Czechvar at Smokeless Joe's

[Cass]

This seems to be a recurring topic around here - what's new at Smokeless Joe's.

I was down there last night and Czechvar had arrived and being served. Czechvar, aka Budweiser Budwar, is a nice, clean pilsner from the Czech Republic. Quite flavourful.

Joe also had many (if not all) of the Fall beers release, including the Hendrick Brune.

[esprit]

If you head down to Smokeless tonight or tomorrow you'll also be able to partake in Rare Vos and Ommegang from Brewery Ommegang. Both of these brews were scored 96 and received Platinum Medals in the most recent issue of ALL ABOUT BEER!

[Josh Oakes]

No more Czechvar at Smokeless. Apparently there are people who read Bartowel and they all ran down and drank the place dry because I only took 48 hours to check it out and I was too late. It will, of course, be back, but this weekend doesn't look too promising.

[Publican]

Anyone who wants to try Czechvar(aka Budweiser Budvar) it is available at the Davisville LCBO. I first tried this beer in Scotland last fall, and I think the beer we got here was as good as the version I had last year. Don't expect this beer to taste like Pilsner Urquel,it is more malt accented.
FYI, In Britain a judge has decided that both
Anheuser Busch and the Budvar brewery are both entiled to sell a beer called Budweiser in Britain

[Josh Oakes]

I like that decision. Let the market sort it out. What's the worst that will happen? A few kids who want to pretend like they're Yanks will discover real beer? It's not like A-B won't outsell the Czechs by 100x anyway.

[old faithful]

Maybe some update of Czechvar is in order.

I have bought Czechvar, which most beer fans know is sold under the name Budweiser Budvar in most European markets, since the LCBO brought it in a couple of years ago. At first it was great. Then, it seemed less so, I wasn't sure if the product was older at time of sale than the first lots or whether it submitted to the inevitable variations that attend most beers from time to time. I let it alone for a while and picked up some bottles today at Queen's Quay, dated to end November '05 on the neck.

This beer is absolutely superb. It is very fresh, with a fluffy head and a rich body full of sweetish malt and firm, flavorful hop accents. The malt and hop can be distinguished yet meld very well together. It is as good as Urquel but different, stressing the malt more perhaps or maybe it is the Budvar yeast that lends the keynote to Czechvar with its signature apple-like note.

And now I want to give an opinion which not everyone may share. In my 20's I drank a fair amount of (American) Budweiser both in the States and here in its licensed version. I always thought it was a good beer, not great but good with a distinctive malty/chalky/appley taste.

But I have almost never had a Bud in the last 20 years because there are so many other beers to try. But at one time I drank my share of it and its flavour profile remains in my sensory memory.

Well, when I tasted today the rich very flavourful Czechvar, immediately the memory came back of those Buds in the summer! In other words, I believe there is a taste connection still between the two beers. Even though U.S. Bud has its own identity and has existed, far away from the town where Czechvar is made, for 100 years and more, I can see a connection between the two beers. Sure, Czechvar is a richer, more characterful beer than Budweiser, but Budweiser resembles it to a certain degree in my opinion. It is as if Bud is a light Czechvar, or a light light Czechvar. Quite amazing when one thinks that 100 years have gone by and Bud has charted its own path in America. The malt accent is similar in both and especially that apple-like note which probably comes from the yeast. Budweiser is a more subtle beer but it shares a certain something with the parent beer. (I know the Czechvar brewery started up after Bud became well-established in the U.S. but I believe Czechvar represents a taste that existed before, that Bud sought to emulate when A/B's founder when to 1800's Czechoslovakia to find inspiration for the new beer he wanted to launch in St. Louis).

To those who are skeptical, try fresh samples of the two side-by-side, you may be surprised.

All I know is, when the first taste went down today of Czechvar I had a flashback to those U.S. and Canadian-licensed Buds of 20 years ago.

Gary

[burgermeister]

.... Budweiser is a more subtle beer but it shares a certain something with the parent beer. (I know the Czechvar brewery started up after Bud became well-established in the U.S. but I believe Czechvar represents a taste that existed before, that Bud sought to emulate when A/B's founder when to 1800's Czechoslovakia to find inspiration for the new beer he wanted to launch in St. Louis).

