From the “Stories that Got Away” file: the great Prague pub U Medvídků is known for a couple of things. One is the never-ending supply of Budweiser Budvar rolling out in the cavernous beer hall downstairs. And for the past few years, the place has been hailed for its top-shelf — albeit tiny — brewpub upstairs, which makes limited amounts of a couple of great beers: the outstanding Oldgott lager and the extra-strong X-33 beer, a bottom-fermented beer that resembles a barley wine, both in its level of alcohol (12.6%) and its syrupy texture.

Both of those beers, however, are amber. If you wanted a pale lager — the country’s most popular style — or if you felt like a dark beer at U Medvídků, you could only have Budweiser Budvar. But that’s changed.

Since earlier this year, the upstairs microbrewery at U Medvídků has served its own pale lager. Called 1466, it’s certainly not meant to compete with the Budvar 10° and 12° beers the pub serves in its beer hall: this is a pale lager brewed at 14.66° Plato, putting it up in the “speciál” territory, roughly analogous to a Bock.

The flavors here, however, are not Bocklike. There’s malt but no plumminess. There’s an unexpectedly aromatic hop presence from the use of whole Saaz hop cones. And there’s not even a touch of alcoholic heat. For a beer brewed at 14.66°, the strength should probably end up just under 6%, but you’d be hard pressed to notice it in this case. What you get instead is a nicely full malt body with a very hoppy backbite, like a strong Pilsner, only more so.

(In appearance, it looks much like a Hefeweizen. It’s that cloudy and pale in color.)

At 48 Kč for a half-liter, the 1466 pale lager is among the most expensive brewpub beers in Prague, but at least the portion is the full amount for grown-ups.

That’s not the only news at U Medvídků. According to pub owner Jan Göttel, U Medvídků is thinking of expanding its production in the fall, which might allow them to sell more brews out of the house. That might mean you’ll see bottles of X-33 in more specialty beer shops. It could even mean that you’ll see Oldgott and 1466 on draft elsewhere in Prague.

And who knows? They might even end up brewing a dark lager someday.

Sometimes it takes a while for a beer or a brewery to find high gear. A year ago, when the new Prague brewpub Pražský most u Valšů first tapped its own brew, it didn’t make quite the same splash as Pivovar Bašta a few months earlier. Only one beer was available, a traditional pale lager, and it didn’t do much for people who care about good Czech beer. Max Bahnson said it was nothing to write home about. I had the same impression, in as much as I stopped by, ate lunch, tried the beer, and didn’t even bother writing about it.

What a difference a year makes. Now there are two beers available, and at least one of them’s a firecracker.

Beyond the expanded beer list, there are other changes as well. There’s a nice garden upstairs, which I didn’t see last year. And the bargain 85 Kč ($4.50) lunch special they had last year appears to be long gone. I went by on Tuesday and found a two-course lunch special for 150 Kč, but at least that included a small beer. Large beers are still priced a bit on the high side, 45 Kč, but in the case of the new arrival, it’s worth it.

The new brew is a 12° dark, but this is much more of a German Schwarzbier than it is a typical Czech tmavé pivo: it finishes slightly dry, not terribly sweet, and there’s less coffee in the mouth than your average tmavé pivo. Czech brewing law doesn’t differentiate between “tmavé pivo” (or “dark beer”) and “černé pivo” (or “black beer”), but this is one case where I would suggest that “černé” should be used. Beyond just being black in color and dry in the finish, it’s excellent.

The pale lager seemed improved as well, though without the same impact, perhaps because of the surfeit of great pale lagers in the country. To date, the Czech Republic only has a couple of these Schwarzbier-like black brews: the inspirational Bohemian Black Lager from Pivovar Herold and the great Flekovské pivo from U Fleků come to mind.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: It now appears that Heineken did not apply for the “Czech Beer” designation for its own brew, but rather on the part of Krušovice. This post has been corrected.

