This column was written in 2017. Pints&union came along in 2018, and Common Haus Hall in 2022. At both these establishments, owned by Joe Phillips and beer-tended by your truly, the majority of taps are kept constant (Anglo-European at P&u, and German-themed at CHaus). My point? I’m practicing what I preached, and it’s been successful.
I remember being in Prague in the mid-1990s. We’d wander through downtown neighborhoods hunting beer, sometimes hopping trams, other times using the subway, but most often on foot.
The objective was to find draft beers from as many of the Czech Republic’s breweries as possible, and having identified these beers, to drink them straight down.
In retrospect, it isn’t clear to me what sort of legal framework for beer distribution existed in the Czech Republic at the time. Something akin to a “tied house” seemed common, in that a pivnice (piv-nee-tsuh, or tavern) generally would serve beer from only one brewery.
These days, we’d probably decamp to a multi-tap and be overwhelmed by sheer choice. I’ve read that Prague now has such establishments boasting bountiful selections, as well as WiFi to enable the inevitable postings at Untappd, but this approach strikes me as tantamount to the king’s gamesmen running the animals past his shooting stand.
It’s also no way to conduct a drinking tour of a city, especially when traveling overseas, where there’s so much else to be learned quite apart from beer.
2Two or more decades ago, many of Prague’s pubs served beers from one of the city’s “big three” breweries: Staropramen, Braník or Mestan, the latter two apparently long since deceased as independent entities.
Other breweries were well represented, too, and it seemed the closer their home cities to Prague, the better chance of finding them. Pilsner Urquell was a given. Gambrinus, Velkopopovický and Radegast also were around, though at the time of which I speak, the epochal Budvar not as much.
Intriguingly, it remained possible in the mid-1990s to find watering holes in Prague that had hooked up with smaller breweries, or even larger ones further away from the capital. There’d be occasional appearances by Ferdinand (from nearby Benešov), Hostan (Znojmo), Regent (Třeboň) or Starobrno (Brno).
The trick was finding the places serving them, as they didn’t always correspond to familiar addresses amid the prevailing tourist routes. We’d forage down back alleys, through obscure archways and below street level in...Read more