Seems to me Bud tried to rip off more than just the Budweiser name. The shortened version of the Czech name for the town of the brewery is Budweis, hence someone from the town is a Budweiser. The brewery has been around since the 1500s and was at one time known as "The Beer of Flemish Kings", now Bud is the "King of Beers". The beer was hauled thru town way back when on wagons pulled by Cleidsdales (scuse the spelling please). And although Budvar was the original inspiration for American Budweiser, I can find little if any resemblence today between the two beers.

Seems to me I got all that stuff from something I read in a Micheal Jackson book some time ago.

[pootz]

Czechvar is by far the most flavourful and malt accented Czech pilsner in the LCBO. Wonderful stuff for a hot summer day...I felt a loss that I didn't drink as much of it this year as I was busy ploughing through the froth of some fine German hefeweiss that grabbed my attention this summer. There certainly is a variety of east block pilsners appearing in the LCBO but the budvar and Urquell have to be the best.

I agree that they were ripped off for their trade marks by AB, even their logo looks to have been imitated by AB.

http://www.budvar.cz/

[Uncle Bobby]

**Warning -- tangential post.**

The shortened version of the Czech name for the town of the brewery is Budweis, hence someone from the town is a Budweiser.

Sorry to be a stickler, but I did my minor in German language and literature. Although it is true that someone or something from "Budweis" is a "Budweiser", "Budweis" is not a shortening of Budejovice. Budweis was the name used for the town by the former German-speaking inhabitants. The same is true of that other great brewing town Plzen/Pilsen.

Ethnic Germans inhabited towns across Europe from Yugoslavia in the south to Latvia in the north, and in Eastern Europe as far east as the Volga, living alongside "local" populations in polyglot communities. Many had lived there for centuries, and had migrated there for a number of historical reasons. (Uniting ethnic Germans was one of the rationales spurring Germany's invasion of the east under Hitler.) Virtually all Germans left or were compelled to leave after the war as local populations sought revenge for the atrocities inflicted on them by the Nazis, whose onslaught many of the ethnic Germans had welcomed.

Don't look for mention of this on any tourist websites. As you can imagine, even discussing this - let alone trying to resolve any on-going disputes - 60 years after the end of the war in modern Europe is still fraught with huge political and emotional baggage. And you will find very little mention of this aspect of local history today in the Czech Repulic or elsewhere, even though German communities were pervasive and huge. It is thought that anywhere from nine to twelve million ethnic Germans had to leave Eastern Europe at the end of the war in one of history's largest mass migrations.

Recently however the issue has cropped up again with the release of a fictionalized account of this aspect of the war and its aftermath by Guenther Grass ("The Tin Drum") in his new novel "Im Krebsgang"/"Crabwalk". See this article for a good summary of the issues, and sensibilities, surrounding this period of history. http://www.boston.com/news/world/articl ... _passions/ Grass's stated goal in writing the book was to pre-empt German right-wingers from using this period of history for their own parochial (and repugnant) end of equivocating the mass displacement of ethnic Germans with the mass extermination of Jews.

Anyways!...as a result, many of the towns had multiple names depending on the language of the speaker. Belgium, for instance, still has this issue. (E.G. Liège/Luik/Lüttich.) And bigger towns, because they have a greater variety of ethnic groups, have more names. (BTW, Belgium still retains a minority German-speaking population, as does Italy.) Besides Czech and German, the other languages in this region of Central Europe at the time might have included Yiddish, Slovak, Hungarian, Ruthenian, Polish and even Roma.

So "Budweis" is a legacy of the former population of German-speakers who inhabited parts of Bohemia and Moravia, and towns like Prague/Prag/Praha.

Of course the Germans did not only leave a legacy of place names, they also left a legacy of family names. Just ask Robert Reichel and Jaromir Jagr.

Complete tangent. My apologies to other users for interrupting the integrity of the string.

