Beer tourism...

  Plzen, Bohemia, Czech Republic
Friday, August 21, 2009

I seemed to have developed a taste for beer on this trip (partly b/c it's too hot to drink wine!!) and no tour to Czech republic would be complete with a tour of the Pilsner Urquell brewery...


The town of Pilsner is fairly nondescript (ie/ it has no redeeming features, other than a summer installation of a pilsner beer garden and a bouncy castle in it's main square.).

The brewery tour was 90 mins long and I'm sure the gentleman conducting the tour was the human muse for the creation of 'The Count' on sesame street, his hair didn't move, sadly there were no mirrors anywhere so I couldn't check for a reflection... He was a brilliant tour leader and was happy to answer any question put before him...


The tour starts with the production line - the cleaning of recycled glasses, the airation & subsequent dispensing of beer into glasses and laser scanning of the bottles for imperfections, this was pretty much how it worked for the cans aswell (minus the recycling step).  

If I could bore you with all the stats, I would - as they were pretty impressive, but then you all know how to use google!!


We then had a tour of the fermentation tanks and details of the vital ingreadients (water, malt, special yeast and bacteria...). The tour concluded in obvious fashion - with a taster straight from the keg, poured by the most photographed man in Plzen!!