Central European brewers can be fairly self-enclosed, often focusing exclusively on local techniques and customers. Marek Mahut and Jan Hrnko are making beers in an entirely different tradition, bringing Belgian-style, spontaneously fermented Ales to the land of Pilsner.
Their Lambic-inspired brewery, Many Worlds, had a breakout 2022. It presented bottles at the Wild World Festival in Brooklyn, New York and the Salon Piva expo in Bratislava, Slovakia, followed by a bottle release that was paired with a tap takeover by Brooklyn’s Grimm Artisanal Ales in Copenhagen, Denmark.
That kind of connection-making is echoed in Mahut and Hrnko’s brewing, which combines a Belgian-style coolship with a historic Czech lagering cellar dating to 1876. Located inside the long-closed Pivovar Unhošť outside of Prague, that cellar currently houses just over 200 Bordeaux-size oak barrels of 225 liters, as well as a few 500-liter puncheons; more are planned for 2023. While traveling, the brewery’s founders have hunted for wild microorganisms in places like Ibiza, Spain, and Sardinia, Italy—and their transportable coolship has allowed them to produce special beers with site-specific microbes.
Mahut and Hrnko are only the second dedicated spontaneous-fermentation brewers in this part of Europe, with strong connections to Belgium, where Mahut was raised. Their brewery is part of a sea change of modernization, bridge-building, and cosmopolitanism in what has long been one of the Old World’s most traditional and insular beer regions.
Words,Evan Rail