-Uncle Bobby

[old faithful]

Which makes me wonder if Michelob is a Germanic or Slovak or other term.

In the young American Republic the first Busch went to these areas in Europe for inspiration. He took palpably foreign names and used them blithely for his new beers. I find this surprising. Sure, he was addressing an ethnic audience, but only in part, and we musn't forget he intended to make a national-scale beer, the first ever, and succeeded massively in this goal.

I recall once suggesting to Steve Beaumont that Bud and Michelob would be better if A/B used the same ingredients, just more of them (except the water ). Steve said, well, that's not really a compliment to A/B because you would be making something different, it becomes a different drink. Maybe, but I now realise I've found the beer that has in a more concentrated or assertive form what I like in Bud and Michelob: it's called Budweiser Budvar.

Gary

[Uncle Bobby]

Which makes me wonder if Michelob is a Germanic or Slovak or other term.

The amateur word-sleuth in me suspects "Michelob" could be a version of the Slavic surname which is rendered in Russian as Mikhailov, or "Michaels" in English.

In the young American Republic the first Busch went to these areas in Europe for inspiration. He took palpably foreign names and used them blithely for his new beers. I find this surprising. Sure, he was addressing an ethnic audience, but only in part, and we musn't forget he intended to make a national-scale beer, the first ever, and succeeded massively in this goal.
Gary

Although it does not surprise me that the German-sounding names for many American breweries were appropriated rather than being founded by ethnic Germans, I also understand (on the say-so of one of my old profs, i.e. entirely anecdotal information) that many American breweries come by their German names honestly.

In the middle of the 19th century, there was an abortive revolution against the petty, regional monarchs of Germany. It was quickly crushed for a number of reasons.
http://www.germany-info.org/relaunch/cu ... /1848.html

However as a result, a concentrated wave of Germans left for America in the next decade seeking political freedom and new opportunities. To a large extent they settled the mid-west, the area between the Rockies and the Appalachians, land just being settled at that time. Their legacy is the resulting band of German brewery names across mid-western America.

See the attached page from the German embassy in Washington for a look at German influence in the American brewing industry. http://www.germany-info.org/relaunch/in ... arons.html

My only caveat is to keep in mind that German borders were a pretty elastic thing until the late 19thC. In fact, largely there was no "Germany", just a series of middle-European statelets containing German-speaking populations of varying proportions. Many Germans discussed here would have been from outside of the land that we now consider Germany proper.

-Uncle Bobby

[old faithful]

Excellent information, thanks. I guess what I meant in relation to the beer names from Europe adopted by brewers in the U.S. was, they felt confident to do so, they (who were German-Americans) were not abashed to affirm their heritage, they did so naturally, and the results became (ultimately) part of the warp and woof of Americana. They did in their way what British-North American brewers (e.g., Molson, or Scotch-Irish Brewing or Wellington County) did, what felt right for them, and their customers liked it, those in their ethnic orbit and outside.

That is the way it should be. Everyone adds their stamp, and no one can say it is not American or Canadian or whatever, it will become Canadian or American if people like it enough. The last thing (believe me) people of my background, Jewish-Canadian, wanted to do was make bagels or (say) smoked meat an emblem of Montreal foodways - it just happened, they sold them to make a living but people in and outside our community liked it enough to take notice. Who knew?

My interest in British- and German-derived beer styles is an example of this in reverse.

Gary Gillman

[Mississauga Matt]

The last thing (believe me) people of my background, Jewish-Canadian, wanted to do was make bagels or (say) smoked meat an emblem of Montreal foodways ...

I'm just damned glad they did.

Fairmount and St.-Viateur for bagels, Schwartz's and The Main for smoked meat. ... now that's living!

[old faithful]

Which brings up the question what beer goes well with a smoked meat. I'd say a St-Ambroise Pale Ale or a Griffon Pale.

As for bagels, that's easy: Mike Hancock's Wheat Beer!

Gary

[pootz]

Just quaffed a fairly fresh Czechvar with home made pizza tonight and it seemed to pair as nicely with this malty Pils as did bar-bq steaks last summer...pretty versitile brew.