The death isn’t final (and given the history of this place, who knows?), but all signs point to this being the end of a chapter at a minimum.

The Beer

Hlavsa made very unusual beer. The standards were 10° and 12° svetle pivos. They also made two strong dark lagers. The regular lagers were extremely thick and stiff in hopping, effectively the most exaggerated versions of Czech beer out there. Hlavsa, who’d started at Pilsner Urquell in the 1960s (if memory serves), did standard triple decoction, but also used a dash of caramel malt for color, which really blew my mind when I heard about it back on a visit in 2014 organized by Mark Dredge. It was quite a tour, including Good Beer Hunting’s Michael Kiser and Jonny Garrett, who was not yet too deeply into his YouTube project the Craft Beer Channel. (Here’s a vid he did of Kout 12.)

Evan Rail was translating, and he’d been sitting on that info for years. I have a sense he sort of guided me to ask about it because it was so unusual. From there the beer got a two-hour boil and three hop additions. Hlavsa used first wort hopping, as is widely practiced, so the first addition was in the kettle when the boil started. He did two more additions at 45-minute intervals, so the last addition was a half hour before flameout. He used tons of Saaz hops, and you could really tell how long-boiling gave an unusual stiffness to the bittering. From there he used open fermentation and very long lagering times. All of this, he told us, was purely traditional brewing like he was taught decades ago. Needless to say, a lot of that is no longer standard practice.