Zíchovec Brewery: Family Beer from a Former Tank Firing Range
On the southern edge of Louny, the army used to test tank ammunition. Today beer barrels age in the grounds of that former firing range and barracks, the bar is welded together from tank tracks, and the old command tower serves as a lookout.
Zíchovec is a family brewery and one of the most distinctive names in craft beer in Czechia: alongside classic lagers it brews IPAs, stouts and specials aged in wine and spirit barrels. I didn't first run into it in Louny, though - it came my way as a stand-in for a Christmas party that covid had canceled.
The Husák Family and the Village of Zíchovec
The brewery inherited its name from Zíchovec, a village of a few dozen people on the border between the regions around Kladno and Louny. Ivan Husák, a former co-owner of Linet, the hospital bed maker, had the idea of brewing his own beer back in 2010 - out of sheer dissatisfaction with the taste of the standardized stuff, as the family tells it. From the start, though, the plan went beyond a brewhouse: a new village green, a guesthouse, a shop and a chapel, so that the brewery would bring the place back to life. The family split the roles up in their own way: mother Jana ran the guesthouse, son Ondra brews, son Honza sells, and the father oversaw it all and paid for it. The first batch was racked in the fall of 2012.
Why the Lager Is Called Krahulík and the Special Magor
The village brewhouse soon couldn't keep up with demand, so in 2016 production moved to Louny, into that former tank firing range. The family didn't pick the opening date at random: March 18, exactly 120 years after the birth of Josef Krahulík, a Zíchovec native, mayor and publican, who gave his name to the twelve-degree pale lager (twelve degrees by the Czech scale of original gravity). The strong amber special, in turn, took its name from the reaction the family got to their plan: "You're out of your mind." So two of the three mainstays got their names straight from the family chronicle. The bitter Hotline is the only one whose name nobody explains anywhere - and I couldn't track down an explanation either.
Port Barrels and 130 Beers a Year
The brewery's signature move is aging beer in wooden barrels - the first one, as the brewery tells it, had held port wine, and the cellar has seen barrels from wines and spirits ever since. To be fair, some fifty microbreweries in Czechia age beer in wood these days; Zíchovec didn't invent it - it's just that hardly anyone does it across such a range. Around 130 different beers are made here every year, output holds steady at around 12,000 hectoliters, and the beer ships to more than twenty countries. The brewery's own canning line meanwhile fills cans for competing microbreweries too. And there will soon be more of that: the brewery wants to phase bottles out.
You can pick up the core range in supermarkets, in the online shop and in pubs. For the specials, though, you have to make the trip: they are made in small batches, often never reach regular distribution at all, and your surest bet is the brewery restaurant and shop right there in the Louny grounds - the view from the old command tower is included. And the newest line, called Drink And Drive, shows where the brewery is headed: an alcohol-free beer that would fare better at a roadside check than its name does. Beer consumption is falling worldwide, and while Svijany stands by the classic unpasteurized lager, in Louny they're hopping water too.
Three Bottles from the Wholesaler
I usually pick up my Zíchovec at Makro, the wholesale store. A 700 ml bottle runs about 100 CZK (4 EUR), which is steep for a beer - except that the flavor and the bite convince me every time that the price is justified. My favorite is the assertively bitter West Coast IPA called Hotline: resin, grapefruit peel and a dry finish that lasts. Next to it, Krahulík is a clean, crisp lager with no tricks, and Magor a sweeter caramel affair whose fifteen degrees you notice before you finish the glass. I like to alternate them with specials from Matuška, whose draft version you'll run into on the Prague Beer Zoo circuit. And if the names of the Zíchovec beers prove anything, it's that "you're out of your mind" gets said now and then to people who know exactly what they are doing.
Pivovar Zíchovec
