Beer and Bunkers in Plzeň

Sir FUZZ-a-Lot turned 18 this month. His kidneys are failing, so we don’t leave him at the fancy cat resort or at home alone overnight anymore. There is a German obsession with taking “real” vacations, away from home for a week or more two (better three!) times a year; we just took one last year so I’m fine for awhile. Hopefully a long while. But Mr Radish is still required to take time off from work, so we’re taking some day trips.

So this past week, when the air temperature outside reached 37°C, we took a day to drive in the nice cool car to Plzeň in the Czech Republic, where we toured the city’s medieval tunnels and cellars, carved out of the sandstone under the city starting in the 13th century. Not all of them, of course; there are 13k of tunnels, so we just took a standard guided tour that lasted about an hour.

As you can see, it was uneven, and wet and slippery, but I only slipped once, and caught myself on the (wet, rough) wall. The tour focused on the history of the city, and the uses of the tunnels, such as wells, cold storage, lagering cellars, shelter for citizens during siege in wartime, drinking beer without being seen.

The men who carved out the tunnels were shorter than I am; I hit my head twice.

Back out in the heat, we had just enough time for a quick lunch. The menu was available in Czech, German, and English, and somehow despite all that we ended up with a non-alcoholic grapefruit beer, but it was perfect for the weather.

We pre-booked the tours to ensure we got into a group with a language we could understand, so we didn’t have much time to explore the old city. I would love to go back and take more pictures of more buildings.

In Italy and Norway, enough words look similar to English or German that I can guess at the meanings of signs and labels, but Czech is completely unrelated. Mind blown.

And on to the Pilsner Urquell brewery campus. In 1842, the townspeople banded together to build a modern brewery, with all citizens with brewing rights owning a share, and hired a brewmeister who developed a radical new recipe for a cold-fermented lager. This new beer style was so good, it soon spread to Germany and America, and now 70% of the beers produced world-wide are known as “Pils” or “Pilsner” or “Pilsen” and based on this beer (I paid good attention to the promotional film). The community-owned brewery was also a radical new idea, but it did a good business, and in 1892, the 50th Anniversary Gate was constructed. You’ll see it on the cans and bottle caps…

The brewery tour was fairly standard–this is how beer is made, these are our ingredients, here is our commendation from Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Bohemia–and took us through the 20th-century brewhouse (now refurbished as an education and event space) and the new 21st-century brewhouse (warmer than Outside!) where all Pilsner Urquell is born. A highlight of the campus is the Largest People Elevator the Czech Republic. Please enjoy this video, because I was too busy marveling to take photos.

The tour then headed to the historic lagering cellar, which were used by townspeople to store ice and lager beer even before the brewery’s founding.

The beer fermenting here in the oaken barrels is an historical recipe, available only on location.

And by “on location” I mean “in the cellar.” Our samples were poured unfiltered straight from the source. Each barrel can hold up to 80 hectoliters, or 68 US barrels, and could be used as long as two hundred years. These were all built after 2003, after the old barrels were lost to floods.

We did not have time to visit their new microbrewery, Proud, located in a former power plant on the property, so instead we loaded up on their fancy non-Pilsners in the gift shop.

TL;DR: Czech beer is yummy, underground tunnels are cool, if you ever get an opportunity to spend a day in Plzeň take it.