Given the name of his business, perhaps it isn’t a surprise that Luc “Bim” Lafontaine, owner of Godspeed Brewery in Toronto, seems to view beer through an epiphanic lens. He still sounds thunderstruck by the trip he took to the Czech Republic two years ago.
“I’ve been brewing for 30 years and I’ve been passionate about beer for more than that—and this was the best beer trip I’ve ever made in my life,” he says. “It was a complete revelation. I came back to Godspeed and said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ It’s been incubating inside of my soul for all of these years. Now pretty much a third of my portfolio is Czech Lagers.”
Lafontaine isn’t alone. Traditional Lagers might be making a comeback across the beer-drinking world, but something particularly special is going on in Canada. Thanks to a surprising network of Czech diplomats, importers, brewers, and beer enthusiasts, one of the world’s oldest brewing cultures is planting roots in the land of Molson and Labatt—and those roots are growing deeper with every batch of beer that comes out of the lagering tanks.
This recent development is visible when you wander into Montreal beer shop Veux-tu une bière?, where the number of Czech-inspired Lagers has multiplied over the past year. “This one is really good,” says the store clerk as he rings up a can of Boire Prague et Mourir (“Drink Prague and Die”), a Světlý Ležák by Microbrasserie Dieu du Ciel! that was introduced this past summer. “But it’s a little more bitter than a really traditional one. If you want something more classic, there’s a lot to choose from.”
He’s not kidding. Just a couple of years ago, it was hard to find many Lagers—especially Czech-style ones—amidst the country’s panoply of NE IPAs and other contemporary styles. Now it seems like every other Canadian brewery is trying its hand at making one. A growing spectrum of Czech styles are represented, from pale, light-bodied, lower-alcohol Světlý Výčepní to the relatively obscure Amber Lager known as Polotmavý Ležák.
Some breweries take a typically experimental, North American approach to these styles, like Brasserie Isle de Garde’s Světlý Wai-iti, which mixes Czech and New Zealand hops. But plenty of others are trying to stay as true to Czech traditions as possible. That includes Lafontaine, whose 2018 trip to the Czech Republic inspired him to brew Czech-style Lagers as close to the originals as he can.
It’s a trip that wouldn’t have happened without a cast of characters that includes a beer-loving couple named Brenda and John Steinsky. From their home on Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada’s smallest province, they have forged links between Czech and Canadian brewers, supplying them with the ingredients and knowledge they need to properly brew some of the oldest styles of Lager in the world.
The Steinskys’ interest is ancestral. John’s parents were born in Czechoslovakia and eventually settled in Toronto. “There wasn't a lot of Czech beer available, maybe Pilsner Urquell,” he recalls. “But beer was very much part of the household. My parents always had a beer with every meal—various industrial beers.”
It was only after the Iron Curtain fell and John was able to visit his ancestral homeland that he began to understand the difference between Czech beer and the various Molson and Labatt Lagers that dominated the beer market in Canada at the time. “The overwhelming thing was the drinkability,” he says. “You can drink a lot of it, it doesn’t fill you up, and it doesn’t make you too drunk. You can drink over the course of an evening and still be sober enough to walk home.”
Brenda’s introduction came after she met John in Toronto, when they were both working in IT for the federal government. She grew up in Nova Scotia in a family of French and Scottish descent. “I was an outsider looking in,” she says. “For me it was how integral having beer with traditional Czech food was. Czech cuisine tends to be pretty heavy. Meat, dumplings, and some kind of sauce to soak up with those bread dumplings. Lager is one of those beers that pairs so well with so many different types of food.”
“There’s a great proliferation of craft beer being made, but we didn’t see any Czech Lagers on the taps. It’s our impression that a lot of people think they don’t like craft beer because it’s too hoppy or strong. Lagers are a great way to bring new customers into your taproom.”
