Libeň La Vida Loca!

Life in a Grungy Industrial Prague Suburb

The corridor from Prague Libeň through Prague Holešovice has a reputation as being an ugly, dodgy section of Prague best avoided (say 'Palmovka' to a local and watch their face twist). This is mainly due to the dearth of abandoned factories, plants, manufacturers, and other industrial-age relics left behind when Soviet communism died a vodka-soaked death in the Eastern Bloc. These areas are now mostly inhabited by the poor. You can still see the tall, round brick smokestacks left behind in empty dirt lots, like phallic totems of the mighty proletariat.

I moved to Praha-Libeň quite by accident. I've lived in many areas in Prague over the years, including Strašnice, Bubeneč, Smíchov, Žižkov, Nové Město, Zahradní Město, Stodůlky, Řepy, and Letňany. A lot of expats prefer to live in more central, popular areas like Staré Město (Old Town), Vinohrady, Malá Strana or Žižkov. I prefer not to give the landlord parasites most of my earnings, so I live slightly further afield.  It also means I can live in cheap neighborhoods completely devoid of pretentious expat douchebags, which is its own reward.

Libeň la Vida Loca: a Micro-brewery and a Mexican Food Store

Even though I tend to live in unpopular areas relegated to the poor, unwashed masses (like me), I have a truffle-pig snout when it comes to rooting out the good shit in every area I've lived.  I used to take trams and buses to poor, punk, working class Žižkov all the time just for a drink, but many of my favorite bars there shut down. After moving to Libeň, I was very surprised to learn that there are some decent digs for food and beer right in my own dreary working class suburb.

I never thought a taco-teased, burrito-bombed California dude like me would find a place for real Mexican products in Prague. Then I stumbled down a narrow passage one day after a fried cheese binge and found Mexicali Mercado. There I found:

- Restaurant quality tortilla chips.
- Real corn tortillas in several sizes, from enchilada to street taco.
- Refried black beans, chipotles in adobo sauce, enchilada sauce, and mucho, mucho mas.
- A fresh food kitchen in the back. Admittedly, I skip this as I prefer to make massive amounts of comida Mexicana en me casa. Plus they once put red cabbage on my taco. Fuj.

Sadly, that once-mas-fina Mexican joint has succumbed to all the usual greed, incompetence and rudeness famous in Prague. I watched many of my favorite products double in price overnight, got bitched at when I questioned the padded bill, and mucho attitudo in general.  Chingala! I guess I'll have get my vida loca elsewhere. Fortunately, the Albert store in the nearby Harfa mall stocks the same tortilla chips for only five crowns more, plus half-price jalapeños.

In my day, they called small, non-industrial breweries 'micro-breweries.'  Now the term seems to be 'craft beer breweries.'  The difference is simple: micro-breweries make their own beer in many varieties and serve it to discriminating beer consumers for reasonable prices.  Craft breweries make their own beer in many varieties and serve it to fucking hipsters for twice the price.  Yes, I can say that because I am a discriminating beer consumer.

I like to walk along the path by the creek from the park and approach Kolčavka Pivovar from the back. I'm sneaky like that, plus I love the sound of burbling creeks to whet my appetite for beer. Kolčavka brews dark beer, strong dark beer, light beer, strong light beer, IPA, summer ales, winter ales, Irish red ales, bitters, bittersweets, seasonal beer, super strong beer and a partridge in a pear tree.

Libeň: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

There are still signs of the usual poverty associated with cheaper and uglier areas.  I'm lucky enough to live on a nice street surrounded by older buildings with fancy facades that remind me a bit of the Old West towns in the States. Adjacent streets have ubytovny (boarding houses for imported Eastern European laborers), gypsy slums and service warehouses.

Once I took a long walk on a dodgy trail on a hill overlooking Libeň, prodded along by my wife, who is allegedly concerned with my health, yet likes to prod my ass up dodgy trails to slippery precipices at every opportunity. I was just looking down to my left to avoid sliding down the hill, when she said 'watch out for needles! Junkie camps ahead. Junkie camps? What ever happened to your garden variety homeless camps?  I paused mid stride to evaluate my chances of either trodding on an HIV needle or sliding down a hill onto cold steel train tracks below, and I looked up. The sun was just setting over Libeň. I could see the train tracks below, and old warehouses and buildings with plants growing through their roofs. I couldn't see our flat, but I could easily see the O2 Arena, where I once heard Ennio Morricone conduct an orchestra playing his greatest movie hits of all time.

Several other islands of goodness are scattered across the landscape. A Chinese joint on Sokolovská offers an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet (11 am – 3 pm) for 109 crowns. My favorite local Czech pub, Kovářská, has the best fried cheese in Libeň. This area also features a high concentration of Vietnamese grocers and discount food outlets (aka Food Crypts), if you're into that sort of thing.

Libeň and the Winter of My Content

Once I took a Sunday stroll for a Sunday smažák. Zero degrees celsius with cold winds nipping at my nose and Jack Frost chewing on my ass.  I like cold, but Jack needs a muzzle.

Visions of dark beer and fried cheese dancing in my head; no dark beer today.  I've always enjoyed a dark beer on a cold day ever since my London/Dublin daze.  In Czech, you have to get used to things running out at any given time.  Kolčavka always rotates the beer stock, and offering Summer Ale in December seems like a perfectly Czech thing to do. So I ordered an IPA. They were not out of fried cheese. Those lucky bastards got to live another day.

This Californian has seen many snowy winters in Europe, and I still thrill at the first snow. Leaving Kolčavka that night, the previous wind chill was replaced by the pin pricks of ice crystals in the face.  I grinned and let them melt on my teeth. There were a few days in the last weeks where it only threatened to snow; barely-visible flecks of white dancing on the wind but never sticking to the ground. That shit doesn't count.  This was a right proper snow with white powder on the ground and  black footprints breaking through to the pavement. Along my path home, winter boot heels left their mark with tiny dog paw prints alongside. I could see the history of the snow dog's walk, his tiny feet breaking stride with his master to leave the path and mark a bush, or to bolt 90 degrees opposite to greet an oncoming human.

I walked by my favorite creek-side path passing under the fractured columns of the broken bridge, its blackened surfaces standing in stark contrast to the tiny snowflakes and brownish-black evening sky. The creek burbled and sang along with the thumping boot tempo of my bustling feet.

The Czech Beer Revolution

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.

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:

1. they were all good
2. they were all cheap
3. 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.

DIVERSITY

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).

BEERENAISSANCE

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.