
stronger, which is all a beer mathematician needs to know. The 10
degree is about 4% alcohol, and it goes up about a point per degree.
All of the beers I sampled had that fresh micro brew taste. I can't
describe it without getting all nostalgic about Malt-O-Meal again,
but that flavor is exactly the same in Sacramento or Praha-Libeň. Except Czech beer is 5x better.
Add to that the various types of hops and malts offered in each type
of beer and you get beer perfection. I also had something called Best
Bitte, which I thought was German, but it was in fact a bitter beer.
They also had a hořka, which is Czech for bitter. Then there was the
IPA, famous for hoppy bitterness. Apparently you can't be bitter
enough. There was also one called Mrtvy Kostelnik, translated
something like 'dead friar.' It was the strongest beer on offer. As
tempting as that was, I had to pass, as fried cheese, french fries
and 3 strong ales is already enough to kill a bull moose.
I oozed home along a winding path by a
creek and I stopped to listen to the water burbling off the stones.
I thought about how a small country won against imperialist brewers
and purveyors of cheap swill to the growing global economy. Half of
the major Czech breweries and most of the minor ones are still owned
by Czechs in spite of the best efforts of Big Beer. But in a country
that has been brewing beer since about the year 800, that makes all
the sense in the world.
