A farmyard with a brewhouse
The brewery occupies a historic farmyard in Černice, six kilometres from náměstí Republiky, and the yard does everything: brewing, a restaurant, a hotel, a spa, a place for motorhomes and three bowling lanes. It opened in 2007. The beer is fermented in open vats, left unfiltered and unpasteurised, and lagered in tanks; the range runs from light lagers through a 12° semi-dark to a 12° dark at 4.8%, with seasonals alongside.
Open fermentation is the old way: the yeast works in shallow vessels you can see into, and the beer is exposed to air in a way that closed tanks do not allow. Most Czech breweries gave it up for cylindrical tanks in the twentieth century because it is slower and harder to control. Here it is the point, along with Moravian malt, Czech hops and spring water, and the beer is served young enough that the difference is easy to taste.
The name is worth a sentence. A purkmistr was the burgomaster, the head of a town council in the Bohemian lands, and the word is still the Czech for mayor. Naming a brewery after him is a claim to civic seriousness, and the yard backs it up with the hotel, the restaurant and the spa rather than with flags and brass.
The bath
The beer spa is the reason half the guests come. The baths are drawn warm with beer yeast, herbs and mineral oils, in private rooms with a tap beside the tub, and you are meant to drink while you soak. The claim is that yeast, hops and warm water do something for the skin. Believe it or not, an hour in a warm bath with a beer tap is not a hard sell.
Book it. The spa takes couples and small groups in private rooms and fills at weekends; the hotel packages include a bath and dinner. The rooms are in the same yard, which means you can go from the bath to the table without going outside, and the restaurant serves the beer you have just been sitting in. Say at the desk if you want the bath before or after dinner, because the order changes the evening.
The brewery tour is short, about thirty minutes, and covers the yard's history, the brewhouse and a tasting. It is not the Pilsner Urquell tour and does not pretend to be. What it has that the big brewery does not is the smell of a working small brewhouse and a brewer who will answer a question about fermentation without checking a script.
The table
The restaurant is a brewery restaurant in the proper sense: pork, dumplings, cabbage, dark beer sauces, and a menu that changes with the season. The beer list is the point, and the seasonal taps change often enough to justify a second glass. In summer there are tables in the yard and a grill; in winter the vaulted rooms do the work.
Černice is a village that Plzeň swallowed, and the yard sits among houses and fields rather than in an industrial park. The walk from the tram stop is short but not pretty. A taxi from the centre takes fifteen minutes, which is the practical way to do this if you plan to drink, and the last stretch is a village lane rather than a slip road.
For the rest of Plzeň, the brewery is a base rather than a destination: the centre is a fifteen-minute drive, the Pilsner Urquell brewery twenty, and the motorway west is close enough that this is a sensible last night before Bavaria. It is also near enough to the D5 for a lunch stop on the way through. The place for motorhomes in the yard suggests the management has thought about who turns up.