History Always Intervenes
The German-language gate at Pilsner Urquell, 1892. Courtesy Pilsner Urquell
So, we had an election here in the United States this week—perhaps you heard. One of the unofficial mottos of the blog is “politics divide; beer unites.” That’s true, but there is a corollary truth—beer is always political. Hold a glass of beer in your hand, and if it’s a style with even a few decades of life, it will have been touched by the winds of politics, war, or government. So on this Friday after what by all accounts was a very historic election, let’s delve into this phenomenon of politics and beer, traveling to one of the patches of earth most affected by this intersection.
The Czech Republic is home to just 10.5 million people and is slightly smaller in size than South Carolina. You could nevertheless scarcely find a more eventful patch of land in terms of historical drama. Prague has been the home of several kings and the seat of power for empires that ruled Europe. More than a century before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a German church, Jan Hus was leading the first rebellions against the Catholic hierarchy in Prague.
The drama of politics played itself out famously in not one but two defenestrations (the act of throwing one out the window), a variety of theater seemingly distinctive to the Bohemians—until Vladimir Putin revived the practice in recent times. Later, of course, it was where legions of Nazi and Soviet soldiers would arrive as conquerors and linger as occupiers. Prague Castle, the largest complex in the world, occupies a space as capacious as a small town, and seems to exist as a metaphor for the heavy, vivid, florid past of this small country.
Ghosts of history are inescapable. In Benešov, a town 30 miles south of Prague Castle, sits the Ferdinand brewery, founded in 1898 by Franz Ferdinand. Yes, that Franz Ferdinand. An Austrian by birth, this erstwhile heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne found his way to Bohemia as so many men do—following a woman. His future wife, Countess Sophie Chotek von Wognin, lived in Prague—though she was not considered royal enough to be a suitable queen of the empire. Nevertheless, Franz loved her and relocated to the 13th-century chateau called Konopiště in Benešov, two miles from the brewery he would later found. He was said to be more comfortable there than in his homeland, and might have brought the crown back to Bohemia had he—and the empire he was in line to rule—survived.
Instead, of course, he was assassinated in 1914 (Sophie, by his side, was also killed)—sparking the First World War. The almost inadvertent circumstances of their deaths would lead the Czech Lands into decades of darkness. After a brief spring of independence following that war, Czechoslovakia was first conquered and occupied by the Nazis and then a bit later by the Soviet-backed Communists. The history of this small country has so often been written by rulers and their armies from neighboring countries; they wash bloodily over the landscape, periodically stopping to install themselves in that castle atop a hill in one of Europe’s most arresting cities. And then inevitably soldiers from a different empire come calling.
Ferdinand’s role in history was a quirk of timing; his brewery, by contrast, is a perfect symbol of the landscape it inhabits. The prince built a sizable facility, able to produce about 50,000 barrels a year, and he included a malthouse. This was typical of the time, but something that would come to stand, a century and a quarter later, as a classically Czech feature. The old brewery still malts barley there, and you can buy it from Weyermann.
No aspect of life was left unchanged by the World Wars, and that’s certainly true of beer. In the Czech Republic, the biggest effect came as a result of the Communist period (both before and after Soviet occupation). The post-war era was a time of enormous technological change in the West, as small breweries grew massive, able to ship their perishable product safely in refrigerated trucks and railcars. In places like Benešov, the technology did not advance. Brewers continued on making beer the same way they had before the Communist era. And, because that period immediately followed the Nazi occupation, those traditions extended back into the 1930s. Like a bug trapped in amber, beer-making was perfectly preserved for half a century.
In fact, there was more to it than that. Communist rule led to a kind of reverse-innovation, a period allergic to change, fueled by several threads of dysfunction. Following World War II, Czechoslovakia when quickly began reorganizing as a Communist country, a period of instability led to consolidation in 1948, when businesses were uniformly nationalized across the country. Breweries fell under national control and a number were eliminated—considered redundant by a government that reorganized them into districts.
