Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Twelve: Those first ever draft Pilsner Urquells in Prague, 1987.
When Barrie and I arrived in Czechoslovakia, it became the sixth East Bloc country I’d visited in 1987. Recall that we first met in Moscow for a guided tour that took us to Poland, and before that, I’d allotted travel time in May and June to Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
From the perspective of beer and brewing, lagers of Germanic descent comprised the standard options available throughout these areas, and these beers were overwhelmingly golden.
Communism was the prevailing political system, and it was entirely red.
And, a pervasive green was the color of my face when I experienced my very first Balkan squat toilet.
But I digress.
As a primitive precursor of future internet beer lists, I actually enumerated in writing the different beers I drank in 1987. The stated goal at the outset was to drink at least one different brand of beer each day, and I achieved this: 120-odd days, and 130-plus brands.
There’s a copy of the list somewhere downstairs in a banker’s box, although it seems senseless to dig for it, as there’d be only a handful of “dark” lagers and probably fewer ales.
Not unexpectedly, the beer drinking experiences proved to be more memorable and influential than the beer list.
I’ll never forget drinking beer at the Zagreb train station, a workers’ cafeteria in Sofia, the Leningrad street kiosk, and Moscow’s modern stainless steel beer emporium, which also offered smoky salted fish in place of peanuts or popcorn.
I also remember:
- Being guided to an eatery in Budapest for a “German” draft beer, imaging it would be Beck’s, and learning with delight that it was brewed in Karl Marx Stadt (once and now again Chemnitz) in East Germany.
- Wandering into a “local” beer dispensary in Warsaw and being told by an English speaker that Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide would have been even larger if Poles were allowed to vote.
- Crashing on the late Radojko Petkovski’s couch for a few days in Skopje, sharing beers, and hearing about the life and times of a kind and generous Slovene earthquake expert who’d relocated to Macedonia, and befriended me during a train ride in Croatia.
There were numerous, venerable breweries in these locales, as with Union, Dreher and Aldaris in Ljubljana, Budapest and Riga, respectively. However, wherever I wandered in the East Bloc, there was an almost mystical reverence attached to beer from Czechoslovakia....Read more