In a cozy pub in the eastern Bohemian city of Pardubice, I’m considering a glass of Pardubický Porter for what might be the last time ever.
It’s a dark beer, slightly more brown than black, capped with a thick cap of khaki-colored foam. It’s not as viscous as it might appear—it’s refreshingly light in the mouth—and there’s a rich “holiday spice” aroma that quickly evokes memories of previous tastings, followed by touches of caramel, licorice, and Dutch cocoa in the finish. Though it is strong for a Czech beer, I don’t notice the alcohol: Pardubický Porter is supposed to have 8% ABV, but I can’t taste it. Nor is there much Czech hop character. Instead, this beer is all about the malt, which makes every sip disappear with a clear invitation to take another.
Setting the glass down, I reflect on the inherent contradiction. I know that Pardubický Porter isn’t brewed with spice, but I keep picking up notes of cinnamon, clove, allspice, and nutmeg as I drink it. It’s probably a trick of the cerebral cortex, some kind of sensory suggestion stemming from the dessert-like sweetness of the malt. Or perhaps it is inspired by the setting, since Pardubice is known as the home of perník, a kind of gingerbread that is baked with most of the same spices. In fact, this city of 90,000 residents about 75 miles east of Prague has long been famous for three things: its perník gingerbread, a historic horse race called the Velká Pardubická, and Pardubický Porter, brewed here since 1890. And because of the impending closure of Pardubický Pivovar, the large brewery next door to the pub I’m in, the latter of those three points of pride is down to its very last kegs, tanks, and bottles.
I take another sip of the strong Lager and try not to think about what it means for a 133-year-old beer to disappear.
What it means, of course, depends on how you look at it and where you’re coming from. For me, an American outsider who loves Czech beer, the death of Pardubický Porter marks an inflection point for Czech brewing, one of those dots on the timeline that will soon denote a “before” and an “after.” For the people who decided to close the brewery in Pardubice—Prague’s Pivovary Staropramen brewing group, part of Molson Coors—it’s an unfortunate casualty of difficult times. For foreign fans, it’s a great European Baltic Porter, though one that confusingly comes from a country that is separated from the Baltic coast by the 200-mile breadth of Poland.
For many Czech drinkers, however, Pardubický Porter has long signified something else. When I hear about the brewery’s impending closing, I reach out to Filip Nerad, a journalist at Czech Radio and the author of “The Beer Kingdom of Belgium.” In his eyes, Pardubický Porter stood in for “foreign” beer during the oppressive, state-controlled communist era in Czechoslovakia, as well as all the unimagined possibilities that a foreign drink might represent to people who didn’t have the freedom to travel anywhere they wanted.
“For me, it’s a very special beer, because I grew up in the communist times,” he says. “You had Pale Lagers, or Dark Lagers. There was nothing else here, except Pardubický Porter. It was a kind of ‘exotic’ beer for us.”
That mostly has to do with its heft, of course: 8% ABV might not count as wildly powerful for fans of modern DIPAs and Imperial Stouts, but it certainly stood out when the vast majority of beers consumed by Czech people had less than 4% ABV, as was the case during the state-run era of Czechoslovakia, and which has shifted only slightly in favor of beers with 5% ABV or less in the Czech Republic today. But Nerad says there was more to the drink than just high alcohol.
“For me, it’s a very special beer, because I grew up in the communist times. You had Pale Lagers, or Dark Lagers. There was nothing else here, except Pardubický Porter. It was a kind of ‘exotic’ beer for us. ”
“Even the name, ‘Porter,’ it sounds Western,” he says. “It was really something different. I remember it as an exceptional beer in this way, because it showed us, the Czechs, that there is also something else, something different.”
It’s been seen as “something different” for quite a while. Originally brewed for the Jubilee Exhibition of 1891, a kind of world’s fair that took place in Prague, Pardubický Porter was launched by Pardubický Pivovar’s then-new brewmaster Alois Šimonek, who had joined the company less than two years earlier, according to the brewery’s entry at pivovary.info, a Czech enthusiast website.
Not many breweries are home to the gravestones of their former employees, but I find myself staring at Šimonek’s memorial in the brewery yard, near the brewery’s empty delivery bays and silent bottling line, when photographer Michal Novotný and I drive out to Pardubice one morning in late February. A sign in three languages—Czech, English, and Russian—explains that the headstone was brought here from the cemetery in the village where Šimonek was buried to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death in 2016.
Aleš Vejr, the brewery’s technical manager, acknowledges that there’s some dispute about how Šimonek came up with Pardubický Porter’s recipe.
“We know that he traveled through Europe, and that he learned something from England, where strong, heavy beers were being brewed, and then he tried to make something halfway from a Pilsner-style beer, but slightly flavored by England,” he says. “We know that around 1890 the recipe was created, and after that we have the prize he won at the exhibition.”
