The Birthplace of Modern Beer

There are a number of very cool breweries in the world, and I have been fortunate to visit some of them–the foeders of Rodenbach, the koelschip of Cantillon.  I’ve stood under Crown street at the sprawling Greene King brewery, where beer is pumped to the packaging plant.  Uerige still uses a baudelot chiller; Schlenkerla smokes their own malt–and I got to see both.  But there is no brewery that has had a greater impact on brewing history than the one in Plzeň, České republice.  It’s not even close, actually.  When the brewery we now call Pilsner Urquell first made a pale lager 172 years ago, it changed the course of brewing forever.

Pilsner is the world’s most popular beer, by miles and miles.  It’s made in every country where beer is allowed, and owns something like–just spitballing now–90%+ of the total world production.  It’s almost never the case that we can trace some seismic event back to a single place and know the single moment, but with pilsner’s birth, we can. No doubt eve …