The most common type of beer in the world is Pilsner, and today we visited the brewery that originated the beer. Pilsner Urquell Brewery has been brewing beer in Pilsen since 1842 when all of the people with brewing licenses in town decided to consolidate beer brewing in one location. They hired a German brewer from Munich to start up the new brewery and cold brewed Pilsner style beer was founded here.
Today the brewery is a major industrial site capable of producing 880,000 bottles of beer per day. We have toured breweries before, but they were microbreweries. This is the first time we had visited a modern macro brewery.
We had signed up for a tour at 12:30 and decided to drive over. The weather is still unstable, and it rained overnight, and once in the morning. Today was a little better than yesterday, as there was more periods of sun than rain and the high was around 45 degrees.
The tour was led by a local medical student who does these tours to work his way thru college. He was very knowledgeable and had a good sense of humor. Besides providing us with the history of the brewery, he was full of facts about the capacities of the brewery, and their worldwide distribution.
They have 9 kilometers of tunnels under the brewery which in the past were used for production of the beer, as pilsner requires periods of cold storage as part of the process. Some of the tunnels were used for the cold production, and some was used for storage. Today the cold production is done using modern refrigerated equipment to control the temperature exactly, so the caves are empty.
It was an extensive and interesting tour and we enjoyed ourselves. It ended as all good brewery tours do with a sample of unfiltered, and unpasteurized beer. The beer was quite good. While all of the beer sold as Pilsner Urquell in the world is produced here, the company is now owned by Asahi Brewery in Japan, so they do bottle other products at the plant.
After we finished the tour we headed to the town center for a visit. Our target was the synagogue which is the third largest in Europe. We have seen other synagogues in Europe and they are usually understated because of the complicated history of Christian/Jewish relationships. This synagogue is one of the most prominent buildings in Pilsen.
The synagogue in Pilsen was built in the 1890’s. It is a beautiful building inside and out. We were the only visitors while we were inside so we were able to enjoy the interior and look at architectural details.
Unfortunately, Czechoslovakia was the first country conquered by the Nazi’s in WWII so the Jewish population of Pilsen was decimated. Less than 100 Jews from Pilsen returned to the city after WWII so the synagogue fell into disrepair during the communist era.
In the late 1990’s funds were provided to restore the synagogue to its past glory. The restoration was beautifully done and the interior of the synagogue is striking. Unfortunately the Jewish community in Pilsen is still quite small so services are held in a smaller building. Today the main synagogue is also used to host concerts as well as being preserved as a memorial to the past.
While we were touring the synagogue it had rained pretty hard, but the rain let up just as we left. We decided it was time to head back, we wanted to stop at a Lidl near the campground, but when we got there we could not find a place to park François, so we decided to try again tomorrow.
