Pilsner Urquell Brewery Tour

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Here is a link to the official Pilsner Urquell Website

Over Memorial Day weekend, 2000, my wife Dina and some friends and I made a trip to Prague. On the way we stopped in Pilsen, Czech Republic, home of arguably the most copied beer in the world. Beer was brewed in Pilsen for a long time before Pilsner Urquell was introduced, but according to our tour guide, it wasn't any good. In the late 1830's the powers that be in Pilsen decided to change the brewing reputation, and beer history, and began construction of the Pilsner Urquell brewery. The first keg of Pilsner Urquell was tapped in October of 1842. 50 years later the old gate was constructed and the dates 1842-1892 can be seen in both Arabic and Roman numerals. That's Dina and our friend Shannon on the steps to the left of the gate.

Ironically, the side of a building right across the street from the brewery is emblazoned with an advertisement for another famous Czech beer. Do you think they located it there for a reason?

Just inside the gate is a view down the yard of the brewery. The building in the near right houses the souvenir shop (85 cents for a 0.5 liter Pilsner Urquell glass) and the Na Splice restaurant (50 cents for a 0.5 liter beer!). The tower in the center of the picture is the water tower, and the pink building on the left is the brewhouse (the ugly orangish building between the two smoke stacks also houses part of the brewing operations).

As you approach the brewhouse, the wonderful aroma of hops and boiling wort is almost overpowering. It feels good to know that that is exactly what my house smells like when I brew. I must be doing something right. Loose hop petals blow in the breeze in the courtyard and collect in the corner. That thing that everyone is standing in front of is an old open fermenter on display in front of the brewhouse.

Just inside the brewhouse door is a diagram showing the brewing procedure used to produce Pilsner Urquell. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the diagram. According to the tour guide, they use a triple decoction mash, drawing off a third of the mash with each decoction, boiling it, and adding it back to the mash. These two pictures show the mash tuns.

Here is a shot of the wort running off into the lauter grant.

The brew kettles are right next to and a little below the mash tuns. In the photo on the right, you can see the panel from which the brewing operation is controlled.

The Pilsner Urquell that is distributed to the public is fermented in closed cylindrical/conical fermenters (that we didn't get to see on the dime tour. You have to be on one of the reserved tours to see those and the bottle filling line). As a quality control measure and in order to ensure that the beer that is brewed using modern methods remains true to the first batch from 1842, a small amount of beer is fermented in the cellars in open wooden casks. The picture to the left shows a row of casks, and on the right is a view of the head on top of some fermenting beer.

The temperature in the cellars is about 6 °C. This picture shows how they keep track of the date that primary fermentation began, and record the fermentation temperature daily. In this case over four days, the temperature ranged between 6 and 8 °C. The 12% before the date is the original gravity on the Balling scale (~1.048).

Walk past the primary fermenters and you enter the secondary fermentation chamber. All those large barrels are filled with beer, and one of them was tapped for us to sample. The guy with his back to the camera is my friend, sometime brew buddy, and homebrew drinking buddy, Sean.

Everyone on the tour got a sample right out of the secondary (even 6 year old Chelsea, although her dad drank hers). It was excellent, and I'm still kicking myself for forgetting my yeast hunter's kit. I'd sure love to culture that yeast and brew with it. Oh well, I guess I have to go back :).

Well, this was the end of our tour. As I mentioned before, we didn't get to see the modern fermenters or the bottling line, but it was a treat to see what we did and sample the beer right out of the barrel. After the tour we ate at Na Splice, which had decent (but not great) food (at an average of $2 per entree) and 50 cent 0.5 liter beers (Pilsner Urquell and Gambrinus). Other things we did in Pilsen included the Brewery Museum, which was interesting but a little bit of a letdown. They started out with a display about malting, and I expected a similar display on each step of the brewing process. That would have been cool, but it turned out to be mostly just a collection of antique brewing equipment. Pretty cool, but I had hoped for more. One really neat thing they had was a working scale model of a steam powered brewery that was built for the 1958 worlds fair. They actually used it to brew beer at the fair. I'd love to have that in my basement. We also took a tour of a portion of the Pilsen underground. There are hundreds of mineral wells and hundreds of kilometers of tunnels beneath Pilsen. Tourists can tour a very small part of them, and see artifacts recovered from some of the wells and cesspools.

Every beer we drank in the Czech Republic was excellent. These included Pilsner Urquell, Gambrinus, Radegast, Krusovice, Budweiser Budvar, Staropramen and probably others. Beer was right around 50 or 60 cents per half liter everywhere except the center of Prague, and the food was good and cheap wherever we went. I definately recommend a trip to the Czech Republic for anyone spending any time in Europe.