Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
DRINKS
Alcohol consumption among Czechs has always been high. It doubled in the 1970s and the
population has remained on top of the world league table of beer consumption ever since -
thoughthey'requaffingslightlylessthanadecadeago.Thatsaid,violenceinpubsisuncom-
mon and the only obvious drunks you're likely to see in public are British stags and hens.
Czech beer Czech beer ( pivo ) ranks among the best on the planet and the country remains
the true home of most of the lager drunk around the world today. Beer is served by the half-
litre; if you want something smaller, you must specifically ask for a malé pivo (0.3l). The
average jar is medium strength, usually about 4.2 percent alcohol. Somewhat confusingly,
the Czechs class their beers using the Balling scale, which measures the original gravity, cal-
culated according to the amount of malt and dissolved sugar present before fermentation.
The most common varieties are 10° ( desítka ), which are generally slightly weaker than 12°
( dvanáctka ).Light beer ( světlé )is the norm, but many pubsalso serve a slightly sweeter dark
variety ( tmavé or černé ) - or you can have a mixture of the two ( řezané ). Kvasnicové pivo
is yeast beer, nefiltrované is, you guessed it, unfiltered (cloudy) beer. There's also nepaster-
ované and pšeničné as well as combinations of all the above.
Czech wine Homegrown wine ( víno ) will never win as many prizes as the local beer, but
since the import of French and German vines in the fourteenth century a modest selection of
medium-quality wines has been produced. Interestingly you won't find Czech wine outside
theCzechRepublic,asproductionhardlyevencoversdomesticconsumption.Themainwine
region is South Moravia, though a little is produced around the Bohemian town of Mělník .
Most domestic wine is pretty drinkable - Veltlínské zelené (Grüner Veltliner) is a good, dry
white - and rarely much more than 100Kč a bottle in shops, while the best stuff is only
available from a good wine shop or private wine cellar, hundreds of which still exist out in
the wine-growing regions. A Czech speciality to look out for is burčák , a very young, fizzy,
sweet, misty wine of varying (and often very strong) alcoholic content.
Brandy Thehomeproductionofbrandiesisanationalpastime.Themostrenownedofthelot
is slivovice , a plum brandy originally from the border hills between Moravia and Slovakia.
You'll probably also come across borovička , a popular Slovak firewater, made from juniper
berries, and myslivec , a rough brandy with a firm following. There's also a fair selection of
intoxicating herbal concoctions: fernet is a dark-brown bitter drink, known as bavorák (Bav-
arianbeer)whenit'smixedwithtonic,while becherovka isasupposedlyhealthyherbalspirit
from the Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary, with a very unusual, almost medicinal taste.
Absinthe Although illegal in some parts of Europe, absinthe has enjoyed something of a
renaissance in Prague. The preferred poison of Parisian painters and poets in the 1920s, ab-
sinthe is an evil green spirit made from fermented wormwood - it even gets a biblical men-
tion in Revelation: “and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the
 
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