Six centuries of brewing, old traditions and a brewery that still isn’t afraid to try something new.
Article 002
STRAHOV MONASTERY BREWERY
1400 First brewing record
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2001 Brewing returns
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2020 “One Last Beer”
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TODAY Tradition continues
At Strahov, history doesn’t sit quietly in the background.
It appears in a 600-year-old lease, in a bell that still rings during the brewing process, and in recipes that reach into the past without trying to recreate it exactly.
Brewing here has disappeared and returned. Traditions have survived. New beers have emerged from unlikely ideas — including lockdown boredom and one experiment the brewers privately nicknamed sausage water.
Strahov has plenty of history.
What makes it interesting is that it is still being written.
It starts with a fat hare
The earliest surviving written record of brewing at Strahov dates to 1400.
A Lesser Town burgher named Petr leased the brewery from the Strahov monastery. His annual rent was four score Prague groschen, one pound of pepper and one fat hare.
The arrangement was surprisingly precise. Money was paid twice a year. Pepper — a valuable imported commodity — had its own designated payment date. The hare arrived at Christmas.
According to the monastery researchers who studied the document, the hare may have been more than payment. It may also have found its way to the monastery table, where matters concerning the lease could be discussed over a meal.
More than six centuries later, there is an unexpected parallel.
Strahov Brewery is still privately operated in leased historic buildings.
Only the rent — and the way it is paid — has changed a little.
The centuries between have been less straightforward.
The brewery lived through wars, damage by Swedish troops and the great fire of 1697. Eventually, historic brewing at Strahov disappeared altogether.
Then, after almost a century of silence, brewing returned in 2001.
A year later came the Prague floods. The brewery itself escaped the water, but Prague almost came to a standstill and visitors disappeared. Years later, Covid brought another empty city and another test for hospitality.
When the Strahov team talks about this history, they connect it with the man whose name has long been associated with the brewery: Saint Norbert.
According to tradition, the young Norbert was knocked from his horse by lightning during a storm. He survived, abandoned the comfortable life he had known and chose an entirely different path — one that eventually led to the foundation of the Premonstratensian Order.
His remains now rest at Strahov.
Different centuries, different setbacks, but a familiar instinct:
Get back up. Begin again. Keep going.
The bell still rings
When brewing returned to Strahov, not everything from the old world had disappeared.
There is a bell inside the brewery.
At a particular moment in the brewing process, when the finished wort leaves the brewhouse, someone rings it. The brewer says:
“Spánembohem.”
May it go with God.
Once, the bell had a practical job. Brewing meant moving large quantities of very hot liquid, and its sound warned everyone nearby to pay attention.
The words belonged to another uncertainty.
Brewers had worked with yeast for centuries before they understood what it actually was. They knew from experience that it transformed wort into beer, but not that living microorganisms were responsible for fermentation.
So when the wort left the brewhouse, the brewer had reached the limit of what he could control.
From there:
Spánembohem.
Today, fermentation is measured, monitored and understood down to details those brewers could never have imagined.
The bell still rings.
It lasts only a few seconds.
Six centuries of brewing history can sometimes fit into a moment that small.
One Last Beer
Fast-forward to 2020.
The brewery is empty.
Covid has shut down hospitality, nobody knows quite when normal life will return, and brewer Jan Martinka and the team are tired of waiting.
So they decide to find out just how far they can push their equipment.
How strong a beer can this brewhouse actually make?
They settle on a Triple IPA.
The original gravity reaches 24° Plato. The finished beer will eventually sit around 10% ABV.
The brewhouse, however, has other ideas.
There is so much malt that the filter bed repeatedly compacts until the wort can barely pass through. Lautering — normally a fraction of the work — stretches almost through the entire night.
The beer was meant to be an experiment. Something brewed during a strange period when nobody even knew when they would next be able to sit down with guests and share a drink.
They called it One Last Beer.
Then something unexpected happened.
People loved it.
The lockdown experiment became a recurring Strahov beer, returning long after the empty brewery that created it had filled with people again.
Sometimes brewing history begins with centuries of tradition.
Sometimes it begins because two people are bored.
The one they called “sausage water”
Strahov’s curiosity has also taken the brewery much further backwards.
For Poutní Grätzer, the team looked to Grodziskie — an almost forgotten Polish beer style with roots stretching back centuries.
Traditionally, it is a very light, highly carbonated wheat beer brewed with smoked malt. It has even earned the nickname Polish Champagne.
Strahov didn’t want to make a museum-piece reconstruction.
They used wheat malt smoked over oak, added Nelson Sauvin Cryo hops with their distinctive white-wine character, and introduced a small amount of saffron.
The saffron wasn’t there simply to make the recipe unusual. Saffron, hops, grapevines and citrus were historically associated with Strahov’s monastery gardens, with saffron cultivation in the abbot’s garden documented as far back as the 17th century.
On paper, it made sense.
Then they tasted the beer from the tank.
Smoke. Wheat. Young beer.
The brewers gave it an unofficial working name:
“Sausage water.”
They waited.
Weeks passed. The smoke softened. The flavours began to settle into one another. Nelson Sauvin’s fresh, wine-like character emerged.
What had initially frightened them became a light, dry and refreshing beer.
Then came the second surprise.
People liked it — far more than the brewery had expected for such an unusual style.
A beer several centuries old had found a new audience.
Not by pretending nothing had changed since it was first brewed, but by accepting that everything had.
“Even a beer style several hundred years old can work for today’s drinker if you give it a slightly more modern interpretation.”
From drinking to tasting
For all the history and experimentation, one of the most interesting things Strahov told us was much simpler.
When we asked about misconceptions surrounding Czech craft beer, they didn’t point to a particular style or ingredient.
They talked about how we drink.
Czechia has an extraordinary beer culture. But beer is still often approached as something consumed by the half-litre — sometimes several of them — rather than something explored with the same curiosity we might give wine, coffee or whisky.
Strahov would like to see that shift, even slightly:
from consumption toward tasting.
Notice the aroma.
The texture.
The bitterness and malt.
The acidity. The yeast.
Even what happens to the flavour as the beer gets warmer.
Nobody needs to spend twenty minutes analysing every glass.
Just pay a little more attention.
That answer stayed with us at CHEERS!.
Because discovery isn’t about drinking more beer.
It’s about making the beer we choose to drink mean a little more.
Opening something we haven’t tried before. Knowing who made it. Understanding why it tastes the way it does. Sharing it with someone. Remembering the place, the conversation or the evening around it.
Sometimes, one bottle is enough to take you somewhere you weren’t expecting.
Perhaps to a monastery brewery in 1400, where rent is being paid with pepper and a Christmas hare.
Perhaps to an empty brewhouse during lockdown, where someone has decided 10% alcohol sounds like a reasonable challenge.
Or perhaps just to the person sitting across the table from you.
Strahov has centuries of history to draw from.
But when we asked what they wanted visitors to remember after leaving, their answer wasn’t about being old.
They don’t want to be a museum.
They want Czech beer and gastronomic culture to remain alive, contemporary and honest.
And the ideal result?
Someone finishes their beer, leaves Strahov and thinks:
“I’d like to taste that again.”
After more than six centuries, that may be all the reason a brewing story needs to continue.
THE CHEERS! QUESTION
If you could share a beer with anyone — past or present — who would it be?
Tom Waits.
“I don’t think we’d even have to talk very much. He’d mumble something incomprehensible in that gravelly voice of his, I’d perhaps nod every now and then, and we’d simply drink beer.”
And that would be quite enough.
Explore August Collection
Six carefully selected Czech craft beers, chosen to be shared and enjoyed.
