One of the parlor tricks I like to perform with people new to beer is this: Tell me what kind of beer you’re holding, and I’ll tell you the story of the people who invented it.
These stories often involve factors such as geopolitics, local agriculture, curious production methods, and even tax laws. Sometimes they stretch back centuries. Often, they contain a hint of mystery—perhaps the first brewer(s) are lost to time, or the influence of local tastes, always unexplainable, plays an outsized role.
I know only one example of a truly enigmatic beer, however: Czechia’s modest amber lager, the polotmavý. It seems to have emerged, whole cloth, from nowhere, like a spirit suddenly made flesh.
It definitely exists now, and brewers are happy to tell you how they make theirs. But where did it come from? What does its immaculate conception tell us about Czech brewing? And does this story—not of style but enigma—give any clues as to how breweries today should think about Czech amber lagers?
I don’t want to give you false hope—this article won’t solve the mysteries of polotmavý. But it may help us understand Czech beer a bit more deeply.
The Austrian Empire and Bavarian Lager
The history of empire tends to complicate the history of beer. When modern Czech brewing was born in 1842, there was no Czechia or Czechoslovakia. Bohemia was part of the Austrian Empire. Further confounding matters: The region’s nascent lager-brewing tradition was imported from Bavaria (not from Germany, which didn’t form until 1871).
The Bavarians were the recognized masters of lager beer, which is why the burghers of Pilsen hired Josef Groll from near Munich to launch their new lager brewery. (For more on that story, see Style School: Examining the Czech Pale Lager Tradition.) In the following decades, lager beer transformed the Bohemian landscape—largely guided by Bavarians. In fact, the first four master brewers at Urquell were Bavarian; the brewery didn’t hire a Czech until 1900.
Peering back into the 19th century, when many of the residents of Austrian-controlled Bohemia were German-speakers, we do find more than just pilsners—but no polotmavý. Andreas Krennmair, who recently published a book about 19th-century Bavarian brewing, cites a malting and brewing manual on Austrian brewing from the turn of the 20th century. The manual’s author, E. Leyser, provides this overview: “In Bohemian and generally Austrian breweries, four types of beer are usually brewed: Abzugbier, Lagerbier, Exportbier, and Märzenbier.” Abzug is described as a low-alcohol beer, while lager and export were akin to today’s weaker and stronger pale lagers, respectively. Märzen was stronger yet, and darker.
In today’s Czech range we find pale (světlý), dark (tmavý) or black (černý), and—in between those—the amber or “half-dark” polotmavý. According to Leyser, there was no dark beer—but if you cock your head right, you could see in märzen an ancestor to today’s polotmavý.
Or, maybe it was another beer. Krennmair further tantalizes with a different style from the late 19th century. In 1880, Prague’s Smíchov Brewery first brewed a beer they called Granát, which means “garnet.” According to the old newspapers he consulted, it sparked a small wave of imitations. By 1892, one source describes Granát as “a newer-type beer.” Was the beer a reddish, garnet color? It certainly could be part of the family tree.
Still, to connect the dots from märzen, granát, or Vienna lager—another style that some have cited as a precursor—to polotmavý, you have to skip decades in the historical record. When I ask Czech brewers and experts where (and when) polotmavý came from, I get something like a collective shrug.
More than a century ago, Bohemians were making amber lagers—and a few decades ago, they were making polotmavý. In between, no one seems to know what happened.
Polotmavý Today
The first Czech beer that ever passed my lips—in Plzeň, no less—was a polotmavý.
I had arrived on the train from Munich, bumped my luggage down a cobblestone street, and stopped in the first pub I found. I had taken scrupulous notes about the various types of Czech beer unknown to me, so I was delighted to find a polotmavý on the menu. It arrived, I took a sip, and … it was OK. I found it sweet, flabby, and forgettable except for the setting. (I can’t remember who made it.)
As I sampled my way across Bohemia, I developed the impression that amber lagers were a kind of filler for a lot of breweries. They rarely tasted as accomplished as the pale lagers. Most are brewed a bit stronger, which lends itself to greater malt depth—and that may contribute to my sense of their flabbiness. Most were too sweet for my taste, and they lacked the drinkability of the pale lagers. For a time, I assumed it was a lesser style and not a very interesting one.
On my second trip to Czechia, however, I visited the Strahov Monastery Brewery in Prague, where their amber lager accounts for 70 percent of sales. Under the brand name St. Norbert, Strahov’s polotmavý is full and velvety but not overly sweet. The hops are spicy and almost stiff, and at 35 IBUs, the bitterness adds a wonderful structure to the beer. As with my favorite Czech lagers, the fullness somehow evaporates with the finish, ending with a crisp snap. This was on a warm September afternoon, and I poured the glass down my throat like water.
I was curious whether they do anything unusual at Strahov. The brewery’s manager, Marek Kocvera, assures me that they do not. Writing in Czech, he describes a familiar process: “The two-mash decoction adds more non-fermentable sugars that remain in the beer and add to the intensity of the malt body, which must be balanced by a fair amount of hops to achieve harmony between bitterness and sweetness. The hops are Žatecký poloraný červeňák [i.e., Saaz], added three times over a period of 90 minutes. Primary fermentation takes five to seven days, maturation around 30 days.”
If there’s anything unusual about amber lagers, it’s the grist. Strahov uses pilsner, Munich, and CaraMunich along with a touch of unmalted barley for foam stability. (They don’t let you do that in Bavaria!) Other breweries may use wheat or color malt.
Still, these are all classic Czech methods and ingredients; Strahov’s polotmavý just pops the way some others don’t.
Polotmavý at the Strahov Monastery Brewery in Prague. Photo: Jeff Alworth
What Czechs Think about When They Think about Style
This is the Style School column, but maybe “style” is the wrong way to think about polotmavý. The Czechs don’t have styles, exactly. Rather, they think in grids. A beer menu will list the strength of the beer in degrees, the larger the stronger, and its color. It is bog standard to see a 10° pale lager and a 12° pale lager. Which of these is “pilsner”? According to Czechs, neither one. Order a pilsner and they will hand you an Urquell. With the grid system, breweries can mix and match color and strength, but the results don’t necessarily constitute what we think of as “style.”
Polotmavý is Czech amber lager, but the key information is implied by the first rather than the second adjective. If you search for the essential “styleness” in polotmavý—what makes it distinct from other Czech lagers—I guess it exists in the color. Yet a brewery could make a 10° amber lager with stiff hopping and a crisp, dry finish, and a 16° amber lager with little hopping, a full, rich body, and bock-like booziness. Are these the same “style”?
North American brewers and drinkers have embraced Czech lager, and it’s common to see Czech-style dark lagers or pilsners on tap lists and store shelves these days. Polotmavý is rarer, but no longer unknown here.
Back to that first adjective: Czech. Polotmavý is a process beer, like světlý and tmavý, and that process is characteristic of the Czech brewing tradition. If a brewery uses the ingredients and techniques that Strahov does in making their polotmavý—decoctions, possibly open fermentation, a cool primary fermentation, and a longer lagering period—these describe Czech brewing. The specific tools may differ brewery to brewery, but the toolbox is the same.
Rather than a style backed by a coherent story, polotmavý is more like a cell on a grid. What the brewery does with that cell may vary, but it should always retain that essence of Czech brewing. So, have a polotmavý and know that it’s a Czech lager, with all that entails. We can leave it to others to decide whether a particular range of hues combined with Czech process is enough to constitute a cohesive style.
And—who knows?—maybe somebody will figure out how the beer came to exist in the first place.