In Praise of...Czech Beer Snacks

The very first post of 2023 on here was "Year of Czech...Snacks", in which I held forth on the notion that if 2023 was to be the "Year of Czech Beer" then I really hoped that we would also see more elements of Czech beer culture come to the fore. With just a few weeks until the end of the year, I can honestly say that I have not really seen a noticeable increase in the number of Czech style lagers available in this part of the world. The cynical side of me kind of wonders though if "America", when it comes to beer trends, is largely limited to the West Coast, Colorado, and New England. Czech beer styles really haven't swept the nation in any meaningful way, and I say that with a tinge of regret, for obvious reasons, and a tinge of relief for equally obvious reasons if you know me at all.

Anyway, unless you have been under a rock recently, you will know that I spent a few days back in Czechia a couple of weeks ago. As you can tell from the last pair of posts, I drank a lot of seriously good beer, and there are several places and beers that I simply haven't mentioned. Drinking tankové Svijany in a pub in Malá Strana was a delight, as was Plzeňský Prazdroj at Pod Petřínem, all of which happened before midday. While it is true that Czechs make the best beers in the world, sorry everyone else, they also have the kind of pub culture that resonates most with me - admittedly my decade living in the city sorely colours that, but for a deeply shy person (I know some of you will be stunned by that admission), Czech pub culture is a safe space lacking the forced bonhomie of much of the modern Anglophonic world.

Essential to such a pub culture are snacks, small bites of something to mop up the booze that is going down in prodigious amounts. Sure, many tap rooms and bars over here do snacks, but a side of fries or a pile of tortilla chips with cheese just don't do much for me.

On the Friday afternoon, I got to introduce Dave and Chris to the place that is, for me, the epitome of a proper Czech pub. A place that doesn't have a bank of taps serving dozens of beers from breweries of varying quality, there were only 3 beers on tap that day. A place that doesn't have garish lighting, modern fixtures and fittings, or a sign in English, or even a menu in English. A space with just the bar and about 6 tables total, I have said this many times, but if I had the building skills to do so, I could replicate it pretty closely in one half of my garage. I am referring, of course, to Hostomická nelevarna (sorry Evan for drawing more attention to it), the brewery tap for Pivovar Hostomice, and a bastion of Czech pub culture in an ever more westernised (read generic) experience in Prague.

As Chris and I were starting our journeys home the next day, we were planning to only have a few pints before relatively early nights. Well, that was the plan, but it went out the window. The only picture I took while we were there was this one.

Despite the mug of desítka in the foreground, that was not the focal point of the picture, rather the three plates and basket between it and the glass in the background. When the munchies hit, we looked at the board of available snacks and just decided to get one of each of the options, knowing that they all came with bread. And, so we had nakládaný hermelín, utopenec, and škvarková pomazánka, with classic Šumavský chleb to spread all the unctuous goodness onto. I am not going to go into detail about how to make the snacks, I did that in the post from January, though since being back I realise that Mrs V and I sorely need to make more of the first two, and I really need to get on with making my own škvarková pomazánka.

While this is the only picture of snacks that I bothered to take, we had similar morsels in several of the places we went to, always accompanied by dense, chewy Czech bread. At Únětice we had a delicious game pâté, and at Pivovarský klub a magnificent duck liver pâté and more škvarková pomazánka. All of this delightful food got me thinking about what makes a good pub snack?

Let's start with the basics, it can't be fiddly. Food that you have to mess about with is a pain in the prdel in general, but when it is accompanying good beer and fine conversation, it is even more important that it be easy to eat. When I think specifically about Czech pub snacks, grease is the word. Nakládaný hermelín, a piquantly spiced wheel of soft cheese, somewhat akin to Brie or Camenbert, is marinaded in oil, and served with a pool of said highly flavoured oil. To eat it, you smoosh the cheese, oil, onions, and any of the spice paste that came along with it into an unctuous goo to be spread on a slice of the dense bread. While not marinaded in oil, the škvarková pomazánka being made with lard and crispy bits of unrendered meat is likewise a study in greasiness, again spread on a slab of rye bread.

The more I think about it though, I think the key is actually the bread. Now, I will happily own the fact that I am a big fan of Czech bread. I love that it isn't some fluffy, light, airy nonsense, but rather dense, chewy, and it sticks to your ribs. Sure, you can buy seeded rye bread here in the US, and while it may taste similar, it doesn't hold a candle to Czech rye bread. The tight crumb is ideal for spreading whatever cheese or meat based snack it is that you want with your beer. Another superb traditional Czech pub snack is some form of topinky, basically fried bread, sometimes with a topping like a cheese paste, or with cloves of garlic to be rubbed across the crispy bread.

I feel as though I could wax lyrical about Czech pub grub ad nauseum, but for the sake of my grumbling stomach I will stop, and work out some plans to make more versions of my own.