The Making of a Classic: Pilsner Urquell

During this time of pandemic, when we have more time for reading than sampling new beers, I thought it would be a great time to explore some classic, much imitated (but rarely equaled) beers and what makes them tick. Click here to see other beers in the series.

Pilsner Urquell, a brand that has passed through the hands of South African Brewers, SABMiller, and now Asahi, is one of those green-bottle European lagers found on every convenience store shelf in the US, usually next to the Heineken. It’s ubiquity obscures its importance, however—and also its general weirdness. Yet this is easily the most influential beer ever made, and one with a history deeply scarred by the darkness of empire and war. It is also, for those who taste carefully, a beer that is quite different from those it inspired.

Bohemia, Late 1830s

The story of the first pilsner, the ur-pils, is both well-known and highly entertaining. The story starts in the Bohemian town of Plzeň, where the beer was by all accounts quite bad. At the time, locals did not make the lagerbier famous fifty miles to the west in Bavaria. They made ale, and especially wheat ale. Maybe the wheat ale had always been bad, but by the 1830s, Bavarian lager was trickling into the market—perhaps as much as 10%. That threw the local product, which was, insult to injury, quite expensive, into a dark light. Local publicans were therefore importing better and cheaper lager from down the road. That worsened the situation, because the local ales sat around too long and soured. The situation came to a head in 1838, when local authorities dumped 36 barrels of spoiled beer in the town square. Things had to change.

In Bohemia were a class of citizens with the special right to brew beer known as burghers, and they decided to swing into action. Rather than import lager, they would make it themselves. They knew the best lager beer was made in Bavaria, so they sent a local architect, Martin Stelzer, off to Munich to learn about brewery design. He brought back not only that knowledge, but the name of a man willing to relocate to Plzeň. But perhaps most importantly, Stelzer remained mindful of the burghers’ instructions about including a malthouse in his design to produce “mature, unspoiled malt … and thus the best quality of beer.” It was a state-of-the-(1840)-art facility, including a malt house and a kiln “equipped in the English manner.” This was the newest, coolest way to malt barley, one being developed by Anton Dreher in Vienna and Gabriel Sedlmayr in Munich that used indirect heat, producing a pale malt free of smoke and roast. They were insistent particularly—and these quotes come from their formal request, a document still preserved—that “a burgher, who would brew, would not have to entrust his barley and malt to foreign hands.” Malt, they understood, was central to their endeavor.

Stelzer returned and built the brewery next to the Radbuza River, just a kilometer away from where the townspeople had dumped their ale four years earlier. The final piece of the puzzle was a brewer to make the stuff, and they found one in Bavaria named Josef Groll. He was described as rude and arrogant—his own father called him “the rudest man in Bavaria”—and departed after just three years. That was enough time to write his name in the history books. Groll brewed his “pilsner” on October 5, 1842, and it debuted at St. Martin’s fair on November 11. He was out by 1845.

The Primacy of Malt

In nearly every retelling of this very famous story, Josef Groll is lauded as a visionary brewer. This is at once a tiny and enormous mistake. Because Groll’s beer became immediately popular, we can assume he was a capable brewer. But what made pilsners such a success, and the reason we remember the name Josef Groll today, is because he was a visionary sladmistr—a malt master. A well-made Světlé pivo is surely the result of good brewing, but the style, that revolutionary, limpid golden beer, is a triumph of malting. It was the malt that made pilsner possible, and it was Groll who made the malt—malt unlike anything used to make lager before it. Then as now, the highest calling in a Czech brewery is that of the malt master.

There’s a word Czechs use to describe very well made beer: říz. Translations range from “zest” or “tang,” but also “vigor” or “elan” or even something close to “cut.” Depending on how it’s used and which word it’s modifying, it acts as something like a magnifier. A term of art, říz is the word Czechs use to praise a beer or quality in a beer they admire.

When I visited Budvar Brewery in České Budějovice in southern Bohemia, brewmaster Adam Brož told me how much barley varieties affect the flavor malt provides. “In spite of the fact that the analyticals are very similar or the same, the varieties could change the taste profile of the beer. Our tasting panel here in the brewery is the most important [technical instrument]. You can have expensive equipment, devices, but the taste—that’s the best.” He didn’t mention the “říz” of the beer when he said this, but that’s what his tasting panel is looking for.