In 1998, work took the couple to Halifax, where they got their first taste of craft beer from upstart breweries like Propeller Brewing Company and Garrison Brewing Company. Every year, they traveled to the Czech Republic to explore the country’s breweries and beer halls, which made Brenda think of a quintessential doughnut shop where people gather every day. “They’re the equivalent of Tim Horton’s in Canada,” she says. “It’s where everyone goes to catch up.”
Each trip began with that first resplendent sip of beer. “Every time I go there and have that first beer, I forget how great it is until I go there and have one. It’s amazing,” says Brenda. “We try to find pubs in Prague that have tank beer, which means it’s delivered in tank trucks,” adds John. “It’s super fresh. In many cases they’ll have the date of delivery right on the taps they’re serving it from.”
When the couple decided to settle full-time in their Prince Edward Island vacation house in 2014, they thought about how to bring that quintessential Czech beer experience across the Atlantic. They were given an extra push when John was named Honorary Consul for the Czech Republic.
“We looked around and while PEI is small—there’s only 12 breweries—there’s lots of breweries around the Maritimes,” says Brenda, referring to the region of Canada that includes the three provinces of New Brunswick, PEI, and Nova Scotia. “There’s a great proliferation of craft beer being made, but we didn’t see any Czech Lagers on the taps. It's our impression that a lot of people think they don’t like craft beer because it’s too hoppy or strong. Lagers are a great way to bring new customers into your taproom.”
That observation led Brenda and John to launch their company, Bines & Vines, in 2018. It imports Czech wine and hops, including Saaz (the aroma hop that gives most European Pilsners their distinctive fragrance), Sládek (another aroma hop, often used in conjunction with Saaz), and Kazbek (a relatively new hop variety that was created by breeding Saaz with a wild hop from the Caucasus Mountains).
The company also offers a consulting service that provides equipment and training to brewers who are interested in making Czech Lager. “We’ve restricted ourselves to whatever is three to four hours of driving for us,” says John. “We want to really understand what the craft breweries are trying to achieve and where Lagers might fit into that, and really enable them with all the tools they need to do that,” adds Brenda.
That’s where the “beer missions” come into the picture. Hatched by a pair of the Czech Republic’s North American diplomats—David Müller in Toronto and Petr Ježek in Washington, D.C.—the idea was to send North American brewers to the Czech Republic for background education and hands-on training. “I work as a trade commissioner across the board, covering all industries,” says Müller. “Of course, beer is my passion and I’m a huge fan of beer myself.” He and Ježek—another beer enthusiast who works as the Embassy of the Czech Republic’s Agricultural Attaché—thought that if they took some brewers from the U.S. and Canada to the Czech Republic, it might result in more trade between the countries—not to mention more quality Czech Lagers on tap.
Müller, who moved to Toronto in 2016, says that his travels around Canada have shown him that the country’s Czech brewing skills could use some shoring up. “There are some breweries using the label ‘Bohemian style’ or ‘Czech style,’ but sometimes when I ask they don’t always use Czech malt—which is something I totally understand, because it could be complicated—but they don’t even use Czech hops. Legally it’s fine, but from my perspective it’s a bit dubious to label beer ‘Czech Lager’ if you don’t really use any Czech-based ingredients, or at least hops.”
They can be forgiven for not getting it exactly right. People in what is now the Czech Republic have been making beer for centuries, including Lagers, the earliest records of which date back to the 15th century. In 1842, a Bavarian brewer living in the Bohemian city of Pilsen named Josef Groll created the first-ever Pilsner, known today as Pilsner Urquell. It was such a hit that Lagers quickly came to dominate the Czech beer market, followed by the rest of Europe—and most other parts of the world.
But here’s the thing: there is more to Czech beer than just Pilsner, as the country produces a whole range of different Lagers. They are generally categorized by their color and strength, starting with the rarely seen Stolní Pivo (“Table Beer”), made from an original gravity under 6º on the Plato scale. That’s followed by a far more common style, Světlý Výčepní—a straw-colored daily drinker brewed anywhere between 7 and 10º on the Plato scale, with roughly 3–4% alcohol by volume (ABV)—and the slightly stronger Světlý Ležák (11–12º Plato), which includes the Pilsner style. Even stronger Lagers run all the way up to the Czech Porter category, a pitch-black Baltic Porter style that starts at about 8% ABV, made from an original gravity of 18º or more.
