Prague Beer by Vitali Vitaliev
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… I could not believe my eyes: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the great leader and teacher of workers, peasants and executioners of all countries, was standing in front of me in the office of the Staropramen brewery in the central Prague area of Smichov. He was wearing his famous polka-dot tie, and his pseudo-intellectual “social-democratic” goatee trembled slightly when he spoke.
“The communists wanted to keep the Czech people quit by offering them cheap beer,” he was saying. “Beer was highly politicized. It was the country’s main showcase, like ballet in Russia, and we never had shortages of it.”
Let me reassure you: my meeting with Lenin who had then been dead for over 70 years (although in the Soviet Union we were always told that he was eternally alive and was always with us – hence the joke about triple marital bed), was not the result of several mugs of the strong Kozel beer consumed the day before. Dr. Pavel Ferkl, the ageing ormer chief brewer of Staropramen, and now an adviser to the general manager, was the spitting image of Lenin, his complete lookalike.
In modern Russia, he could have earned heaps of money by simply wandering around Moscow and calling for the overthrow of the non-existing monarchy or by repeating Lenin’s famous truism that communism was Soviet power plus electrification (or was it electrocution?) of the whole country. When he was showing me around the brewery, I half-expected him to raise his hand suddenly and to cry out in a high-pitched, burred voice (Lenin could not pronounce “r” and had to say “g” instead), “Comgades! The ggeat ghevolution has happened! Hoogay!!”
Except for this striking resemblance, the was not much in common between the first Soviet dictator, who had never had a proper job, and Prague’s most respected beer expert, who had worked all his life at Staropramen and was also a professor of brewing (!) at the Prague School of Food Technology, a member of the American Master Brewers Association, and so on. So high was Dr Ferkl’s brewing authority that the communist government used to send him to the West as the ultimate ambassador of Czech beer. Now, the West had come to him, and Staropramen, the largest brewery in Prague, was partly owned by Bass, a British brewing giant.
“There are two secrets of Czech’s bee’s success: ingredients – hops, barley and water, which are the best in the world – and tradition. Books on technology of brewing have been written here since the 16th century,” Dr Ferkl said, as we passed by a huge fermentation tank. Flakes of greyish cotton-like foam in it did not look very appetising: they reminded me of the melting dirt-ridden Moscow snowdrifts at the end of March. In the next room stood four conical copper tanks, the so-called brew-kettles, in which the actual brewing process took place. These precious old tanks – the pride of the brewery – were temporarily buried in Staropramen’s spacious courtyard during the German occupation and thus survived the Second World War.
I was interested to see that the making of beer was not unlike the making of filter coffee: the mixture of malted grain and water was placed in vessels with sieve-like false bottoms through which the juices of the malt ran prior to being aromatised with hops, boiled and fermented.
“Our brewing technology remained unchanged for centuries,” Dr Ferkl continued. “Communists did not intervene in technological matters, they only turned the Czech beer industry into a centralised military-type organisation and used it as a source of revenue. This is why Czech beer was less exposed to modernisation than German or American, which in itself was not so bad.”
Dr. Ferkl was contemptuous of the very concept of canned beer, which, he asserted, had distorted the whole face of beer-making. He told me with pride that Czech beer was produced exclusively in returnable bottles, and it had become a popular Czech pastime to take crates of empty bottles back to shops on Saturdays. It was illegal (!) for the shops not to accept the bottles.
From the colourful Staropramen brochure, I deduced that one of results of the brewery’s westernisation was that it now produced a “politically correct” diabetic beer with reduced sugar and protein. But no canned beer still!
The main thing I grasped from my visit to Prague’s largest brewery therefore was that the “velvet revolution” and the resulting change of the country’s political system hadn’t radically altered the technologies and the very nature of the Czech beer industry: the packaging and the labelling might have improved – the taste remained largely the same.
In the end of the tour, Dr. Ferkl confided in me that, despite being the professor of brewing, he wasn’t a beer-drinker himself. I didn’t see a huge contradiction there: one doesn’t have to live on the moon to be a professor of astronomy…