Prague by Vitali Vitaliev

A rather reluctant beer drinker (I always preferred wine), I made sure I memorised one useful Czech expression before flying to Prague: “Uz nepiju” (“I don’t drink any more”). It was the best I could do, for visiting Prague without getting the feel of its world-famous pubs was like touring Moscow without seeing the Kremlin.

Of course, the starting point of my initially rather half-hearted pub crawl had to be U Fleku, Prague’s oldest and most famous beer hall, which has been brewing its own dark and strong brand Flekovsky Lezak since 1499.

U Fleku was easy to find. An uninterrupted line of neatly parked tourist coaches led me to its entrance on Karlovo Namesti. The place was bursting with tourists, mostly Germans, with streaks of Americans and Japanese among them. A musician, dressed in the military uniform of the times of World War I and Good Soldier Svejk, was playing an accordion in one of the cavernous rooms.

To escape the noise, I went out into the beer garden. It was nippy outside, and the long wooden benches were half-empty. Only some cold-resistant Scandinavians and several legless Germans were there. I sat next to a drunken German sugar daddy snogging his blonde and red-eyed young girlfriend. She was massive – Brunhilde-like – and had a thick bovine neck. They both stank of beer.

Somewhere from above there came a voice “Pivo?” (“Beer?”). It was the waiter, and I suddenly realised why in the Czech Republic the call waiters ‘Pan Vrchny’ (‘Mister Upper’). U Fleku’s Mr Upper, sporting a short-sleeved white shirt under a black vest, was towering above me holding an enormous tray with several dozen beer mugs on it. His question was rather a rhetorical one: why on earth would someone come to U Fleku, if he didn’t want beer? To file one’s tax return? To board a plane to Bratislava?

Thump! A weighty mug with dark brown liquid landed on the table in front of me. It was followed by Mr Upper’s dexterous hand which made one quick notch on a piece of paper, stuck under my coaster. Before I could say “Dekuji!” (“Thanks!”), another Mr Upper’s hand was stretching towards me with a shot a Becherovka liqueur. But I was well prepared for the trick. Gently pushing his priapic hand away, I told him resolutely “Ne!” (“No!”), as the Pub Etiquette section of the Prague Post, a local English-language newspaper for expats (I took time to study it on the plane), advised.

“Perche?” Mr Upper asked in unexpected Italian.

“Because I don’t want it!” I replied in English.

“But it is very good with beer,” the obstinate polyglot insisted.

“I don’t think so. Take it away!”

The reason for Mr Upper’s persistence was that they charged you the price of a three-course meal in a good Prague restaurant for a shot – more than five times the cost of a 0.4 litre mug of U Fleku beer – by far the most expensive in the country. Besides, contrary to Mr Upper’s assurances, mixing the vomitingly sweet Becherovka with beer was like eating a pickled herring topped with raspberry jam.

I took a couple of sips from my mug and found the beer surprisingly pleasant. Its bitter-sweet taste reminded me of kvass, a mildly alcoholic Russian drink, made of yeast and rye bread.

Meanwhile, my neighbours, who obviously hadn’t read the Prague Post, were busily gulping their Becherovkas, washing them down with beer. Several happy Mr Uppers were hovering above them like butterflies, and the rows of pencilled ‘notches’ on their beer slips were as thick as hedges in Devon. A group of German students at the next table tried to half-heartedly to swing, but quickly gave up. The sugar daddy was quarrelling with his bovine-necked Brunhilde, whose face was by now pretty bovine, too.

The famous U Fleku, which claims to be the oldest beer pub in the world, was clearly no longer a place where one could find much local colour.

Not far from U Fleku, in Kaprova Street, I spotted a small pub called U Mestkiy Knihovni (‘At a Local Bookshop’). What an ingenious name! Imagine an angry wife questioning her wayward husband: “Where have you been all evening?” “At a local bookshop,” he answers meekly and the would-be row gets quickly defused. In Finland, by the way, they have gone even farther in pacifying angry wives: they have pubs called ‘At My In-Laws and ‘At My Brother’s’...

I didn’t venture into ‘A Local Bookshop’ (perhaps because I then didn’t have a wife to report to), but through the window I could discern several ruddy, fat men drinking beer. And not a single book!