Many of these styles are similar to their better-known German cousins, such as Märzen or Schwarzbier. But the use of Czech hops, malts, and yeast gives them a distinct flavor and mouthfeel—especially when the malts go through a decoction mash, which involves removing a portion of the mash and boiling it separately, up to three times, before returning that portion to the main mash. Tomáš Kincl, a former brewer with Pilsner Urquell who is now a brewing specialist at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague, says decoction adds chemical compounds that aren’t formed by a regular boil. “Generally these are maillard reactions, and some flavor-active compounds are created—the same compounds like when you are baking bread or barbecue,” he says. Decoction can make a beer taste fuller, heftier, a little bit richer in body, as well as imparting toasty, caramel notes.
In early 2020, just before the pandemic hit, the Steinskys invited Kincl to run a one-week brewing workshop in New Brunswick. “It was really to help experienced brewers fast-track their skills at brewing Czech Lager,” says Brenda. “He came in the middle of winter! What a trooper he was. It was his first visit to Canada. I remember him taking a shot of the internal temperature gauge in the car and sending it back home.”
In one case, a New Brunswick brewer who wasn’t able to participate in the workshop made the journey to visit Kincl anyway. “They spoke for just 15 minutes, but he said those 15 minutes saved him nine months’ worth of research,” says Brenda. “Some of his assumptions were correct and some of them were not. It saved him a lot of time and bad brewing and money.”
The brewers who participated in the missions to the Czech Republic had a similar experience. “I just got a phone call asking if I wanted to go,” says Eric Wagner, the owner and head brewery of Moth Lane Brewing, which is located in a former oyster storehouse in Ellerslie, PEI. “I really enjoyed the trip for so many reasons. I love the beer culture. And I came back with a new appreciation for Pilsners which I had never really liked before because we don’t have many good ones over here. It adjusted my palate.”
Wagner is a former fisherman who opened Moth Lane as a retirement project. “I’m down a dirt road next to the water in the middle of nowhere. It was on my terms,” he says. The brewery turned out to be more successful than he had ever anticipated. “I work eight days a week. That’s no kidding. My wife said three weeks ago, ‘I might as well be a widow.’ If you see where I’m at, the location, to think that I get business every day, you’d just shake your head.”
Although Wagner had been homebrewing for 40 years before opening the brewery in 2016, taking part in the 2019 beer mission to the Czech Republic shook up his expectations of what beer could be. “I didn’t like Pilsners before because I just didn’t find them to be very good over here. When you make a beer, unless you have something to go with, you don’t know what it is really supposed to taste like. That’s just my opinion. Labatt’s Blue is a Pilsner, right? That to me is not what I experienced when I was in the Czech Republic.”
The Czech Lagers Wagner tasted were flavorful and moreish without sacrificing any of the drinkability normally associated with Lagers. When he returned home to PEI, he decided to try his hand at brewing a Světlý Ležák, which he calls Na Zdraví—Czech for “cheers.” He says it was a hit. “We done great,” he says. “The test of a good beer is when it’s warm. If it still tastes good, it’s good. If it ain’t, that’s when the flaws come out. This was a good one.”
Now Wagner is thinking of ramping up his Lager program for next year. “I want to see if I can recommission some dairy tanks for lager tanks, put them away for the winter and see if they lager,” he says. He is aiming to lager the beer for eight weeks—or possibly even longer. “It doesn’t have to be that long but if you want a good one, you have to put in the time. That’s the biggest hurdle here.”
