By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Czechs had emerged as the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s ultimate beer nation. Of the 1,050 breweries that were operating in the entire empire in 1912, 666 were situated in Bohemia, Moravia or Silesia. After the founding of Czechoslovakia, the number of breweries started to decrease (by 1937, there were 374 left), but, due to rapid modernization, production steadily increased. Obviously, not only thirsty Czechs benefited from the larger brewing capacity. In the 1920s, Czech beer exports skyrocketed, which hugely contributed to making the young republic visible on the global market.
There’s not much to say about the unlucky combination of Czech beer brewing and communism. By 1948, all breweries were nationalized and the management centralized, which inevitably led to poorer quality. As late as in the 1980s, when people were shopping for beer in their local grocery, it was perfectly common to turn every bottle upside-down to check that it didn’t contain deposits or other filthy things.
The Bolsheviks, however, by no means prevented the Czechs from flocking to their hospodas and drinking their beer as they always have. Actually, cheap and relatively tasty beer was one of the main enticements with which the communist regime bought support from the broad masses. Before 1989, some pundits even considered a dramatic hike in the price of beer to be among the few things that could make the Czechs revolt against the communists (see: Velvet Revolution).
As in almost all other fields of society, the fall of communism also had a positive impact on the breweries. With the exception of Budvar in České Budějovice, all members of the “Big Five” have been privatised (several of them, such as Prazdroj in Plzeň, by foreigners), and this also goes for the vast majority of the small- and medium-sized breweries. There have also been some new ones established, most of them microbreweries, so currently, the Czech Republic can boast about 84 breweries with total production approximating 19 million hectolitres. If this doesn’t say anything to you, just try to imagine some 3.8 billion pints in a row...
Now, let’s have a look at the practical part of this foamy subject.
If beer drinking is not a national sport (see: Beauty Contests; Ice Hockey), then at least it is a basic part both of the Czech lifestyle and traditional Czech cuisine. In fact, there are those natives who even consider beer to be a soft drink. A doctor, whom the author of this manual once visited, claimed in dead earnestness that fewer than four pints of beer does not count as alcohol. Some of his foreign colleagues might disagree about that, but he still had a point: about 60 percent of the beer consumed in the Czech Republic is of low gravity (ca. 3 percent alcohol), while stronger beer, popular, for instance, in Belgium, is more or less unknown.
This brings us to two basic terms from the Czech beer world: desítka and dvanáctka.
The first means ten-degree beer and the latter twelve-degree beer, and both correspond to the two main types that are consumed in this country. Many people, including lots of native Czechs, confuse this marking with the alcohol content, which is actually a big mistake. The term desítka means that the beer contains 10 percent (or degrees, as the brewers used to say) extract of the original young beer, while the dvanáctka has twelve percent.
Thus, the latter, containing about 5 percent alcohol, has a fuller taste and a stronger flavour of hops than the former, which normally has 3 percent alcohol. In other words, Czech beer, in both of its main versions, is relatively weak in alcohol, but is compensated by its rich flavour.
Beer is also an inexhaustible source of debates (and sometimes even black eyes) in this country. Questions such as, “Has Plzeňský Prazdroj reached at a higher level of beer evolution than Budějovický Budvar?” (it hasn’t!), or “Should beer bottles (yes, bottles! Only stupid foreigners buy canned beer) be stored on the seventh or on the eighth stair in the cellar staircase?” are treated with the utmost seriousness by any true pivař. Most of them will even claim that beer is one of your health’s best friends. Which, actually, is not all that untrue.
Most of us have already experienced that our hair gets shinier when we wash it in beer, and even the wildest hair-do can be tamed by a few drops of beer (famous as the Pilsner Ur-gel). You might have also noticed that beer is strongly diuretic, so it helps cleanse your kidneys and bladder of detritus. But did you know that beer also contains an incredible amount of minerals, ranging from potash and sodium to chloride, phosphorus, magnesium and silicon, plus all the most important substances in the vitamin B family? Or that some Czech spas even recommend a bottle of beer daily to fight coronary disease?
Perhaps there’s no need to blow up the doctor’s usual message that beer has a positive effect on your physiology only as long as it’s consumed in “moderate” quantities. And you’re probably aware of the fact that a desítka contains about 380 calories and a dvanáctka no less than 460 calories. Instead, remember Jára Cimrman’s somewhat sexist, but still widely respected words of wisdom: “Teplé pivo horší než studená ženská!” — Warm beer is worse than a cold woman!
Blava
To a Czech ear, this frequently used slang abbreviation of “Bratislava” sounds very close to a combination of the two words bláto (mud) and kráva (cow). If this makes you believe that the Czechs tend to regard neighbouring Slovakia’s capital as a somewhat dull and uninteresting place, you’re exactly right. Small but romantic Bratislava on the Danube is a city most Czechs take great pride in not visiting.
One can, of course, perfectly understand that the Czechs after the Velvet Revolution and 40 years of isolation started exploring foreign countries instead of their own country, but the ostentatious ignorance and belittling of Bratislava is a quite evident expression of the Czech paternalism that enraged the Slovaks in the Czechoslovak era.
And it’s also a bit comic, since the Slovak-Hungarian-German-Jewish city Pressburg (or Pozsony) in 1918 actually was renamed Bratislava (brať — brother, slava — glory) as a tribute to the eternal brotherhood between the Czechs and Slovaks.
Bohemia
As the story goes, the Czechs descent from a Slavonic people who, in the sixth century, were led to the area of today’s Bohemia by the legendary chief Čech and his younger brothers Lech and Mech. After having trudged thousands of kilometres from the Slav heartland somewhere by the Dnepr, old Čech commanded his exhausted tribesmen to climb Říp, a hilltop visibly resembling a woman’s breast (see: Sex).