This isn’t entirely different from reorganizations companies endure after they’ve been sold, but the result wasn’t a leaner industry. Quite the opposite. A state responsible for all industry and commercial activity becomes caretaker to its citizens’ jobs, which ballooned under the decades of Communist rule. In a remarkable article in the New York Times immediately following the fall of Communism, reporter Steven Greenhouse identified 2,000 workers at Pilsner Urquell, a brewery roughly the size that Sierra Nevada is today. Among this giant workforce, “the advent of capitalism” will, he wrote, “probably mean tougher management, less slacking off and perhaps some layoffs, especially among the 400 administrative workers who spend much of their time doing paperwork for Prague’s central planners.” It’s hard to fathom what four hundred administrative workers would spend their days doing, though “slacking off” would seem to have been a central activity if for no other reason than there was no work to do.
Oversupply of labor leads to inertia. Beer prices were set at the state level, and breweries had protected regions of distribution. Add to that bloated workforces, and you have a prescription for stasis. The famous dissident, playwright, and first president of democratic (and newly-named) Czech Republic Vaclav Havel, once worked for the Krakonoš Brewery, still extant in north-central Czechia by the Polish border, and his writings touch on the experience. In one of his most famous plays, “Audience,” his doppelganger is Vanek, a playwright working at a languishing brewery in which the brewmaster spends most of his day drunk, sleeping at his desk. Since there is no reason for improving productivity, the brewmaster talks of moving people around in the brewery as favors for their loyalty to him—and, of course, the Party.
I saw a remnant of this era on my first visit in 2011, decades after the collapse of Communism. Servers at pubs and restaurants once regularly scattered their tables with little “reserved” signs rather than have to wait on too many tables, but the practice has now died out. In smaller, sleepier towns, it hung on longer. I was once mystified to find nearly every table in a neighborhood pub in České Budějovice had these signs and when I asked another patron, he rolled his eyes and told me to just sit down. Presently, the server came and took my order with irritation.
Havel reflects more seriously on his time at Krakonoš in “The Power of the Powerless,” from 1978. In the essay, he describes a situation in which the brewery managers had gotten their position through patronage and whose interest lay in holding their positions rather than making better beer. One of the brewers, whom Havel only identifies as Š, wanted to make better beer and tried to improve things. “He was proud of his profession and he wanted our brewery to brew good beer,” Havel writes. “He spent almost all his time at work, continually thinking up improvements, and he frequently made the rest of us feel uncomfortable because he assumed that we loved brewing as much as he did.” Not only was his initiative not welcome, but it eventually became a problem.
The structure of these late-communist organizations were not favorable to change. When Š finally decided to complain to a superior, who was also a member of the Communist Party’s district committee, he was labeled a “political saboteur” and shipped off to do menial work at a different brewery where he would cause no further trouble. Havel’s point is how easily one could become a dissident in Czechoslovakia—simply by trying to do a job well. He did not celebrate the old-fashion practices of the brewery, and indeed in one passage he says the managers were “were bringing the brewery to ruin.” One person’s romantic nostalgia is another’s antiquated stasis.
The Times’ Greenhouse writes of Pilsner Urquell’s “ancient copper mash vats, ponderous oak barrels and age-old beer-making techniques” and “dank, dimly lit beer cellars, where the beer ages slowly in large oak barrels.” Typical of reporting of the era, it’s as if he’s discovered a cell of prisoners who are just now stepping, blinking, into the sunlight. The reality is that Urquell’s systems, save for the oaken fermenters they soon abandoned for steel, were large and impressive. When they modernized a few years later, the new, capitalist managers recreated a very similar brewhouse immediately next to the old, historic one, which they can still call into use if orders demand it. But this continuity, which goes back through the decades to a distant past, was broken in countries to the west, so a reporter could be forgiven for seeing in it a metaphor for decline.
And so, by the time the Communists were chased out of their offices, these antiquated practices had become enshrined as tradition. Like the Prague Castle, they are metaphors of a kind for the history of the Czech Lands.
Why do Czech and German pilsners taste different? Czech beer is German beer—brewed first by a Bavarian and sustained by Bavarian brewers until the Czechs had gotten the hang of things. But that border, separated not just two countries, but two brewing traditions, which would slowly deviate. The question, “how does a German pilsner differ from a Czech one?” can be answered by descriptions of technique and ingredient, which is the usual answer. But an equally accurate answer can be given in a single word: history.