The time it takes to lager beer can be difficult for a small brewery. “The time factor is huge,” says John Steinsky. “You’ve got to leave that beer sitting for three or four times as long as a typical Ale would sit. From a business point of view it’s a challenge. You’ve really got to plan your production differently.”
Another challenge: decoction, a time-intensive process that requires a separate vessel that most standard North American brewhouses just don’t have. “If you don’t have the setup it’s tough,” says Godspeed’s Lafontaine. “But if you have some imagination there’s always something you can do.” New Brunswick’s Brasserie Chockpish manages to brew a well-regarded Světlý Ležák without decoction. Carine Luys, who co-founded the brewery with her husband, brewer Yves Martin, credits that to the use of specialty malts, though many connoisseurs of Czech beer will argue that it’s not the same.
“There’s something very special about drinking a Czech beer. They have something unique. Is it the decoction, the malt, the water, the spirits of ancestral brewers that add a little something to Czech brews?”
But in Canada, just finding the right malts can be difficult. “The hops are not a big problem—it’s always been the malts,” says Lafontaine. “It’s always been tricky to get Czech malts here.” He has now found two companies that can supply him with grain from the Czech Republic.
Going that extra mile makes a difference in taste. Kincl says that when he first sampled Canadian-produced Pilsner malt he was surprised by how different it was from what Czech brewers use. “It was not so crispy. It was very neutral compared to Pilsner malt in the Czech Republic,” he says. While he was in New Brunswick, he consulted a local brewery and suggested they use a two-row pale malt—normally used for Ales—instead of local Pilsner malt, simply because it seemed closer to what would be available across the ocean. “It was crisper and breadier,” he says.
Lafontaine and Müller, who became beer buddies after the trip to the Czech Republic, say they have mused about implementing some kind of certification program for Czech-style beers in Canada. “We’re thinking about how deep do we go,” says Lafontaine. “Just the ingredients? Or the process as well? There’s no way I was going to make a Czech Lager without using Czech raw ingredients. As a joke I always say that for my Czech beers, there’s two things that aren’t Czech in there: me and the water.”
If there’s any time to shore up Canadian beer drinkers’ knowledge of Czech Lagers, it’s now. More and more brewers are interested in making them—after two successful editions in 2018 and 2019, the Czech beer mission was slated to double in size this year, with trips in the spring and fall, before the pandemic upended everything.
But even the pandemic hasn’t quenched the thirst for Lagers. Beer lovers stuck at home or venturing out to plexiglassed, socially distanced bars are seeking them out and being greeted by more craft Lagers than ever before. “It’s the next trend, but it’s one that’s based on drinkability,” says Hugo Jacques, co-owner and sommelier at Poincaré Chinatown, a Montreal bar that focuses on fermented food, natural wine, and craft beer. “Because Lagers really are the pinnacle of drinkability.”
Poincaré recently finished building a new system of gravity-fed taps—which makes use of a rooftop cold room—that includes four side-pull faucets made by Czech manufacturer Lukr. Sometimes described as a “dimmer switch,” these taps allow bartenders to moderate the flow of beer, giving them greater control over the amount of foam. Jacques says the new handles allow them to serve a properly poured Lager in half the time as their standard taps.
And that pour is important, because the way Czech beer is served is almost as emblematic as the way it tastes. “They have beer-pouring competitions over there,” says Brenda Steinsky. “It’s a really big deal. You have to get the right amount of head with a kind of dome on it.” A classic Czech pour involves a few fingers of foam, which gives the beer a silkier texture.
“It’s a whole experience, but it can be a challenge for someone who isn’t used to seeing so much head on their beer,” says brewer Jean-Philippe Lalonde. “It invites a lot of questions and comments.” Lalonde is the owner of Brasserie Silo, which opened last March in a former garment district in Montreal’s north end. From the beginning, a Světlý Ležák named Louvain has been one of Silo’s flagship brews. Lalonde uses only Czech hops and malts in that beer, and while his brewhouse doesn’t enable him to do decoction—at least not yet—he has tried to achieve a workaround by making sure his wort is slightly caramelized in the boil. “It’s balanced, easy to drink, and it has flavors we don’t find in a lot of the beers that are popular right now,” he says.
