Today we visited the Pilsner Urquell museum and brewery. The highlight of this was getting to taste their unfiltered, unpasteurized beer. WOW! This is nothing like the beer you buy in the bottle. It has a huge hop nose and taste from the Saaz hops that are used. The filtering and pasteurization really takes a lot of the smell and flavor out of the beer. It's too bad because I liked it better this way!

The museum was interesting and showed a lot of historical background about the brewing industry in Pilzen and the brewery as well. We spent about an hour there and then headed over to the brewery for the tour. The brewery is like a small city, with it's own rail yard and miles of underground tunnels that were hand dug and used for lagering the beer. This used to be done in oak barrels, but now it is done in stainless steel tanks. They do keep some in the barrels so they can do comparison tastings occasionally to be sure the product is still tasting correct. An interesting system! They did give us tastes from the oak barrels and it was very crisp and clean tasting.

I took a lot of photos on the tour and have posted a few of them.

After the brewery tour, we headed off to the small town of Chodova Plana. This will be our last stop before we cross the border into Germany. And so it goes!!!!!!!!

Prost,

Eric & Val