A Pilsner Urquell story

The first was in September. I was at the brewery in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. We saw the huge, modern brewery with the big copper brewing kettles (heated by direct fire) and the massive stainless fermentation and maturation tanks . . . all aboveground. Then we were led below ground, into nine kilometers of tunnels cut through the native sandstone.


Down here, in the dim, wet halls where all Pilsner Urquell used to be lagered in great wooden barrels, they still make a small amount of it in the old, traditional way: fermented in open vats, aged in the big barrels that are still made by an onsite cooperage, and cooled by the natural temperature of the earth. They do that to make sure the beer made the modern way tastes the same as the old school stuff.

Vaclav handing Thomas his first beer

And there I was, in the very birthplace of pilsner, drinking fresh-as-life beer tapped directly from those barrels, with none other than the Pilsner Urquell brewmaster, a huge blond bear of a man named Vaclav Berka. It was cool, deliciously zingy with Saaz hop aroma and bitterness, and fantastically fresh.

The second moment was in mid-October. It was my son’s 21st birthday, and I managed to get him to hold off having a drink until 4:30 in the afternoon. That was when we went to a Pilsner Urquell event (at City Tap House), and my son’s first legal beer was a Pilsner Urquell, tapped and handed to him by a huge blond bear of a man . . . named Vaclav Berka. I got the next one, and it was cool, deliciously zingy with Saaz hop aroma and bitterness, and fantastically fresh....


And you can read the rest of that story here. It's a trade journal piece, but a good piece. And I have a follow-up, too. Yesterday I picked up a liter of unpasteurized Pilsner Urquell in the beautiful bottle you see to the left. I got it from the people at Muller Beverage, who told me it was one of only 60 in the country (edit: Ahhh...no. It was actually one of 60 that Muller got, which is quite a bit different! I was moving fast, and it was a simple misunderstanding. My apologies to all). They also told me I should drink it right away, because it had been held up in shipping because of Hurricane Sandy (that bastard).

So I did. I picked up some lobsters at a local supermarket (I'd say where and give them a plug, but they sold me a piece of bad bluefish at the same time, so screw 'em), got some barbecue mushrooms at the farmer's market, and went home to Cathy and Thomas. I popped open the liter, poured it into two beautiful Pilsner glasses I got at the Grey Lodge some years back and cherish, and Thomas's mug (which you see in Vaclav's big hand above), and we drank that sweet thing... And we all said, hey, that's pretty good! And it was. I hope the whole Express Shipped Cold thing works out, because then we'll see more of this kind of thing, and it won't just be lucky journalists and bar owners who get this delicious stuff.

Missed Opportunities: a shout out to Jack, Kerry, Gregg, and King Ron

Okay, this is going to be a little complicated, but I just saw something that made me pissed, intrigued, nostalgic, and happy, all at the same time. It's this entry in Evan Rail's excellent Czech beer blog (which I really need to read more regularly). He's talking about how he wants the already excellent Pardubicky Porter to be better, less of a sweet finish, so he's "beer hacking" by dosing some of it with Orval yeast, in hopes of getting some brett dryness in it.

But that's not what zinged my cortex. It was this:

For example, take Pardubický Porter from Pivovar Pernštejn in Pardubice. The Czech Republic’s premiere Baltic Porter and perhaps the southernmost traditional exemplar of the style, Pardubický Porter is a very filling, strong black lager with lovely treacle and licorice notes.

As anyone knows who knows me, I'm a sucker for Baltic Porter. And this is Moby Dick for me, because of a bastard bus driver named Ivan. The whole story's here, but I'll condense it. I was on a beer junket in the Czech Republic (courtesy of Distinguished Brands Int'l, who no longer own the rights to the beer they had us over there to pimp, Budvar, so no real conflict here, okay?) with the beer writers mentioned in the post title ("Uncle" Jack Curtin, Kerry "ColdHard" Byrne, Gregg "Let Me Get That For You, Miss" Glaser, and "King" Ron Givens).

Jack's buddy, Czech beer demiurge Honza Kočka, had lined up a sample case (that's pronounced "free effin' beer") of Pardubický Porter for us, direct from the brewery. And our bus driver, Ivan, damn his black heart, refused, simply refused to go half a mile out of his way and let us pick it up. That bastard! After three years, I still get pissed off when I think about it.

And when I saw Evan's post today, well, it all came back. Finding out how highly Ron Pattinson regards the beer didn't help. Ah, me. Some day.