Place names are powerful triggers, no doubt about it. Say “Czech,” and the imagination of the average beer lover fills with thoughts of bittersweet golden Lagers, foamy pours, and overbuilt Lukr taps. For hockey fans, the same word brings to mind NHL greats like Jaromír Jágr and Dominik Hašek, while cinéastes might envision scenes from the Czech New Wave. But among fly fishers, the name of my adopted country has a very special connotation: Czech nymphing, a technique developed here using a long, light rod, a short line, and weighted flies that resemble insects. If you’re not into chasing trout, it is an entire world that is hard to imagine. If you are into it, it’s often hard to think of anything else.
Or at least that’s how I feel about it, especially once the weather starts to warm up. Fishing is strictly regulated in the Czech lands, with all trout waters closed from December 1 through April 15. After April 16, those of us who live in cities but dream of cold, flowing water can finally start making our occasional, or weekly, or even daily trips out of town.
From Prague, it’s generally at least an hour by car to a place with good fishing, most of which are in the mountains to the north, next to the Polish border, or in the thick, hilly forests to the south neighboring Austria and Germany. At the beginning and end of each season, I spend most of my time fishing the rivers of the north, while our family summers down in South Bohemia put me close to the trout streams of the thick Šumava forest. On the in-between days when I try to steal a few hours on the water, I generally head to the town of Žatec, about an hour northwest of Prague.
Even in this country, Žatec pretty much just means hops. Hops have been grown commercially in and around the town Žatec—or Saaz in German—for 1,000 years or more, with historical records noting that they were commanding the highest prices in German hop markets around the year 1100. It is impossible to hear “Žatec” and not think of the hop region.
But for me, Žatec also brings to mind the river that runs through it. A rocky-bottomed tributary of the Labe, or Elbe, the rusty-red Ohře is surrounded by tall trellises of hop bines for miles on either side. I can see the plants change on every fishing trip: at this point just shoots, head-high by late spring, soaring and heavy with leaves and cones at the end of summer. When I stand knee-deep in the Ohře, casting nymphs or dry flies to brown trout and grayling, the tall warehouses of Bohemia Hop, the Žatec hop company, are within sight. On my drive in, I pass the derelict mansions and abandoned storehouses of the hop barons of previous eras, evidence of boom-and-bust cycles in a city that has seen plenty of them. You can spot the spires of Baroque churches and houses that were paid for by hops while standing in fast-moving, tea-colored water as you try to catch a wild animal. It is a wonderful confluence of beer culture—beer civilization, even—and the natural world.
I’m not the first person to find links between fly fishing and beer. (As with most things, Kate Bernot got there first.) And of course, there’s plenty of difference between the two: As I see it, beer is mostly about relaxation, while fishing is a physical and mental activity, one that can be fairly intense, depending on how high the water is, the slipperiness of the rocks and the size of whatever it is that takes your hook. They are different worlds, and yet I increasingly find myself talking about fishing with beer people like Tim Adams from Oxbow Brewing Company, Joel Winn from New Belgium Brewing, and Phil Lowry from Barth-Haas. It is a thing that connects us that is more than beer, the way we prefer to spend our time away from it. In Žatec, more than anywhere else, these two worlds come together. I’ll be spending time there, now and then, over the next six months, trying to find the clear thoughts that only come to me after an hour or two of casting, watching the surrounding bines grow ever higher until the harvest, after which trout season will end again.
