Svijany Brewery: Unpasteurized Beer from the Jizera Valley
The English brewing group Bass had a simple plan for the brewery in Svijany back in the 1990s: shut it down. The place was turning out 43,000 hectoliters a year at the time, and from London that looked like a line item you could cross off. Luckily, nobody crossed it off.
Today the Svijany brewery, sitting in a village in the Jizera river valley, puts out more than 600,000 hectoliters a year, which makes it the largest independent, wholly Czech-owned brewery in the country - and its bottles, with the year 1564 on the label, sit on the shelves of every other supermarket.
The Village of Sviňany, a Lord Without a Head, and a Family from Liberec
Every label carries the year 1564. That is when the brewery first shows up in writing - it was granted brewing rights as part of a fort that Adam of Vartemberk was building as an inheritance for his son. No document says when beer was actually first brewed here, so the brewery sticks to the first written mention and says so. The name of the village is older than the brewery, and as the story goes, it was originally Sviňany, from svině, a sow - after the herds of pigs the local monks kept. There is no proof of it, but there is something charming about a premium beer coming out of a former pig village. And the history gets better still: one of the Svijany beers is called Šlik, after Jáchym Ondřej Šlik, who owned the estate in the early 17th century. In 1621 he was the first of the 27 Czech lords executed on Old Town Square in Prague. Not many beer labels carry the name of a man the state beheaded.
The modern chapter is every bit as dramatic, it just ended better. When Bass wanted to close the place down through Pražské pivovary, František Horák, then the director and for many years the brewmaster, negotiated a buyout - and in 1998 the brewery passed to LIF, the Kučera family business from Liberec. Output has grown almost fifteenfold since then, and Svijany now brew more beer than the better-known Bernard. The brewery is run by the founder's son, Tomáš Kučera. Oddly enough, the brand has kept its reputation as a small country brewery, even though its volumes now put it alongside the industrial giants rather than the microbreweries.
Why Svijany Beer Never Sees a Pasteurizer
The thing that sets Svijany apart is invisible, but you can taste it. Pasteurization heats beer briefly so it will keep for months on the shelf - and some of the flavor is left behind in the process. Svijany skip pasteurization across the entire range, so their beer tastes closer to what comes straight from a brewery cellar, and the trade-off is a shorter shelf life. Which is why it pays to buy it fresh and not leave a bottle standing on the windowsill for a month. The brewery grows some of its own hops in the Žatec region, the home of Saaz hops, and for its Zámek beer it has revived kroužkování, the old Czech technique English-speaking brewers call krausening: the lager finishes fermenting with a shot of fresh wort stirred into it. Svijany did not invent it - that is how beer used to be made ready for winter at mountain chalets - but they have turned their ancestors' logistical fix into a specialty.
A Noble Court in Bottles and a Shelf of Medals
The range is put together like a household at a chateau: Rytíř (the Knight), Kníže (the Duke), Kněžna (the Duchess), Baron (the Baron), plus Máz as the best-selling member of the retinue and Vozka (the Coachman), who stays off the drink altogether. The biggest haul of trophies goes to the dark Svijanská Kněžna, which has taken both the Pivo České republiky title, the Beer of the Czech Republic, and the Zlatá pivní pečeť, the Golden Beer Seal, and to the alcohol-free Vozka; most recently the strong Baron added a gold at the World Beer Awards 2025. Beer competitions work much like film festivals - there are plenty of prizes to go around and every brewery puts its own on display - but twenty years of repeated wins in front of different juries cannot be put down to luck. Compared with craft breweries such as Zíchovec or Matuška, Svijany play a different game: no experiments with IPAs, just classic Czech bottom-fermented lagers, and you can buy them without hunting down a specialist beer shop.
A Weizen from the Shop Around the Corner
I worked my way through the Svijany range with a tasting pack. The one that ends up on my table most often is, oddly enough, the least Czech of them all. Weizen, the only top-fermented beer they make, smells of banana and clove and goes down soft, with no sharp bitterness - the kind of wheat beer you would otherwise drive to Bavaria for. This site is otherwise full of beers you have to get on a plane for. For my favorite wheat beer, I walk.
Pivovar Svijany
