It all started in 1805, when the English doctor Frobig came to Carlsbad, where he found accommodations in the house where Josef Becher had his pharmacy. Thanks to their common interests in mixing different fluids, the doctor and pharmacist soon got acquainted. In 1807, the two gentlemen presented the result of their long-lasting experiments: Carlsbad English Bitters.
It’s known that Josef Becher sincerely considered the “gastric drops” to be a medicine. However, hordes of patients in the spa city rapidly discovered that Becher’s Bitter not only improved digestion, but — thanks to the not insignificant alcohol content — also improved bad moods.
The production and marketing of Becher’s Gesundheits-Liqueur (Health Liqueur) hit its stride when Josef’s son Johann took over the management in 1841. It was also Johann (in Czech Jan) who registered the trademark — modestly enough, not in his father the inventor’s name, but in his own.
For the next century, agile marketing combined with big chunks of luck helped Becher’s liqueur to penetrate markets all over Europe, and it even became popular in Egypt. The company reached its zenith when Emperor Franz Josef, by coincidence, tasted the liqueur. The drops evidently pleased the imperial stomach, for after that day, Becher delivered 50 litres to the court in Vienna every month (His Imperial Highness probably didn’t consume it all by himself).
The Becher family’s success story came to a rather brutal end in 1945. As were nearly all the three million ethnic German citizens in Czechoslovakia, the Becher family was deported from the country (see: Munich Agreement). According to the Potsdam Conference’s decisions on war reparations, all their property — including the distillery — fell to the Czechoslovak state as compensation for damages caused by the Germans during their more than six-year occupation of Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren.
During the 40 years of communist misrule, Karlovarská Becherovka, as both the company and the liqueur were renamed, scraped by without any significant investments or efforts to promote exports. Luckily for Czech Becherovka fetishists, the bad times ended with the Velvet Revolution. In 1997, the distillery in Karlovy Vary — including the secret receipt of Becherovka — was sold to the Pernod-Ricard concern, which, after some wrangling with a Becher daughter company in Germany and a pirate distillery in Slovakia, has started the fight to regain the international position that was lost during the last half century.
That’s the whole story. If you still think the beverage tastes more like the medicine it once was promoted as than an irresistible aperitif, try this trick: nonchalantly order a beton (concrete), which is the Czech slang expression for Becherovka mixed with tonic.
This method has two advantages. Firstly, it clearly demonstrates that you are a true connoisseur of Czech drinking culture. And secondly, thanks to the tonic, beton doesn’t remind you of the gastric drops at all. Cheers!
Carp
The Czechs don’t have access to the ocean, so they can hardly be blamed for not offering a wild variety of delicious seafood (see: Czech Cuisine). Nevertheless, a foreigner may be somewhat surprised by the fact that the Czechs’ relations to fish can — with a slight exaggeration — be reduced to one single species: Cyprinus carpio — the carp.
Inhabitants of maritime nations often turn up their noses at this fat and thick-boned creature that revels in the mud and standing waters of fish-ponds. For a land-locked nation, though, the carp has its undisputed qualities.
First of all, the carp is an undemanding fellow, who is easily reared in artificial ponds. The Czechs discovered this practical advantage almost a millennium ago, when the country was christened. With the introduction of the new religion, a ban of eating meat in the time of fasting soon followed. Creative souls, however, got hold of the fleshy carp (how it found its way from China to the Czech lands is not documented) and the Lent problem was solved.
As in so many other fields of Czech economy and culture in the Middle Ages, also the rearing of carp took off under the reign of the dynamic Charles IV in the fourteenth century. Artificial ponds and lakes were constructed at big pace, especially in the Třeboň area, with the result that Bohemia and Moravia by the beginning of the seventeenth century could boast fish ponds covering a total of 160,000 hectares — almost three times the size of Balaton, Central Europe’s largest lake!
The Thirty Years’ War (see: Battle of White Mountain) and the subsequent economic decline also affected the rearing of carp, and things changed for the better only in the 1860s. Today, artificial ponds and lakes cover about 51,000 hectares, which is rather bleak compared to their heyday four centuries ago. Modern breeding technologies, however, have worked miracles with productivity. Thus, the Czech Republic’s fisheries annually deliver more than 21,000 tons — quite impressive for a land-locked country — of which carp represent nearly 90 percent.
One might, of course, ask whether there not are other and better tasting species that can be successfully reared in ponds. Well, there definitely are. So why are the Czechs so fixated on the poor carp? Simply because of its almost mythical role in Czech culture.
This is not only based on the fact that the carp is a “cute” fish, whose marked lips, big eyes and fat belly make it an obvious hero in the illustrated fairy-tales which Czech children are raised with. The main reason is that the carp, ever since the Middle Ages, when people strictly observed Lent, has been the ultimate Christmas dish of the Czechs.
Neither centuries of Austrian rule, Nazi occupation or communist dictatorship managed to budge the carp’s position. Just as stubbornly as the Czechs resisted the Moscow-promoted Dyedushka Moroz (Father Frost) and clung to their Ježíšek (Infant Jesus) as the holiday’s main star, nothing can replace the carp, served fried with potato salad, at the Christmas table.
Photo © Jaroslav Fišer
Thus, every December a fantastic show is performed all over the country. Large containers filled with water and wriggling carp pop up in streets and squares. Even if the thermometer falls to 20 degrees below zero, millions of Czechs queue up patiently for hours to buy their Christmas dinner. When they are finally served, the fishmonger, with clothes dramatically smeared with blood and guts, asks the classic question: to kill, or not to kill?
Most people tend to follow Pilate’s example, and they give the fishmonger the go-ahead to smash the carp’s noodle with a club, and thus promote the poor fellow directly to the frying pan. However, it often happens, especially when children have come with Mom or Dad to buy the Christmas delicacy, that the carp gets temporary mercy. Instead of being instantly dispatched to eternity, the fish is carried away in a plastic bag, and then allowed to swim in the family’s bathtub until Christmas Eve.
Needless to say, there are those softhearted Czechs who can’t bear to kill their new pets. This often leads to an even more fantastic spectacle than the carp-shows in the street. Every Christmas Eve, you can see people at the banks of Vltava and other big rivers. There, they are giving their fellow creature new life by putting it back into the water where it belongs. True, river water is usually far too cold for the carp, so they inevitably die, but probably not even Christ himself would have questioned the carp-owners’ sincere motives.