Today’s Prague Daily Monitor has a translation of a story from the Czech newspaper Hospodářské Noviny on the first beers to use the České Pivo (”Czech Beer”) label. Officially approved by the EU last autumn, the label is a mark of Protected Geographical Indication that indicates minimal levels of local products, traditional methods of production, and the beer’s place of origin.

And the first brand listed in the story is Heineken.

That is to say that Heineken, virtually synonymous with Holland, is said to be among the first brewers to apply for and use the official EU designation of “Czech Beer.” While an earlier version of this post assumed that Czech-brewed Heineken would qualify as “Czech Beer,” it now appears that Heineken has only applied on behalf of its Krušovice subsidiary. However, problems with the designation remain.

When we first reported this story, Honza Kočka commented that his brewery, Kocour, apparently wouldn’t qualify for the designation, despite traditional methods of production and Czech ingredients, simply because its location — inside the Czech Republic but very close to the country’s northern border — lay outside the area described by the regulations.

If my reading of the “Czech Beer” regulations is correct, a highly hopped pale lager with more than the upper limit of 45 EBC units of bitterness will not qualify for the “Czech Beer” label, no matter where it is made.

Also interesting: the designation will include a range of beers from 2.6% to 6% alcohol by volume. Meaning if a beer has 6.5% alcohol, it no longer qualifies to call itself “Czech Beer,” despite having 100% Czech ingredients.

However, the beers that do qualify as “Czech Beer” don’t technically have to use 100% Czech ingredients — nothing close to it. Take wonderful Czech Saaz hops, for example, which might be considered a key element of Czech beer. The regulations state:

The minimum quantity of Czech hops or products processed from them is 30 % for pale lagers and at least 15 % for other types of beer.

That is to say: if a pale lager uses 30% Czech hops and 70% Chinese hops, it can still be “Czech Beer.”

Of course, Krušovice and other famous dark lagers can get by with up to 85% Chinese hops and still call themselves “Czech Beer.”

If there was any doubt about the efficacy of the label before, it is now clear exactly how much sense it makes.

By all means, have a Czech beer. But there’s no need to look for the “Czech Beer” label to do so.

On Friday, the Czech Beer Festival kicked off at Letňany exhibition grounds (last year’s version is pictured above). It’s fair to say that there was some chaos at the opening: when Velký Al from Fuggled and I arrived a half hour after things got started at 3 p.m., there was only one beer available on tap. Tent #6, which was supposed to have Kout and other indies, had nothing going. Nor did any other tent besides #3. It sound impossible: at a beer festival, beer fans were going thirsty.

But within an hour or so, the situation righted itself. Several great beers from Náchod’s Pivovar Primátor started flowing, including the brewery’s new 11° pale lager. Within a short while we were even sampling Kout na Šumavě 10°, a desítka with as much character as most 12° beers in these parts.

It’s very different from last year’s festival in that there is no entry fee. Most beers are 40 crowns, though this year the strong beers, like Jihlava’s 18° Jihlavský Grand, are served in .3-liter glasses, which makes far more sense than serving them by the pint. You definitely should check it out before the festival closes on May 31.

But there’s more.

Soon after we got to Letňany, Velký Al and I were joined by Max Bahnson of Pivní Filosof. He had just come from the concurrent festival at Zlý Časy, an all-micro running over the same days, including beers from the new brewery at Broumy (more on this soon) and the return of Rampušák, a brewery closed since before the publication of Good Beer Guide Prague and the Czech Republic and only recently returned to production. Zlý Časy’s festival theme is 30 micros in 10 days, making just about every beer an interesting one, and most kegs are one-offs, so when they run out, they’re gone. Go.

In other news, next month’s big event is the wheat beer tasting at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. In the same vein as last year’s outstanding Christmas Beer Markets, Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf owner and Czech beer juggernaut Honza Kočka will present a tasting of various wheat beers, including Leipziger Gose and the return of Herold’s Bohemian Wheat. The cost is 150 Kč for each four-hour session. The dates and sessions are as follows: Friday, 12 June, 6-10 p.m.; Saturday, 13 June, 1-5 p.m.; Saturday, 13 June, 6-10 p.m.; and Sunday, 14 June, from 3-7 p.m.

