Beer and Loathing in Czech Drinking Culture
Beer and pubs are an integral part of the Czech national myth – but, as Peter Smisek reveals, their role has changed through the centuries. Seen at different times as sites of cultural revival or vulgar hedonism – as well as places of forgetting – they continue to expose the shifting fault lines in Czech society.
Cellar at U Pinkasů, Prague. © U Pinkasů.
Czechs are the world’s most prolific beer drinkers. According to research by Japanese brewing conglomerate Kirin, every inhabitant of this small European country gulped down 191.8 litres of the stuff in 2018. Trailing in second place were Austrians with 107.6 litres. The British only managed a paltry 72.9 litres, coming in 21st on the list. In 2005, 76% of Czechs agreed that pubs were an important part of their traditional culture – even the country’s patron saint, St Wenceslas, is the patron saint of malt and Czech beer.
At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, inns and beer taverns came to play an important role in the Czech National Revival, which attempted to revitalise both the nation’s culture and its language. At the time, German was dominant in administrative and cultural circles, while Czech itself was mostly spoken by peasants and labourers. Thus, it was in the beer halls of inns and taverns that the Czech cultural identity and language could begin to re-emerge, becoming intertwined with distrust in the then Austrian elites.
The new beer garden at U Pinkasů, alongside Our Lady of the Snows, Prague. © U Pinkasů.
The world of beer, of course, owes much of its current form to the west Bohemian city of Pilsen (Plzeň), where, in 1842, the Bavarian Josef Groll brewed the world’s first pale lager. The following year, Jakub Pinkas became the first publican to serve Pilsner beer in Prague in a small basement, a block away from today’s St Wenceslas Square. By 1851, Pinkas had expanded his business and broken through to the vaulted basement of the unfinished north aisle of the adjacent Church of Our Lady of the Snows. Over time, Pinkas’ tavern took up more and more space in the adjacent buildings, resulting in a warren-like sequence of dining halls. U Pinkasů (‘At Pinkas’) remains open today, having cemented its position as one of Prague’s favourite restaurants due to its outsized role hosting politicians, agitators, artists and writers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
U Pinkasů follows an established spatial typology of Czech urban pubs. Located within the vaulted basements and ground floors of larger urban blocks, they do not possess the distinct urban-morphological form of, for instance, the Victorian pub in Britain. U Pinkasů also blurs the line between a pub and a restaurant - but most Czech pubs do, since food and table service are always included, and making a bee-line for the bar is a faux-pas for everyone but the regulars.
More sophisticated models of hospitality did develop – think grand hotels and coffeehouses of the kind found all across Austria-Hungary. By the end of the 19th century, traditional pubs were increasingly seen as reflective of the Czechs’ unsophisticated nature. More aspirational places to drink and eat traditional food began to emerge, such as the 1912 Plzeňská restaurace in Prague’s recently completed Obecní dům (Municipal House), a nationalist image-making project in its own right. The cavernous beer hall consists of the traditional semi-sunken vaulted space, this time supersized for 300 patrons and decorated in a mix of elegant art nouveau tiles, stained glass and flowing plasterwork, and is furnished with folksy dark-stained chairs and tables.
Obecní dům (1905–12), Náměstí Republiky, Prague. © Prague City Tourism.
Plzeňská restaurace (1912), Obecní dům, Náměstí Republiky, Prague. © www.plzenskarestaurace.cz.
But the largest shake-up of the hospitality industry came after the Communist takeover in 1948. The country's restaurants, pubs and canteens were gradually nationalised and brought under the state conglomerate Restaurace a jídelny (Restaurants and canteens). All establishments serving food and drink were divided into four standard categories, based on prices and levels of service, which were indicated using Roman numerals. The I. category was initially reserved for the lowliest of pubs, while the IV. category comprised luxury restaurants frequented by officials and visiting dignitaries. The order of this classification was later reversed, so that the IV. category (čtvrtá cenová skupina) came to denote the cheapest pubs, while meals in the I. and II. category restaurants were served on silver platters well into the 1970s. New buildings were sometimes built to accommodate these more expensive establishments, mostly as part of hotels in spa towns, ski resorts or inner cities. Often, the quality to which these were furnished depended on the amount of foreign visitors and tourists these establishments were intended to receive.
The III. category establishments offered a modest menu and paper napkins, while men’s toilets had to be equipped with urinals. By 1973, prices and portions were made completely uniform across the whole of Czechoslovakia. U Černého vola in Prague’s Hradčany opened in 1965 and operated in the III. category. Significant only because it typifies the everyday, unpretentious nature of Czech pubs, it is furnished with long communal tables and simple rectangular benches with a short, stainless-steel bar, and has a few stylised coats of arms painted on its otherwise bare walls. It serves simple, traditional meals (mainly sausages) and bar snacks alongside three types of beer, and is a welcome relief from the mediocre establishments that serve largely indifferent tourist crowds.
U Černého vola (1865), Hradčany, Prague. © Palickap/CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Establishments of the lowest IV. category typically served lower strength lager, soups, some cold starters and not much else. Despite being considered and acknowledged as vital community infrastructure, these establishments did not receive much attention from interior architects. New ones were built as part of the new system-built housing estates, but like most of the mass-building conducted at the time, their charm and design veered towards the purely functional. Whether new or old, the spaces were furnished with umakart (a Czech-made brand of high-pressure laminate) tables, benches and simple chairs. There were no booths. Bar stools, as in other pubs, were non-existent – only the most hardy drinkers would come to stand at the bar and drink. Everyone would be served, though the quality of service depended on the barman’s mood on the day, as well as his general temperament.
These pubs, despite their ubiquity and popularity, came to be seen as a sign of the decline of the Czechoslovak communist regime and the bleak prospects of the ordinary people. In 1988, composer and singer Petr Hapka and poet and lyricist Michal Horáček released the concept album V penziónu Svět. A cult classic, one of its most memorable moments is the song ‘Buřty, pivo, nenávist’ (‘Sausages, beer, hate’). A bawdy, accordion tune about a V. category pub (a category that, of course, never existed in real life), it paints an ironic allegory of material, moral and spiritual decline in which redemption comes through intoxication and destruction.
The price-based classification was abolished in 1994, but the IV. category moniker still carries negative connotations of mindless vulgarity, especially when invoked as an epithet by journalists commenting on contemporary political culture. In 2014, sitting Czech president, Miloš Zeman, for instance, was accused of turning the president’s office into a IV. category establishment with his colourful use of language and populist rhetoric. This characterisation exposes some of the class fault lines in contemporary Czech society, in which the president and his supporters pander to anti-elitist instincts of the supposedly ordinary hard-working, pub-going Czechs, while denigrating their critics as highfaluting intellectuals patronising Prague coffeehouses. Plus ça change …
Peter Smisek is a trained architect and former associate editor of Icon magazine. He writes about architecture and design and can be found tweeting at @psmisek.