Serving custom · Bohemia, Pilsen
The Czech pour
Czech bars treat foam as part of the drink rather than as waste, and a side-pull tap lets the person pouring decide how much of it you get.
The equipment comes first. A Czech side-pull faucet has a lever-operated valve and a short nozzle, and it can be opened partially to throw dense wet foam or opened fully to run clear beer beneath it. That makes the ratio of beer to foam a deliberate setting rather than an accident of technique, which is not true of a standard forward-pull tap.
Three named pours describe the settings. A hladinka is the standard: clear beer under a thick standing head, roughly three fingers of foam, which is what you get if you order a beer without saying anything. A šnyt is a smaller measure of beer under a much larger head — the brewery specifies two parts beer to three parts foam with a gap at the top — and is drunk when a full glass would be too much. A mlíko, "milk", is a glass filled almost entirely with wet foam over a little beer; it is sweet, soft and low in bitterness because the foam concentrates the proteins and strips the hop character.
The foam is doing real work. A dense wet head is not the same substance as the beer beneath it — it is protein- and polyphenol-rich, sweeter and less bitter — and it seals the surface so the beer below stays carbonated and does not oxidise while you drink it. That is why a Czech head is expected to last the length of the glass rather than collapsing in the first minute.
How old this is deserves care. Pouring with attention to foam is genuinely long-established Czech practice; the three names as a fixed, marketed set are substantially a modern formalisation, promoted from the 2010s by Pilsner Urquell and by the Prague restaurant groups that trained tapsters in it. Both things are true, and a page that says only the first is repeating a brand’s framing as folklore.
The three pours, to scale
Hladinka
HLAD-in-ka
The standard. Clear beer under about three fingers of dense head.
Šnyt
shnit
Two parts beer to three parts foam, with space left above. A short measure.
Mlíko
MLEE-ko
“Milk” — wet foam almost to the top. Sweet, soft and drunk at once.
How it works
Wet the glass
The glass is rinsed and left wet. A wet interior lowers surface friction so the beer runs rather than nucleating against a dry wall, which is what allows a controlled head rather than a random one.
Open the tap fully for beer
Held at an angle with the valve fully open, the faucet delivers clear beer to the required level.
Throttle the valve for foam
Partially closing the side-pull lever shears the beer as it passes, producing dense wet foam on demand. This is the step a standard forward tap cannot do controllably.
Set the ratio
Hladinka: clear beer with about three fingers of head. Šnyt: two parts beer, three parts foam, and some empty glass above. Mlíko: wet foam nearly to the top over a little beer.
Serve immediately
A mlíko in particular is drunk at once — it is foam, and it collapses into an ordinary small beer if left standing.
What it does
BeerHQ’s rule for anything ritual: name the mechanism or say it is convention. These are the mechanisms.
- Foam is chemically distinct from the beer under it: it concentrates proteins and is markedly less bitter and sweeter, which is why a mlíko tastes nothing like the same beer poured flat.
- A standing head seals the surface, slowing both carbonation loss and oxidation over the time it takes to drink the glass.
- A wet glass wall reduces nucleation against the glass, so the head that forms is the one the pourer created rather than one the glass caused.
What you will hear
- hladinkaHLAD-in-ka
- The standard pour: clear beer under a dense head of roughly three fingers. What you get if you simply order a beer.
- šnytshnit
- A short measure — around two parts beer to three parts foam, with space left at the top. Ordered when a full glass is too much.
- mlíkoMLEE-ko
- Literally "milk". A glass of wet foam over a little beer, sweet and soft, drunk immediately.
- tankové pivoTAN-ko-veh PIH-vo
- Tank beer: unpasteurised beer delivered to a cellar tank at the bar rather than kegged, and served under air pressure through a bag rather than by gas contact.
What people get wrong
A big head means the bartender short-changed you.
In a Czech bar the head is part of the specified serve and the glass is sized for it. A hladinka in a 0.5 litre glass is a 0.5 litre serve as the house defines it; if you want more liquid and less foam you can ask, and asking is unremarkable.
The three named pours are an ancient Czech tradition.
Careful, foam-conscious pouring in Czech bars is long established. The three fixed names promoted as a set are a much more recent codification, pushed from the 2010s by Pilsner Urquell and Prague restaurant groups. That does not make them fake — it makes them modern, which is a different and more accurate thing to say.
Mlíko is just a badly poured beer.
It is deliberately almost all foam, and it tastes measurably different from the beer beneath — sweeter and much less bitter, because foam concentrates protein and strips hop bitterness. It is drunk immediately, as a small sweet thing, rather than as a substitute for a beer.
Questions
Why do Czech beers have so much foam?
Because the foam is treated as part of the drink. A dense wet head is protein-rich, sweeter and less bitter than the beer under it, and it seals the surface so the beer keeps its carbonation while you drink. Czech side-pull taps let the person pouring control the head deliberately, so the amount of foam is a choice rather than a mistake.
What is a hladinka?
The standard Czech pour: clear beer beneath a dense head of about three fingers. It is what arrives if you order a beer in a Czech bar without specifying anything else.
What is mlíko?
Czech for "milk" — a glass filled almost entirely with wet beer foam over a small amount of beer, which is why it looks like a glass of milk. It is sweet and soft rather than bitter, because foam concentrates proteins and leaves hop bitterness behind, and it is drunk immediately before it collapses.
What is a side-pull tap?
A faucet with a side-mounted lever whose valve can be held partly open, shearing the beer as it passes and producing dense foam on demand. Opening it fully gives clear beer. That single control is what makes the Czech pours possible; a standard forward-pull tap cannot dose foam the same way.
Where it is practised
- Bohemia
The western Czech region whose soft water, Saaz hops and decoction brewing produced the world’s first pale lager.
- Pilsen
A Bohemian town that dumped its own beer in the street in protest, hired a Bavarian brewer, and in 1842 produced a golden lager that within fifty years had become what most of the world means by the word beer.
The beers it is performed on
Connected
The room: Hospoda
The dispense: Tank beer
Last reviewed 2026-08-29.
Evidence
What BeerHQ knows about this, and how. Every statement carries the state of the evidence behind it rather than being presented flatly as fact.
How old the three named Czech pours are as a fixed set is genuinely contested: careful foam-conscious pouring in Czech bars is long established, but the codified three-name scheme is substantially a modern promotion.
— The three pours are a long-standing Czech tapster tradition that the brewery has documented and popularised.
— Foam-conscious pouring is old, but the fixed three-name set is a recent codification promoted from the 2010s by Pilsner Urquell and Prague restaurant groups, and is not attested as a settled scheme before that.
The practical difficulty is that almost every source describing the named set traces back to the brewery or to its partners, which is a weak evidential position for a claim of antiquity. BeerHQ therefore presents both readings and states on the page that the names are modern, which is the part it can support.
Genuinely contested Credible sources disagree, so both positions are given rather than one.
Source: Pilsner Urquell, "Foam is flavour: three Pilsner Urquell pours", the brewery’s own framing of the three pours
Pilsner Urquell specifies three pours: a hladinka of clear beer under roughly three fingers of foam, a šnyt of two parts beer to three parts foam with space above, and a mlíko of wet foam over a small amount of beer.
Backed by a source
Source: Pilsner Urquell, "Foam is flavour: three Pilsner Urquell pours", the three pours described on the page