And finally, I’ve agreed to host another beer tasting and dinner at the Mandarin Oriental on Thursday, 26 June, in the wine cellar of the hotel’s Essensia restaurant. The program for this tasting isn’t completely set, but earlier tastings have covered new Czech beers and focused on raw materials. Suffice it to say we will have great food and outstanding Czech brews on hand. For reservations and more information: tel. +420 233 088 612, or via email at moprg-pr@mohg.com.

You hit the road for a few days of peace and solitude in South Bohemia and what happens? A great beer that has been AWOL for years suddenly returns to the scene.

The brew in question is the very nice wheat beer from Pivovar Herold, a brewery I pass each time I drive down to my wife’s family’s summer home in Písek. As I’ve mentioned before, the history of the brewery in the town of Březnice is covered in Ludvík Fürst’s monograph “Jak se u nás vařilo pivo” (or “How we used to brew beer”). In that book, Fürst quotes documents mentioning the production of wheat beer at Březnice in the sixteenth century. When Herold reintroduced its modern wheat beers in 2002, they were the only Czech wheat beers available in bottles at the time.

That seemed to set off a small wheat trend here. Today, of course, we’ve got the nicely clove-scented Weizenbier from Pivovar Primátor, which is available in Tesco and other big supermarkets around the country. Many brewpubs have started brewing their own wheats; the Duchmaus wheat beer from Pivovar U Rybiček is even distributed in plastic bottles, a new development for many small Czech brewers. And yet as far as I can tell, Herold — one of the first Czech producers to make a name with wheat beers in the recent era — stopped brewing its own wheat by 2007.

Then came last summer’s change of ownership. While the brewery’s black lager remained strong enough to inspire imitations abroad, there were whispers that the new owners might make some changes, including the reintroduction of the wheat. And then, just in time for summer, a shipment of Herold’s wheat beer was delivered to Pivovarský klub in Prague on Thursday, May 14.

There’s something interesting on the label: in English, Herold identifies this beer as “wheat lager,” which seems to present a contradiction. As many beer fans know, “lager” is often used as a term for bottom-fermented beers, while wheat beers are mostly top-fermenting. However, that doesn’t mean that this is a wheat-lager hybrid; as I understand it, this beer is still made using traditional top-fermenting wheat beer yeast. Instead, the term on the label is an English-language approximation of the Czech brewing term “ležák,” which refers to the relative strength of the beer, covering those beers produced at 11° and 12° Plato or Balling. (The term “výčepní,” literally meaning something like “tap” or “taproom,” covers beers brewed at 9° and 10°, even those which are not served on tap or in taprooms.)

So how does Herold’s “wheat lager” taste?

Good. It pours a very pretty, cloudy gold with a fluffy white head. There’s not nearly as much clove in the nose as in other beers; instead, I thought I noted tobacco before I detected a bit of clove on the palate as well as some pronounced barley malt flavors. Perhaps it’s the “wheat lager” on the label, but I thought it was a very Pilsner-like Weizen, reminding me of Weltenburger’s Hefe-Weißbier Hell in its citrus notes. It has a very light body and is very easy to drink.

The next time you drive by Březnice, you have a very good reason to stop and pick up a case. And while Primátor’s Weizenbier has had a near-constant presence on Pivovarský klub’s tap #6, that should change in the near future: the delivery last Thursday included bottles as well as several kegs, meaning you’ll be able to try Herold’s wheat beer on draft at Pivovarský klub for a good while to come.

Today, many — if not most — European beers are made with barley. Earlier European beers, however, were made with any number of other grains. But then came the reformers: Bavaria’s Reinheitsgebot proscribed the use of anything other than barley in 1516; in Bohemia, the great brewing scientist František Ondřej Poupě, author of “The Art of Beer Brewing” (1794), helped kill off other grains at the end of the eighteenth century, famously declaring that oats were for horses, wheat was for cakes, and only barley was fit for beer.