This is why malt is now and has since Groll’s day been such a focus of attention in a Czech brewery. It falls to the malt to provide individuality and character. Despite the similarity of all světlé pivos in terms of color and strength, Czechs can easily distinguish them—largely because of the way the barley smells, tastes, and even feels on the tongue. As a consequence, in no place is the expressiveness of malted barley more important than Czechia—now as it was in 1842. I’ve never managed to see tour the Urquell maltings, but they’re still in use, still at the heart of the brewery. In many cases outside Czechia, one might consider a brewery’s maltings as much a promotional activity as one of necessity, but it has been central to the brewery since the start.

The Beer

A lot of history would visit the Czech lands over the next 150 years, but let’s pause to consider the beer itself, which is no ordinary lager. It is a světlý ležák—that is, brewed to a higher gravity than the standard pub pale lager—but is just 4.4% alcohol. The balance comes with a serious whack of Saaz bitterness, somewhere from the high 30s in IBU to low 40s (accounts, even by the brewery itself, vary). The sense of fullness and creaminess is enhanced by a serious dose of diacetyl, that buttery flavor typically considered inappropriate in most beers. In Czechia, Urquell is considered a premium beer, a treat (it’s priced accordingly). Drinkers don’t usually tuck in for a session of several of these—though having done so I can confirm it’s a great beer for such a purpose.

The brewery says it’s made the same way it always was, but that’s not entirely accurate. Equipment, barley varieties, lagering methods, and yeast practices have all changed. It used to be lagered 90 days, but now gets a more traditional 4-5 weeks. Still, it's definitely in the lineage of the original, and still made quite traditionally. Those malts are prepared for a triple-decoction mash (two is more common elsewhere), which is conducted in a new but still traditional brewhouse.

When I toured the brewery in 2014, Robert Lobovsky told us: "We need to do triple decoction for two reasons. One, to get the golden color out, and then to get the caramelization to take place." He added a fascinating note. "They've got the copper chains inside—you saw them in the old brewhouse when you looked in—and they [scrape] them on the bottom, so when you're 700 degrees from your heat, you're scraping up the caramelization so you don't burn the sugar." This is … not typical in modern brewhouses.

Pilsner Urquell has a fully modern building for fermenting and conditioning their beer, but no one cares about giant silvery tanks. The place to go is down, to the mostly-obsolete cellars that honeycomb the earth underneath the brewery. A hundred years ago, the brewery was making a million hectoliters of beer, and it all needed to sit for weeks in wooden casks to ripen. At one time, there were over five miles of cellars devoted to the purpose. It was an amazing operation, with coopers and cellarman rolling gigantic barrels in and out while other wooden giants sat silently, burping slowly as their worty bellies turned to rough beer and rough beer turned to liquid gold. The tour still ends at one of these, where a cellarman pours out a fresh glass for every visitor. It is invariably described as transcendent by tourists who’ve had the pleasure—and I can’t say they’re wrong.

Hard Times

The Czech Republic is home to just 10.5 million people and is slightly smaller in size than South Carolina. You could nevertheless scarcely find a more eventful patch of land in terms of historical drama. Northeast from the brewery, Prague has been the home of several kings and the seat of power for empires that ruled Europe. More than a century before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a German church, Jan Hus was leading the first rebellions against the Catholic hierarchy in Prague.

The drama of politics played itself out famously in not one but two defenestrations (the act of throwing one out the window)—a variety of theater seemingly distinctive to the Bohemians. (Russians seem to have discovered it recently.) Later, of course, it was where legions of Nazi and Soviet soldiers would arrive as conquerors and linger as occupiers. Prague Castle, the largest in the world, occupies a space as large as a small town, and seems to exist as a metaphor for the heavy, vivid, florid past of this tiny country.

No aspect of life was left unchanged by the World Wars, and that’s certainly true of beer. In the Czech Republic, the biggest effect came as a result of the Communist period (both before and after Soviet occupation). The post-war era was a time of enormous technological change in the West, as small breweries grew massive, able to ship their perishable product safely in refrigerated trucks and railcars. In Czechoslovakia, the technology did not advance. Brewers continued making beer the same way they had before the Communist era. And, because that immediately followed the Nazi occupation, those traditions extended back into the 1930s. Like a bug trapped in amber, beer-making was perfectly preserved for half a century.

The original kettle used by Josef Groll, which was twice hidden by burial during wars to protect it from pillaging.

In fact, it was even worse than that. Communist rule led to a kind of reverse-innovation, a period allergic to change, fueled by several threads of dysfunction. Following World War II, Czechoslovakia quickly began reorganizing as a Communist country. A period of instability led to Communist consolidation in 1948, when businesses were uniformly nationalized across the country. Breweries fell under national control and a number were eliminated—considered redundant by a government that reorganized them into districts.

