Nefiltrovany

Filtering and pasteurising is of course the worst thing you can do to a beer, so when I spotted this fella in the supermarket I bung a couple in, as you don't have to speak Czech to work out what 'Nefiltrovany' might mean.

The bog standard Staropramen which I tried was very uninspiring; the only one of the ten or so Czech beers I've tried from the supermarket which I wouldn't get again.
This one was way, way, better though; nice and cloudy, with spices and fruitiness. Why exactly would they make the crud ones when they can make this? At about 60 Euro cents I bought another 6 today.

It's always encouraging when a pub / restaurant has brewing equipment on display in the window, and when the menu is headed 'we serve unfiltered and unpasteurised beers' then that's even better.

I went for the mixture of pale and dark lager and it was a reminder that lager can be as flavoursome as any beer when it isn't buggered with.

Lager is the beer equivalent of pizza; abused, defiled, misrepresented and misunderstood.
There's lots of beery snacks to keep you going, such as 'beer cheese'.

They also do their own fruit beers; I went for a 'nettle' and a 'sour cherry'.

The nettle one had just the right combination of beer and fruit flavour; the sour cherry one was much more oriented to the sour cherry taste but was still worth drinking. You even get a real sour cherry at the bottom...

Pivovarsky Dum, may your beer stay nefiltrovany.

Prague Supermarket Beers

Is Czech beer more interesting than German beer? I intend to find out.
Perusing the beer section of a Prague supermarket, I noticed that, as well as the Czech brands well known outside the country, there were countless brews I'd not heard of as well. They are also all pretty cheap, around 60 cents a shout, so I grabbed some at random and dragged them back to the batcave.

Kozel was slightly malty, with a gentle kick to it, whereas Breznak was darker, much more malty, with a bigger kick.

Branik was pale and at first taste seemed run-of-the-mill, but grew on me the further down the glass I got. Bernard had a giant head on it, slightly sweet, but very distinctive.

Radegast was a decent brew, easy quaffing - whether it was named after the wizard though I don't know.
So far all the beers were recognisably superior to the vast majority of German beers I've tried - although nothing to write home about, they were all beers I could quite happily drink regularly. However I'd also chucked a Staropramen into my trolley, so that I could do an 'unknown brand vs international brand test'. Switching to this from the Radegast instantly showed the Staropramen up as utterly tasteless and bland, pretty much like a Helles.
In future I'll stick to what I don't know.