Why 1842 happened
By the 1830s the burghers of Plzeň had a problem they could taste. Their beer was top-fermented and did not keep, while cheaper bottom-fermented beer came in from Bavaria and sold faster. In 1838 the town tipped the unsold barrels into the street and, in 1839, the burghers with brewing rights founded a company to build a brewery for cold fermentation. The site had what they needed: soft water, and cellars that could be packed with ice cut from the Bolevec ponds.
They hired Josef Groll, the son of a brewer in Vilshofen an der Donau who had been working with bottom fermentation. His first batch was mashed on 5 October 1842 and the beer was sold at the St Martin's market on 11 November. It was pale because the malt was lightly kilned, clear because it was lagered cold for weeks, and stable because the yeast worked at the bottom of the tank. None of those things was new on its own. Together they made a style.
The copying started almost at once, and so did the naming. Pilsner Bier was registered in 1859; the words Pilsner Urquell and Plzeňský Prazdroj, both meaning original source, were registered in 1898. By then the beer was going to North America and the brewery was official supplier to the imperial court in Vienna. Nine out of ten beers brewed in the world today are pale lagers, and the family tree runs back to this yard.
The room, the cellars, the tour
The tour takes 100 minutes and starts in the brewery courtyard at U Prazdroje 64/7, under a gate and a water tower that were listed as cultural monuments in 2008. A bus runs to the bottling hall, where the line fills 120,000 bottles an hour. The old brewhouse is still there with its copper kettles from 1931, and then the cellars.
Nine kilometres of cellars were cut into the sandstone, twelve to twenty-two metres below the yard, and the tour walks a stretch of them past rows of oak barrels. At the end there is a pour of unfiltered, unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell straight from a lager barrel. It is the only place in the world where that beer exists. No bottle and no tank anywhere else holds the same liquid.
Upstairs, Na Spilce fills the old fermentation cellars with 550 seats and pours Pilsner Urquell unfiltered from tanks, which is the closest most people get to the cellar pour without a tour ticket. The Brewery Museum, in a fifteenth-century brewing-rights house on Veleslavínova, explains the part the tour skips: how the town brewed before 1842, in dozens of houses, each with a licence and a kettle.
The name, and who owns it now
The brand has had several owners and one address. SABMiller held the brewery from 1999; when AB InBev bought SABMiller in 2016, competition regulators made it sell Pilsner Urquell, and Asahi of Japan took it in 2017. Between 2002 and 2011 some of the beer was brewed under licence in Tychy, Poland, and between 2004 and 2017 in Kaluga, Russia. Since 2017 it has been brewed only in Plzeň.
The name is a different argument. Pilsner is a place name that became a style, which is what happens to successful beers, and the brewery has spent a century and a half trying to stop other people using it. It has not succeeded, and the style is now brewed everywhere. What it owns is the word Urquell, the gate, the cellars and the yeast, and the fact that the beer is brewed in the town that gave the style its name.
The practical version: the tour is the thing, book it, and go in the morning if you can, because the cellars are cold and the tasting is generous. Then walk back into town and drink the same beer in a pub with no visitors in it, to see what the difference is. The pubs are cheaper than the brewery forecourt, and the beer has travelled about a kilometre, which is all the distance it needs.