Budějovický Budvar

Budějovický Budvar is a brewery on the northern edge of České Budějovice that has been in court with the Americans for over a hundred years over one word, Budweiser — and their trademark is nineteen years older than the Budějovice brewery. How that is possible you will read below. First, though, what awaits you at Budvar.

Budvar belongs to the state and brews on a large scale: according to the guides, one brew kettle holds a hundred and twenty thousand beers, and in a single day around a million and a half are made here. More than two thirds leave for abroad, to roughly seventy-five countries — and yet everything is brewed only here. Brewery director Petr Dvořák puts it that every drop of Budvar you buy anywhere in the world today was made in České Budějovice. The brewery refuses to brew it abroad under licence, because its greatest value, according to the director, is precisely its origin.

The pale lager people come for is brewed for ten hours and then matures for ninety days in the lager cellars, where the temperature is held around two degrees. The water is from its own artesian wells three hundred metres deep and is treated only with sand filters. The hops are Žatec Saaz and go into the kettle as dried cones, not granules. On the tour you pass the brewhouse and cellars and at the end taste unfiltered lager straight from the tank — according to underbrewer Petr Košin the beer tastes best right in the cellar.

And Budweiser is not an invented brand: Budweis is the German name of České Budějovice and Budweiser simply means “of Budějovice”. But the same name also belongs to the beer that Anheuser-Busch brews in St. Louis in the United States, today part of the world’s largest brewing group.

What it is about, in two sentences

There are two beers in the world that share almost the same name. One is brewed in České Budějovice; the other in St. Louis in the United States by Anheuser-Busch, now part of the world’s largest brewing group. Both claim the word Budweiser — the German name for České Budějovice, literally “of Budějovice”.

Why an American chose exactly this name

In the nineteenth century “Budweiser” already meant beer from a place famous for brewing. An American trademark from 1876 took that prestige. The local brewery that later defended the place-name in Czech hands was founded only in 1895 — nineteen years after the American mark.

Beer as a civic right

Brewing in Budějovice had long been tied to burgher rights and property. Who could brew was a political and economic question, not only a culinary one.

Why this brewery was founded at all

Period voting rights divided voters by wealth and taxes paid. Czech burghers who felt shut out of the older German-dominated Bürgerbräu answered by founding their own joint-stock brewery in 1895, led among others by August Zátka and František Hromada. The founding date often given is 7 October 1895.

And that closes the circle

The dispute over the town’s name as a beer name began before it became a dispute over a brand. Budvar’s argument — that a geographic designation belongs to the place — is the thread that runs through the court cases. The tour still ends not with marketing but with cellars, tanks and water from its own wells.

On site

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