So before barley was the only ingredient to use, what did beers taste like? They might have been a bit like the Historisches Emmer Bier from Germany’s Riedenburger brewery, made with malted emmer, einkorn and spelt (all early domesticated forms of wheat), as well as barley and modern wheat.

Beyond the grain bill, it’s an unusual brew with unusual flavors. From my swing-top bottle it poured a cloudy amber with a thick head and a slightly spicy nose. In the mouth, it was malty and finshed a bit sour, roughly akin to a dark wheat but also rich and full like a Vienna lager. There was also a strange flavor I couldn’t quite place. What I come up with was umami, the flavorsome, food-like notes that reminded me most of doughy notes mixed with vegetables: a good pizza, a rich bowl of pasta, a great sandwich on fresh bread.

It’s also worth noting that this beer is a Naturtrüb, and it is correspondingly cloudy with some amazing amounts of sediment. I’m not sure if you can tell from this shot down the bottle neck, but the last centimeter of liquid was fairly viscous gunk.

My guess is that the hearty, food-like notes came from the primitive wheats in use. In any case, I’d definitely try it again: like a Vienna lager, I think it would be an ideal pairing with pizza or pasta.

Hungary is wine country, but it has a long tradition of brewing as well, with the legendary name of Dreher — as in Anton — the brand of one of the country’s best-known pale lagers. Unfortunately, finding good craft beer from the country’s small producers is tricky. Just about everywhere you go, you’ll come across Dreher (part of SABMiller) and Soproni (a Heineken brand). But great local beer? Microbrews? Not so easy to spot.

We spent most of the last two weeks in Hungary, first at Lake Balaton, then in Budapest, where we I finally found a couple of interesting beers. Or at least, what looked like interesting beers. My Hungarian is limited to the five words most commonly found on restaurant menus, but when I saw the sign above, I was pretty sure that “házi” might be something like “domácí” in Czech, the equivalent of “house-made,” and I knew that “sör” meant beer. So I picked up a bottle of each brew: a világos, or pale, called Gutberger, and a barna, or dark, called Braunger.

Both come from the Szögedi Sörfőzde, which says it was established in 1993. Both were bombshell-shaped plastic (PET) containers of 1 liter, or just about two pints. Each cost the equivalent of $1.50.

Unfortunately, the packaging and price turned out to be the high points of the bottles from Szögedi Sörfőzde. The dark Braunger had a decent appearance of clear amber with thick-set beige foam. There were some light cola flavors in the mouth, as well as a touch of gingery spice, and I detected some not-so-fun cardboard flavors in the finish. That was still better than the Gutberger, which poured a very light gold with an industrially white foamy head that immediately died. The Gutberger’s nose was only slightly grainy, and there was no discernible hop aroma or flavor. Or any other aromas or flavors of any kind.

It brought to mind Jean-Pierre Van Roy’s proclamation about industrial beers: like him, I would rather drink a good industrial beer than a bad artisanal beer, and in this case I’d rather have a glass of SABMiller’s Dreher (not a bad pale lager) or a dark Soproni Démon, which I quite liked, regardless of how much I want to support small producers.

And of course Hungary does have better craft beer producers: there’s the Gyertyános brewery at Miskolc, which has a great reputation among Hungarian foodies, and which was part of the V3 Rauchbier miracle produced in conjunction with Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf and Slovakia’s Kaltenecker. There is also Budapest’s “Only Good Beers!” store, Csak a jó sör!, which sells La Chouffe and other international specialities which are not found even in beer-loving countries like the Czech Republic.

When I return to Hungary, I’ll keep looking for good local brews. But I’ll probably settle for my favorite discovery from this last trip: a few bottles of cserszegi fűszeres, a lovely indigenous white wine, from an excellent local producer like Jásdi. “Only Good Beers” is a great name for a beer store. But sometimes good wines will have to do.

