Lately I’ve been telling them I’m not sure in either case.

They ask because I wrote a 16,000-word essay about Pivovar Kout na Šumavě in which I tried to uncover the brewery’s secrets. (And I say this in all honesty: I failed.) After falling in love with Kout’s two extremely charismatic and rather hoppy Pale Lagers, as well as its two rich and mysterious Dark Lagers, I traveled out to the brewery in remote western Bohemia three times in an attempt to see the brewing book of legend with my own eyes and find out more about the place.