Every new year brings new predictions—and some old ones, as well. In his first January blog post at Fuggled, my friend Alistair Reece notes that he saw someone pushing for 2023 to be “the year of Czech beer.”
That’s nice to hear, if a somewhat overly familiar tune from social media, news sites, industry association forecasts, and even retail catalogs, all of which regularly predict the triumph of Czech beer, or at least Pilsner, which is arguably the same thing. Two Januaries ago, the beer glassware company Déjàbrew wrote that “2021 is going to be the year of Pilsner!” On Twitter, it was thought to be about to happen slightly earlier, when one user posted, “I declare 2018 to be the Year of Pilsner.” Before that, Jason Notte picked Pilsner as the next evolution in craft beer—or “the new pumpkin ale,” as the headline had it—for MarketWatch in March, 2016. Only a month earlier, Thrillist said Pilsner would be one of the “next big trends in beer.” The year before that, Bart Watson at the Brewers’ Association hailed Pilsner as “the next big thing” at the start of 2015.
Like Level Five self-driving automobiles and a second World Cup win for England, the ascendancy of Czech beer is regularly predicted, but it never seems to happen. The Year of Pilsner is almost like the horizon itself: a clearly visible future that never actually gets here.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! If this blog has a familiar, it’s a Pilsner-drinking groundhog who wrote his master’s thesis on repetition, leitmotifs, and cyclical trends. In fact, many of those who floated the upcoming triumph of Czech beer have noted the fizzling out of earlier predictions. With its post in 2021, Déjàbrew acknowledged that people have been calling for the Year of Pilsner “every year for the last several years.” In 2019, Doug Veliky predicted the Year of Pilsner while spotlighting a failed 2015 prophecy for the same, though of course that wasn’t the year for it either. As brewer Bruce Lish told the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper just 12 months later: “Once again, 2020 will NOT be the year of Pilsner, even tho it should be.”
Despite years of failed prognostications, something does seem to be happening with Czech beer nowadays, as if the far-off horizon is just slightly closer than it used to be. As I write this, the team from Sacred Profane is back in Prague again, “furthering relationships” and getting the kind of Czech beer experience that only comes in situ. That must have been the highest-profile Czech-inspired brewery to open in North America last year, but it is part of a growing cadre that includes the 2021 arrivals Cohesion Brewing Company in Denver and Pivovar in Waco, Texas, as well as the upcoming Pivovar West in San Diego.
So, yeah: It’s not happening. But it’s not not happening, either.
There’s probably a benefit to always being thought of as the next big thing, but never the actual big thing itself. I’ve seen a few brewers in the U.S. put out Lagers they called “Czech-style” that didn’t use a decoction mash or Czech hops, which only shows how little those producers understand Czech styles. Actual widespread popularity might mean a proliferation of similarly bad emulations. If that’s the case, the disappointment will be mutual: Curious customers will be disappointed that what they were assured is the next thing does not actually taste that different from other Lagers (since it will be made with the same process and ingredients), observers who know Czech beer will be disappointed by the shortcuts the brewers are taking, and brewers will be disappointed by the resulting lack of interest in the new thing that was supposed to be huge. But if the horizon that is Czech beer’s apotheosis never actually arrives, Bohemian Pilsner and Dark Lager can remain what they are: wonderful, rewarding beer styles that are constantly under-appreciated by the vast majority of drinkers.
That wouldn’t be so bad. Is it not better to be thought of as great but elusive and rare, rather than to be seen as something that ended up being made not great by its own prevalence? Like the emo antithesis of the “everyday carry” mantra, I’d much rather want something and not have it than have something and not want it.
As it is, the Year of Czech Lager and the Triumph of Pilsner will have to remain dreamed-of possibilities that never actually come true. Physicists regularly argue over the possible existence of different universes for every conceivable outcome, alternative worlds in which everything with a non-zero probability of happening has actually really happened.
Maybe in one of those worlds, Czech Lager actually has triumphed, and it’s no longer good.
And somewhere in another timeline, England has won every World Cup since 1966, and the fans are fucking sick of it.