A while back I tried BrewDog’s prototype Zeitgeist beer, a dark lager “taking inspiration from the Czech classics.” That line gave me the idea of trying it against three classic Czech dark lagers, coffee-like black beers which generally finish on the sweet side.

But the Zeitgeist (or Zeit Geist, as it was back then) seemed to be made of different material, so to speak: I liked it, but as I wrote then, “I don’t think it tasted very Czech… Zeit Geist was far more dry in the finish.” And I added that if I had known it was a dry dark beer, like a Schwarzbier, I would have tasted it with Herold Bohemian Black Lager, one of the only dry dark lagers the Czechs produce.

Later, I found out that Herold was in fact the very inspiration for Zeitgeist. And then came the word that Zeitgeist was going into full production and wide release in Britain. So once I got a copy of the production brew, I decided to compare that to the originals, both prototype and paragon.

The Scottish and Czech beers are more different than you might imagine: Herold has 5.3% alcohol, while Zeitgeist went from 5.1% in prototype to 4.9% in production. The Herold is half a shade darker with a sandy head; the production version of Zeitgeist has cream-colored foam.

As I wrote back then, the prototype Zeitgeist had a touch of smokiness in the nose and mouth. That’s still there, though BrewDog has assured me there’s not a grain of smoked malt anywhere near the thing. The astringence — the drying, slightly acidic notes in the finish — that I noted in the prototype are still very much present in the production version. There’s a touch of cooked fruit, and some nice bitter notes.

By contrast, my bottle of Herold Bohemian Black Lager has almost no smokiness and much more chocolate and dry cocoa flavors. It’s dry in the finish, but not quite as dry as Zeitgeist. (It’s also surpremely drinkable: dark beers are not generally thought of as summertime drinks, but Herold’s Bohemian Black Lager is light enough in the body to be quite refreshing on a very warm evening. As is Zeitgeist.)

So which do I prefer? Considering I live in Prague and I really believe in drinking locally, that’s a no-brainer: I’ll take the Czech bottle, thank you. But in terms of taste?

If you can’t get Herold, you surely won’t regret having a Zeitgeist: it’s an excellent dark lager with loads of flavor and surprising complexity. If you can get them both, you have a choice: a bit more cocoa and chocolate with the Herold, or a bit more dryness and bitter fruit flavors with the Zeitgeist.

Marx would probably say that Zeitgeist (the beer) is influenced by the material — in this case, the malt, hops, yeast and water — with which it is produced, and that is why it tastes the way it does. But in this case I think I’m going to go with Hegel. Zeitgeist, at least the beer, is greater than the sum of its parts.

The St. Louis Business Journal is reporting that Anheuser-Busch InBev is negotiating with Heineken to sell its Czech brands to the Dutch brewer. The paper places Staropramen’s valuation between $255 million and $306 million.

We’ve seen this before. Almost exactly a year ago, Heineken’s takeover of the Czech Drinks Union brands was given the green light. That move pushed Heineken into third place on the Czech market, just ahead of the legendary Budweiser Budvar, but still lower than Heineken’s traditional market share. At the time, Ron Pattinson sagely noted that Heineken doesn’t enter a market to take third place.

By purchasing Staropramen — and thus the group’s other brands Braník, Měšťan, Ostravar, Kelt, Velvet and Vratislav — Heineken would move to a very solid second place behind SAB Miller’s Pilsner Urquell group, standing roughly three times larger than still-state-owned Budweiser Budvar in third place (with around 30% of the Czech market vs. about 10%). It would combine the above-mentioned Staropramen brands with its current Czech portfolio of Krušovice, Hostan, Starobrno, Zlatopramen, Velké Březno, Louny and Kutná Hora.

Interestingly, the exit of Anheuser-Busch InBev from the Czech market might finally put an end to the idea of American Budweiser ever buying Czech Budweiser. However, Budweiser Budvar is still on schedule to be privatized in the next year or two. With its expanding presence here, Heineken would be a natural suitor. That would move it to around 40% market share, right behind SAB Miller’s approximate 49%.