In fact, there’s an entire room at the brewery—Galerie Porter—dedicated to the beer, its lore, and awards. There are also dioramas of the brewery, as well as notes on its history and founding, although the focus is mostly on Pardubický Porter, including its original “racehorse” trademark. That’s a bit unusual, since Pardubický Porter was never the brewery’s most popular product, or at least not within the last century or so. For as long as anyone can remember, most Czechs prefer to drink Pale Lagers. Naturally, the brewery dedicated the majority of production to Pernštejn, its beer made in that style, not Porter.
“For us, it was always the cherry on top of the cake,” Vejr says. “It was not the main program.”
Inside, the brewery buildings are strangely silent—and cold. Many Czech breweries have tropical plants growing in the windows surrounding the kettles, since the conditions are constantly warm and humid. But at Pardubický Pivovar, the brewhouse is as frigid and quiet as a crypt. There’s no sign of employees or human activity. On a far wall we find a collection of historic Porter labels that Czech breweriana collectors would rend their garments over, but those were clearly framed and hung years ago.
“There used to be palm trees in here,” Vejr says. “They’re gone now.”
The funereal feeling is heightened by the slate skies and the nearly empty brewery yard, with Šimonek’s gravestone standing at its center. The remaining workers are preparing for the brewery’s closing date of March 31, though brewing actually stopped in mid-December, Vejr says. The last brew was a final batch of Pardubický Porter.
If Šimonek’s take on Porter was inspired by the English, he certainly didn’t have to travel far to find them. Pardubice might not be a familiar name to Britons today, but in the mid-19th century, the city had a clear English influence, thanks to horse racing. The city’s steeplechase course was established in 1856, bringing experienced trainers and jockeys from England to work in Pardubice even before the Velká Pardubická started up in 1874. In fact, for the first 10 years of the Velká Pardubická race, the winning riders and trainers were all British. In 1891, when Šimonek’s Pardubický Porter had its début at the Jubilee Exhibition in Prague, the Velká Pardubická had an all-British trifecta: the winning jockey was Richard Harry Fletcher, the winning trainer was George Herbert, and the winning horse was Lady Anne.
A British influence might have inspired the beer’s name, but probably not its recipe, at least not the version that was made by Pardubický Pivovar’s former head brewer, who worked there for 33 years until not long after the brewery was bought by Pivovary Staropramen in 2019. (When I reach him on the phone, he agrees to answer my questions but politely asks not to be named in my article. Out of respect for his privacy, I’ll just call him Václav.)
“For us, it was always the cherry on top of the cake. It was not the main program.”
“When I first started there, in 1987, that was a Christmas beer,” he says. “It was usually on tap at the Christmas markets, and it definitely wasn’t available all year round.”
With the traditional constraints of Czech brewing, that meant working well in advance. Lagering Pardubický Porter could take up to 120 days, he says, with a minimum lagering period of 90 days.
“To make the beer for Christmas, that meant that you came back from your holidays in August, and the first week of September, you brewed Porter,” he says. “You packaged it around the beginning of December. That’s how long it took.”
While the lagering temperature of 2 Celsius (around 36 Fahrenheit) was the same for the brewery’s entire lineup, Václav says that he raised the fermentation temperature by roughly one degree for all Dark Lagers, including Pardubický Porter, with the wort only chilled down to 9 Celsius before the yeast was pitched. On average, primary fermentation took about two weeks, he says.
Beyond the seasonality of the beer in the old days, the amount of malt in the tun also limited its production volume. While Pardubický Pivovar could turn out 550 hectoliters (about 470 barrels) of its 5% ABV Pernštejn Pale Lager, a batch of Pardubický Porter was only 320 hectoliters. Brewed to 19º Plato, or 1.0785 on the Specific Gravity scale, a single batch of Pardubický Porter required almost 7 metric tons of grain—Pilsner, Munich, caramel malt, and Czech barvící slad, or “coloring malt”—the equivalent of about 15,400 pounds.
After 1989, the brewery converted from state control to private ownership, and the new management decided to make Pardubický Porter available throughout the year. A few other Czech breweries began trying to make beers they also called “Porter,” and for a while that was even the official term for a specific category of beer in the Czech legal code. But Václav says that Porter was always associated with Pardubice, or at least Pardubický Pivovar, in people’s minds.
“If anyone ever asked, ‘Where do you work?’ and I said, ‘Pardubický Pivovar,’ nobody ever said ‘Pernštejn,’” he says. “They always said, ‘Porter.’ The awareness of the brewery was connected to Porter. If you said ‘Porter,’ they would say, ‘Pardubice.’”
With the brewery now closing, that might seem like the end of the line for Pardubický Porter. However, there is still a small chance the beer might come back in some form, according to Denisa Mylbachrová, spokesperson for Pivovary Staropramen.
“Pardubice Porter is a legendary and unique beer, not only on the Czech market, but also abroad,” she says. “The beer has won numerous professional awards and found its fans who appreciate its quality and uniqueness. Since it is a specialty that most consumers enjoy only occasionally, we are thinking about offering it to consumers occasionally, as a limited edition.”
