After visiting the Hops Museum in Zatec, Czech Republic and learning about one of the main ingredients of beer, we visited the Pilsner Urquell brewery in the city of Pilsen. This brewery is world famous because it is where the first lager originated, and even the name suggests this as Urquell means “original source.” A lager is the golden popular beer, which makes up for 90% of the beers that are sold around the world. There is a serendipitous tale to how this beer was created, as our tour guide explained as we walked through the brewery. In 1840 the Pilsen city council, tired of their unpleasing beer, threw away 36 casks of their top-fermented ale and hired Josef Groll to create a new beer. He invented bottom-fermented beer, which is cooled at 10 degrees and then stored for about 30 days at freezing point.
My favorite part of the tour of the brewery was going down to the cold cellar where they stored the beer. We got to see the huge wooden tanks they used to keep the beer stored (they now store them in stainless steel) in the freezing cave of a place, and at the end of the tour they let us sample the unfermented beer. I don’t really love the taste of beer so as someone who is not a connoisseur I can’t tell you if it was good or not. The tour was really interesting and getting to see the process of making beer, from the packaging to the heating and cooling of it, was really educational.
99 barrels of beer on the wall
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