Brewing city · Czechia
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 beer that was poured away
The story starts with a failure. Plzeň's burghers held communal brewing rights, and by the 1830s the beer produced under them was bad enough that barrels were reportedly dumped in front of the town hall in protest. The response was institutional rather than incremental: the rights-holders built a new common brewery and hired a Bavarian brewer, Josef Groll, to run it.
What Groll had that Plzeň had not was cold-fermentation technique, and what Plzeň had that Bavaria had not was exceptionally soft water and pale malt kilned in the English indirect manner. The first brew, in 1842, was pale, clear, golden and bottom-fermented, and there had not previously been a beer that looked like that.
The timing mattered as much as the recipe. Cheap glassware was arriving in ordinary pubs at exactly the moment somebody made a beer worth looking at, and rail was arriving to carry it. A golden beer in a dark pot is nothing; a golden beer in a glass, in a city an overnight train away, is a category.
Why it worked, technically
Plzeň's water is extremely soft — very low in carbonate and sulphate alike — which is the opposite of Burton's and about as favourable as water gets for a pale, delicately hopped beer. Hard water accentuates bitterness harshly; Plzeň's lets a large quantity of Saaz hop read as soft and floral rather than as a hard bite.
Add pale malt made possible by indirect kilning, decoction mashing that develops a rounded malt character, Saaz hops from Žatec to the north, and months of cold conditioning, and the result is a beer with nothing hidden in it. Every element is exposed, which is why the style is so unforgiving of a careless brewer and why so much of what is called pilsner elsewhere is not very good.
The name became a problem almost immediately, because everyone copied it. The brewery adopted Prazdroj — "original source", Urquell in German — precisely to distinguish itself from beers using the town's name, and the word pilsner has long since escaped into generic use for pale lager worldwide.
What is still there
The Plzeň brewery kept things that a plant of its scale had every commercial reason to drop, and it kept them partly as reference. Open fermentation vessels and oak lagering barrels in the sandstone cellars beneath the site are maintained alongside the modern production line, and beer is still made in them, so that the modern beer can be checked against beer made the old way.
The cellars themselves run for kilometres under the town, cut into sandstone, and were the reason cold lagering was practical there before refrigeration. Unfiltered, unpasteurised beer drawn from the wooden barrels below is the version most worth seeking out, and it is a noticeably different drink from the packaged one.
Plzeň is a working industrial town rather than a beer theme park, and the brewery dominates it in the way a single large employer dominates a small city. That is part of the honest picture: this is a factory that changed the world, not a heritage site that happens to make beer.
The houses
Named because of what each one explains about the place, not as a directory. Every entry states whether it is currently operating and when BeerHQ last checked.
How the beer is served here
Where it is drunk
What you will hear
- PrazdrojPRAZ-droy
- Czech for "original source" — Urquell in German. Adopted by the brewery to distinguish itself from the many beers using the town's name.
- ležákLEH-zhahk
- The Czech term for a lager of around 11–12° Plato, which is the standard everyday strength.
- stupněSTOOP-nyeh
- Degrees Plato — Czech beers are described by gravity ("desítka", "dvanáctka") rather than by alcohol.
How it got here
- 1839The burghers build a new brewery
Dissatisfaction with the beer produced under Plzeň's communal brewing rights leads the rights-holders to found a common brewery and recruit outside expertise.
- 1842The first pale lager
Josef Groll brews the first batch: pale, golden, clear and bottom-fermented, made possible by soft Plzeň water, indirectly kilned pale malt and Bohemian cold-fermentation cellars. Full record.
- 1869Gambrinus founded
A second large brewery on the same site, which becomes the country's volume beer.
- 1898The Prazdroj name registered
"Original source" is adopted to distinguish the brewery from the many imitators already using the town's name.
Why it matters to beer
Pilsen water is among the softest used in commercial brewing, with very low mineral content across the board. Combined with pale malt and Saaz hops, it produced a beer whose clarity and colour were startling at the time — and which coincided with mass-produced glassware making that appearance visible to drinkers for the first time.
Pilsner escaped its origin almost immediately and is now the most widely brewed beer style on earth — the word is generic in most markets. Plzeň is the historical source rather than the holder of an exclusive claim, and the brewery adopted the name Prazdroj, "original source", precisely because it could not stop the copying.
What people get wrong
Pilsner was the first lager.
Bottom-fermented brewing in Bavaria long predates 1842. What was new in Plzeň was a lager that was pale and clear — the combination of Bavarian cold fermentation with English-style pale malt and exceptionally soft water.
Pilsner Urquell is the only real pilsner.
It is the original. The word escaped into generic use almost immediately and now covers pale lagers worldwide; the brewery adopted "Prazdroj" — original source — because it could not prevent that.
Styles from here
Beers brewed here
Breweries
Connected
Brewing traditions: Bohemian pale lager brewing
Glassware: Pilsner glass
The water
Among the softest brewing water in the world, with almost no mineral content — the reason a heavily-hopped pale lager tastes rounded rather than harsh.
Water is shown here as a property of the place rather than as the reason its beer turned out the way it did. The correlation between a city’s water and its style is real; the causal story is more contingent than it is usually told, and BeerHQ treats it as contested. See Pilsen water.
Where to go next
Elsewhere in the country
Last reviewed 2026-08-15.