Budvar is not so much a brewery as a small city, a place of two clean halves.
The first is outside, where red crates are stacked as tall as buildings, the gaps between like city blocks. It is so hot that all noise ceases. Underneath this unpeopled soundstage, though, is the half-felt knowledge of roil and motion, that through this place flows a continuous river: first up as water from the well, spouted into a network of pipes and through tanks and kettles and finally back out as beer, golden or brown, taken by truck to all the parched outlying fringes where it is needed. Which, today, must be everywhere. The singular purpose of this great enterprise is that this river never ceases, the whole of this sun-bleached city oriented towards that perpetual forward motion.
But inside, the idea of pure efficiency starts to break down. Our tour group is taken to a place of incandescent light, copper tanks, bas-relief bronzes of suns and sheaves of grain on the walls like the revolution never happened. The hops are only ever whole-cone, and they arrive in bricks that are broken apart by ax. Brewer Aleš Dvořák—who shares a last name with the 19th-century composer, and who has the beard and glasses to match—takes us deeper into the brewery’s shadowed depths to pull pints from that river.
The only thing to do is plunge in, full-faced, like a dog under a hose. To surreptitiously press warm cheek to glass or frozen tank. To become practiced at swimming if you want to stand any chance of coming out the other side. There might not be enough lager in the world for a 95° day like this one—but there’s almost enough lager here.
