Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 68: The advent of the ACBHOF (2024) recalls a diminuendo in BREW (1996).
As a prelude to this recap of the 1997 “spring break” journey to the Czech Republic and Bavaria, kindly allow a banks-of-the-Moldau (Vltava) digression.
During the 40-year period when Czechoslovakia was colored “Red” on the world map by virtue of its communist orientation, Americans aiming to have a peek at the landscape couldn’t merely waltz across the German or Austrian frontiers.
After all, this was the territory behind the Iron Curtain. However, while forbidding, the Warsaw Pact was fully accessible given sufficient pre-planning to obtain visas, along with the patience necessary to navigate a tourism bureaucracy that never seemed altogether delighted to provide the simplest of services, particularly for solo travelers.
In fairness to the official red-starred, state-owned Čedok travel agency, it actually predated Czechoslovakia’s communist tenancy by almost 30 years. First nationalized, then returned to private hands, Čedok has survived to the present day. The attitudinal malaise (1948 – 1989) owed to something askew in the Marxist-tinged water, which is why improving upon water’s fundamental blandness by transforming it into beer is always the best idea.
And the Czechoslovaks were adept at brewing, whether communist or capitalist.
For me, the rewards of Czechoslovak travel far outweighed paperwork aggravations and the mandatory currency exchange, especially when Prague was the destination.
I enjoyed two visits to “Red” Prague in 1987 and 1989, followed by a half-dozen other idylls during the early- to mid-1990s, just after the Velvet Revolution pushed aside socialist realism. These were glorious times, although invariably it was necessary to keep a close eye on your waiter’s math skills.
Whenever I found myself in Prague, irrespective of any historical and cultural objectives (and there were a great many), I’d always hoard a few hours to wander through the lesser-visited neighborhoods — Holešovice, Karlín, Žižkov, Vinohrady — hunting obscure pubs that might be stocking draft beers from Czechoslovakia’s (later, the Czech Republic’s and Slovakia’s) many breweries.
Much of this urban roaming came under the power of my own two feet, but when the dogs began barking, Prague’s extensive network of trams, buses and subway lines usually was close at hand to help follow the bread crumbs back home. Later,...Read more