“To make the beer for Christmas, that meant that you came back from your holidays in August, and the first week of September, you brewed Porter. You packaged it around the beginning of December. That’s how long it took.”
That’s better than nothing, I imagine, but it feels like a long shot. To start, Staropramen has already said that a few “selected brands” from Pivovar Pardubice will be brewed in Ostrava, a city about 140 miles further east that is no longer in Bohemia, but rather in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. The taste of any Czech beer is often less dependent on its recipe than it is on where it is brewed and the equipment used there. To say nothing of horse racing, Ostrava is a great city, but it is not Pardubice.
And even in Pardubice, any other brewery might have trouble making Pardubický Porter. When Pardubický Pivovar upgraded its brewhouse a few years ago, the first batches of Pardubický Porter didn’t work with the new equipment, Vejr says. Instead, the 15,400 pounds of Czech malt formed a solid block at lautering, leading to a stuck sparge. In order to keep making Pardubický Porter, the brewery had to refit the new brewhouse with additional equipment modeled after the previous version. The same could happen in Ostrava, or anywhere that isn’t already set up to brew a strong Baltic Porter.
And then there are the sales volumes. Luděk Štěpán worked as the general manager of Pardubický Pivovar until shortly before it was sold to Pivovary Staropramen. In those days the brewery was often selling just 6,000 hectoliters (about 5,110 barrels) of Pardubický Porter each year, he says, as part of a total production of around 80,000 hectoliters. Not counting the production at Pardubický Pivovar, about 2.5 million hectoliters of beer are made by the other breweries of Pivovary Staropramen each year. With numbers like those, it’s hard to imagine that 6,000 hectoliters of Pardubický Porter will be a priority.
As to why the brewery had to close, it’s hard to get a clear answer. Štěpán points out that Pardubický Pivovar was under financial pressure for years and in serious need of repairs, like many other Czech breweries, which largely went without upgrades during the four decades of state ownership.
“The former owners had to sell the brewery to Staropramen, because the brewery needed much more investment money than it could generate in sales,” he says. “The brewhouse has a capacity of 400,000 hectoliters yearly. It’s too much for a brewery that’s selling roughly 80,000 hectoliters per year.”
Pivovary Staropramen attributes the brewery’s closure to COVID-19 and the changing economic and political situation in Europe. Beer from Pardubice, including Pardubický Porter, found some success as exports to Russia over the last decade or so, but that door closed with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
“The pandemic and the outbreak of war in Ukraine made it impossible for the company to implement its plans and set goals,” Mylbachrová says.
It’s fair to say the closure of the brewery hit people hard. Štěpán describes it as heartbreaking. Václav calls it a real pity. The mayor of Pardubice, Jan Nadrchal, told a Czech newspaper that shutting down the brewery counted as a great shame, adding that it was coming as a shock, since he was hearing the news for the first time from the reporter who called him. Unfortunately, closing breweries is a familiar story with Pivovary Staropramen, at least for anyone who remembers when the group, then owned by Belgium’s InBev, shuttered Prague’s historic Braník brewery in 2007.
Nerad says that, for him, the beer is a legend.
“It’s part of my youth,” he says. “There was only Pale Lager and Dark Lager, and that’s it. There were no Weizens, no Stouts, or anything else. And this Porter was something that was brewed here in Czechoslovakia, and then here in the Czech Republic.”
Although I didn’t come of age here, I’m also taking the news to heart, reflecting on my own history with the beer. I first visited the Pardubice brewery in 2006, while I was writing a Czech beer guidebook for CAMRA. A couple of years later, I wrote a blog post about “beer hacking” Pardubický Porter with Orval dregs, which went moderately viral when the writer Lars Marius Garshol shared it on Reddit. Over the past 20-plus years, I have owned at least a half-dozen Pardubický Porter glasses, which were always my favorites for sampling beers at home. I’ve tried cooking with the beer (recommended) as well as drinking it (ditto). It’s almost impossible to imagine it not being around anymore.
When Michal Novotný and I get back to Prague, we stop at Pardubická Pivnice U Járy, a taproom dedicated to beers from Pardubice in the Czech capital’s Žižkov neighborhood. It’s unusually quiet when we arrive in the midafternoon, and the heavy-set guy behind the bar has time to talk to us. He thinks there will be enough Pardubický Porter to last for a few more months, he says, after which they’ll have to find something else. It won’t be the same, but at least it’ll be strong and dark.
I order another half-liter while Novotný takes photographs. The beer arrives in a traditional dimpled mug, that inscrutable dark brown topped with the dense, sand-colored cap of foam. I take a sip, concentrating on the layers of malt, caramel, and holiday spice, forcing my brain to record exactly what Pardubický Porter used to taste like, so I can remember it once it’s gone.
Words by Evan RailPhotos by Michal Novotný