Lalonde became smitten with Czech Lagers when he traveled to the country on his own. “What I love is the culture around beer and how people integrate it into their daily lives,” he says. “I often hear people say that Lagers are brewers’ beer. And I know a lot of brewers who followed the same path as me because of their travels.”
That was the case for Brasserie Chockpish owners Martin and Luys, whose peripatetic career in aviation led them around the world, including to Prague, where they lived for several months. Before going, they were already familiar with the pasteurized and filtered version of Pilsner Urquell, but it was only after arriving in the Czech Republic that they discovered what the fresh version tasted like. Martin describes it as “un coup de cœur formidable”—or roughly “love at first sip.”
“From the first batches of Světlý people kind of connected. You don’t have to be a craft beer connoisseur to like Czech beer.”
When Martin and Luys finally settled down in the New Brunswick town of Dieppe, they converted their passion into a tiny, 6-hectoliter (5.1-barrel) brewery wedged into their garage. Between the limited space and the time it takes to lager a beer, they make just one brew: a Světlý Ležák they call the Chockpish Pilsner. They’re happy with the result. “That said,” says Luys, “we find there’s something very special about drinking a Czech beer [in the Czech Republic]. They have something unique. Is it the decoction, the malt, the water, the spirits of ancestral brewers that add a little something to Czech brews?”
It’s a question whose answer Lafontaine continues to chase. His first experience with a Czech-style beer came when he was a young homebrewer in the 1990s, and his curiosity only grew stronger when he became head brewer at Dieu du Ciel!, which has long had a Bohemian Pilsner on rotation. “If I’m going to brew beer, if I’m going to brew a style, I need to feel it—I need a story,” he says. He went to Pilsen and drank as much unfiltered, unpasteurized Pilsner Urquell as he could. “I wanted to record that taste forever in my mind.”
He eventually quit his job and moved to Japan on a quixotic quest to start a brewery. He succeeded, but only after struggling with years of red tape, and by the time Ushitora Brewing launched in 2014, Lafontaine was on his way back to Canada, where he opened Godspeed in 2015. Its name is a wink at Lafontaine’s roots at Dieu du Ciel! (“God in Heaven!”) and a nod to Montreal-based postrock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor (which itself was named after a 1976 Japanese documentary about a biker gang).
At Godspeed, Lafontaine started out by brewing beers with Japanese influences, including a Yuzu Saison and an IPA made with green tea. But the 2018 beer mission to the Czech Republic rekindled his love for Czech beer. “I learned a lot of small things that make a lot of difference,” he says, including details about decoction techniques and natural carbonation.
He returned to Canada filled with the zealousness of a convert, throwing himself into making a Světlý Ležák and a Tmavý Ležák—a Black Lager—as authentically as possible. They ended up being a hit with customers. “I decided to do a Czech event here at Godspeed and to my surprise the place got slammed,” he says. “A lot of beer geeks showed up. I thought, will they start to drink Czech Lagers with their little pinkies up?” He laughs. “From the first batches of Světlý people kind of connected. You don’t have to be a craft beer connoisseur to like Czech beer.”
Godspeed’s Světlý Ležák 12º is now one of its flagships. “I can’t brew enough of it—it always runs out,” says Lafontaine. He also makes the lighter Světlé Výčepní Pivo 10º and the robust Silný Ležák 17°, with plans to continue his Czech beer exploration.
“On the [beer mission], we went to some breweries where they still used open fermentation,” he says. “You saw everybody’s eyes get really big. You felt like a baby again. I feel like there’s still a lot of mystery in the Czech brewing story. There’s some places you go and there’s something that grabs you and gets your heart. This did that for me. It’s pretty amazing.”
Words, Christopher DeWolfIllustrations, Araña Schulke