My next destination was U Pravdu, which translated as ‘The Truth’. My guidebook promised a nice beer garden and a convivial ‘Svejk’ atmosphere. The beer garden was closed, the pub was totally empty, and that was the whole truth about ‘The Truth’.

I was luckier at U Cernego Vola (‘At a Black Ox’), although the name of this pub near the magnificent Prague Castle would have been an immediate give-away for a beer-loving husband.

The atmosphere inside the pub was warm and brotherly: under low, beamed ceilings, the patrons were sitting next to each other on long dark-wood benches. They were drinking Kozel (‘Goat’) beer and chasing it with traditional ‘Pivni Sir’, a strong, spicy goat cheese.

The balance, as I soon discovered, was perfect: my mouth was set on fire after each bite of the heavily peppered cheese, and the only way to put the flames out was to wash them down with a good gulp of Kozel. The man next to me had six notches on his slip already, and was thirstily approaching his seventh.

Through a small leaded window, I could see the palatial Foreign Ministry building across the road. It was there, in the courtyard, that the dead body of the country’s president Jan Masaryk was found beneath an open window on 10 March 1948. It was officially announced that he had killed himself by jumping to his death. Interestingly, the first doctor to arrive at the scene also committed suicide a fortnight later.

The death of Masaryk was the final episode in the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. Rather than a suicide, it was the last (so far) case of centuries-old Czech political tradition of defenestration (from the German word ‘Fenster’ – window), which means chucking an undesirable politician out of a window and making it look as if he has taken his own life.

The first defenestration, a collective one, was in 1419, when several over-zealous Prague town councillors were hurled out of their office windows by a group of bullish religious reformers. Since then there have been three more, including that of Masaryk.

Who is going to be the victim of the next great defenestration of Prague? It is hard to say, but the Czechs with whom I spoke were inclined to believe it was likely to be Vasclav Klaus, the incumbent Thatcherite President of the Czech Republic, albeit it was his predecessor, Vaclav Havel, who once won the honorary (if somewhat dubious) title of The-Most-Likely-to-be-Defenestrated Person in Prague.

After a mug of strong pale Kozel, I started clearly seeing human bodies – in suits and ties – flying out, one by one, from the Foreign Ministry’s windows. I recalled the words of Jerome K. Jerome who, in his book Three Men on the Bummel (published in 1900) warned visitors to Prague against “getting too fond of Pilsener beer”, which, in his words, “is an insidious drink, especially in hot weather, but it does not do to imbibe too freely of it.”

To clear my head, I desperately need a cup of coffee.

“What will happen if I order a coffee here?” I asked my beer-swilling neighbour, who happened to speak some English.

“They will think that you are an alcoholic,” he replied finishing off his tenth mug.

Eventually, I did find my favourite haunt in Prague – U Bronku. This small, unpretentious pub in the district of Karlin was not mentioned in any guidebooks. It was genuine and un-touristy. Sitting there over a Gambrinus beer - or over a Slivovitz nine plum vodka, which I had come to prefer - I could quietly observe the locals and the often-confusing daily routine of Prague.

I would come to U Bronku for a morning cup of coffee to watch the first clients of the day fighting their hangover with a hair of the dog. Judging by the size of this ‘hair’, they must have all been bitten by the Hound of the Baskervilles the night before. These morning patrons were often joined by the staff- waiters, chefs and doormen – who seemed to be suffering from the same problem and used the same trusted cure to treat it.

To understand a city one must be lonely there – at least for a while... Prague, the city that I had known for many years, was now more beautiful than ever, and the new spirit of Western commercialism had added some entrepreneurial buzz to its narrow cobbled streets, lined with old baroque houses and churches.

Baroque architecture, by the way, always struck me as somewhat beer-inspired: this extensive ornamentation, this profusion of curved and interrupted lines, these heavy and solid – almost stout – facades, this beer-foam-like multitude of cupolas and turrets... And isn’t it true that the best examples of baroque architecture can be found in beer-loving countries: Germany, Belgium, Austria and, of course, the Czech Republic? Please correct me, if I am wrong (which I probably am).

But one thing I can safely vouch for is that one simply cannot avoid beer drinking or escape beer associations when in Prague.