The result wasn’t a leaner industry, as happens in capitalist economies. Quite the opposite. A state responsible for all industry and commercial activity becomes caretaker to its citizens’ jobs, which ballooned under the decades of Communist rule. In a remarkable article in the New York Times immediately following the fall of Communism, reporter Steven Greenhouse identified 2,000 workers at Urquell when it was roughly the size Sierra Nevada is today. Among this giant workforce, “the advent of capitalism” will, he wrote, “probably mean tougher management, less slacking off and perhaps some layoffs, especially among the 400 administrative workers who spend much of their time doing paperwork for Prague’s central planners.” It’s hard to fathom what four hundred administrative workers would spend their days doing, though “slacking off” would have to occupy much of the day.

The famous dissident, playwright, and first president of the democratic (and newly-named) Czech Republic Vaclav Havel, once worked for the Krakonoš Brewery, and his writings touch on the experience. In one of his most famous plays, “Audience,” his doppelganger is Vanek, a playwright working at a languishing brewery in which the brewmaster spends most of his day drunk, sleeping at his desk. Since there is no reason for improving productivity, the brewmaster talks of moving people around in the brewery as favors for their loyalty to him—and, of course, the Party.

The cellars stretch literally for miles.

Havel reflects more seriously on his time at Krakonoš in “The Power of the Powerless,” from 1978. In the essay, he describes a situation in which the brewery managers had gotten their position through patronage and whose interest lay in holding their positions rather than making better beer. One of the brewers, whom Havel only identifies as Š, wanted to make better beer and tried to improve things. “He was proud of his profession and he wanted our brewery to brew good beer,” Havel writes. “He spent almost all his time at work, continually thinking up improvements, and he frequently made the rest of us feel uncomfortable because he assumed that we loved brewing as much as he did.” Not only was his initiative not welcome, but it eventually became a problem.

Havel’s point is how easily one could become a dissident in Czechoslovakia—simply by trying to do a job well. He did not celebrate the old-fashion practices of the brewery, and indeed in one passage he says the managers were “were bringing the brewery to ruin.” One person’s romantic nostalgia is another’s antiquated stasis.

The Times’ Greenhouse writes of Pilsner Urquell’s “ancient copper mash vats, ponderous oak barrels and age-old beer-making techniques” and “dank, dimly lit beer cellars, where the beer ages slowly in large oak barrels.” Typical of reporting of the era, it’s as if he’s discovered a cell of prisoners who are just now stepping, blinking, into the sunlight. The reality is that Urquell’s systems, save for the oaken fermenters they soon abandoned for steel, were large and impressive. When they modernized a few years later, the new, capitalist managers recreated a very similar brewhouse immediately next to the old, historic one, which they still call into use when orders demand it.

This continuity, which goes back through the decades to a distant past, was broken in countries to the west, creating a fascinating inheritance for Czechs. By the time the Soviet tanks rolled out of Bohemia, these antiquated practices had become enshrined as tradition. Moreover, the beers made there retained a traditional character that had largely been lost in the rest of the world, where the dictates of industrial production had left them pallid and watery. Czech brewing is now one of the more interesting traditions for revival breweries to mine—and they now make beers using old, inefficient methods like decoction mashing, open fermentation, and extra long lagering times to access that depth of flavor. The old ways Havel impugned have become cool again.

One of the coopers. A few are still around.

Looking Forward

The period after communist rule led to another kind of violence in the Czech lands as private foreign capital swept in and acquired local businesses. In 1999, South African Breweries acquired Pilsner Urquell. Three years later, it would snap up Miller Brewing. And still later, Urquell would go to Asahi so that AB InBev could clear monopoly hurdles in acquiring SABMiller.

Which brings us back to the beer. Pilsner Urquell is still made in same location in Plzeň, on a campus that stretches for acres. The brewery, rather remarkably, makes just one beer. Its status as the first pilsner, the one that inspired all the rest (including their descendants, mass market lagers), has inoculated it against change and “innovation.” When you consider how much beers change over time, what breweries have to do to survive, and how the bottom line perpetually trumps tradition, it’s perhaps the most unusual thing about this unusual brewery. And, in the final irony, I wonder about this. Had the brewery been located in a country that didn’t experience such turmoil and oppression, would it have prevailed in such a direct lineage? Would the brewery still be making only a single beer? We can never know—but looking at breweries elsewhere, in freer, less-troubled countries, there are no analogues.

Here’s hoping it makes it another hundred and seventy-odd years.