As the last post in Homebrew Week, I offer you a complete chapter from The Secrets of Master Brewers. Whether you brew at home or not, this chapter will give you the sense of this book and what you'll find inside. It's great for homebrewers or people just interested in fully understanding beer styles. If you enjoy it, go buy the whole book.

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Almost all serious beer fans know that pilsners came from Plzeň (Pilsen) in Bohemia. It is the world’s most famous style and is imitated in greater or lesser ways in every country that makes beer. What they are less familiar with are the světlý ležáks and světlé výčepnís — pale lagers — as they are made and consumed in their homeland. From a great distance all Czech pilsners look alike. If pressed, drinkers might admit that hoppy Pilsner Urquell, with its very round body and dollop of diacetyl, isn’t actually that much like the drier Budvar, with its subtle kiss of bitterness. But eh, really, they're yellow and fizzy and mostly all the same, right?

If you spend time in more than a couple of Czech pubs, however, it quickly dawns on you that this is completely wrong. Let me offer an analogy by way of thought experiment. Put your mind on hoppy American IPAs, which from a great distance also appear a lot alike. Now imagine the perspective of a foreign beer drinker — a Czech, say — who believes he understands the style well enough because he has ready access to Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA and New Belgium Ranger. Would you say he has an adequate understanding of American IPAs based on his sample of two beers? This is why knowing Pilsner Urquell and Budweiser Budvar does not give you a complete sense of světlý ležák.

The truth is that within the confines of just a few ingredients breweries have managed to create beers with a range nearly as broad as American IPAs. I have had the good fortune of visiting the Czech Republic twice on fact-finding missions (both in pubs and breweries) and have come to marvel at the differences in some of my favorite pivos: Únětické 12°, with its rustic haze and electric hops; creamy Pilsner Urquell, the unfiltered version of which is a revelation; thick, very stiff Kout na Šumavě, a beer some say is the best in the world; Na Rychtě Mazel, which slyly hides its luxurious honeylike malts behind a wall of Saaz; and the mysteriously deep golden U Tří růží Světlý Ležák, which seems to have a touch of stone fruit on the palate.

Because the ingredients, beer to beer, are so similar, these differences come largely from technique. Whether breweries are using double or triple decoctions, long boils, open fermentation, extra-long maturations (or shortened ones), filtering or not filtering — all these choices shape the flavors each brewery wants. If you don’t have the opportunity to visit Prague and taste these beers yourself, you can at least experiment with brewing methods and see how varied they can be made at home.