What remains to be seen with the current takeover is if the Czech anti-monopoly office will rise from its slumber (prediction: not freakin’ likely). So assuming the takeover of Staropramen by Heineken goes forward, it might be time to name your Czech Beer Brand Dead Pool.

In Slovakia, for example, Heineken has shuttered many of the breweries they’ve purchased (such as Martiner and Corgoň), keeping the brands alive but moving production to the massive Hurbanovo brewery. And many of Staropramen’s brands here are similar zombies: Braník is no longer brewed at Braník; Měšťan is no longer brewed in Holešovice.

So make your predictions now. What Staropramen or Heineken breweries will be closed? How many more zombie beers will we see here? And will Heineken really end up buying Budvar Budvar?

NB: of the Czech brands that Heineken already owns, Hostan is pretty much over: it’s been partly brewed at Starobrno for ages. And over at Pivní deník, Honza Kočka jokingly predicts that it is the Staropramen brewery — located in prime real estate overlooking the Vltava river — that will end up being sold and turned into upscale loft apartments, just like what happened to the Holešovice brewery after Staropramen sold it. As always, “irony follows hubris” seems like a fairly safe bet.

You say tomato, I say rajčatka: there’s more than one way to name almost everything in this city. Take, for example, the Dancing House, also known as the Dancing Building, locally called Tančící dům, although its official title is the slightly less-romantic Nationale-Nederlanden Building. Designed by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić, the building’s resemblance to a dancing couple earned it yet another nickname: Fred and Ginger. (I usually just say Dancing House myself.) It remains one of the most visited and most frequently photographed sites in Prague.

So what does that have to do with great beer? As of last month, the building’s newly renamed café and restaurant became only the second place in Prague to regularly stock beer from Pivovar Kout na Šumavě, one of the country’s best craft brewers.

Located on the Vltava’s eastern riverbank right at Jiráskův most, one bridge south of the National Theater, the Dancing House’s top floor has long been home to an arch, reservations-only French restaurant. But in late 2008 that location was taken over by the management of the great Angel Restaurant in Old Town, who opened a new restaurant with a new name, Céleste.

As you might expect from a Gehry building, the atmosphere and interior spaces are remarkable. (A balcony encircles the weird spherical sculpture that could represent Fred Astaire’s head.) The views of Prague Castle and Malá Strana are literally spectacular; the inventive, French-based cuisine is outstanding. And now, to go along with the restaurant’s seven-course tasting menu (1,450 Kč, or about $70 at today’s rates), you can choose a draft lager from one of the country’s best breweries.

Interestingly, the bar manager decided to stock Kout’s classic 12° pale lager. My favorite is the brewery’s 10° beer, which is as vibrant and bittersweet as many breweries’ premium brews, but the bar manager told me he believed that Kout’s 12° was better suited to pair with their food. It’s available in Céleste along with meals, as well as in the café-bar at the street level. I found it exceptionally well-tapped when I tried it with Max Bahnson recently. It’s not Žižkov-dive cheap — prices are 40 Kč per .3-liter glass in the ground-floor café, 65 Kč for the same in the top-level restaurant — but you have to remember you’re also paying for atmosphere, service and location. For me, considering the amazing views and the cool architecture, the price isn’t an issue.

What this means, however, is more than just wider availability for a great beer: it shows that one more of the city’s highest-profile, most luxurious restaurants is taking good beer seriously. Instead of just stocking whatever beer would give them the most money or would offer to pay for the most coasters and lights, the management at Céleste figured that they would do better by selling the beer that tastes the best.

What a concept. Incidentally, when I asked about sales, the bar manager said that with Kout on tap, he was selling three times more beer than he had anticipated. It’s certainly not going to be their biggest money-maker: Céleste is a restaurant, after all, with $35 main courses. But selling three times as much beer means they can probably afford to pay for their own coasters.