- Hans Weber
- March 27, 2025
Mini-brewery festival at Prague Castle enters its second decade
On Friday, June 9, and Saturday, June 10, the 11th edition of the Festival of Minibreweries at Prague Castle will take place, organized by the Českomoravský svaz minipivovarů. The festival, which will be attended by 51 Czech and Moray breweries this year, is intended to present to the public the production of mini-breweries from all over the Czech Republic and compare it with nearby foreign breweries. This will be Hungary this year.
“Despite the covid’s period, last year we managed to festively complete the first ten Festivals of mini-breweries held at Prague Castle. So this year, we’re kicking off another decade. I believe it will be equally successful and at the end of it we will see thousands of small breweries in the Czech basin. Indeed, there are already a respectable 550 of us, even with industrial breweries. And because the mini-breweries in Bohemia and Moray have appeared more prominently since the late 1990s, they are already taking their baby steps behind them. So they enter the age of adulthood and with them their customers,” says the director of the Festival of Minibreweries at Prague Castle, Jan Šuráň.
Each of the breweries will bring their two best beers to the Festival and over 100 types of beer will be prepared for tasting in 33 different styles from all over the country. In total, over 5,000 litres of beer are shipped free of charge, representing 66,000 tasting portions of 0.75 dl each. The visitor thus receives 39 degustation doses. For beer lovers, the event is a unique opportunity to sample dozens of high-quality samples from the production of mini-breweries in one place, giving an insight into the increasingly diverse world of small beer producers. In addition, brewers and owners from each brewery will be present at the Festival to provide visitors with the most comprehensive and accurate information about their beers.
The Czech-Czech Minibrewery Association, which is the organizer of the event, currently has 163 members, with a total of 507 minibreweries now on the market. At the general meeting held in March this year, the members of the Association agreed to change the statutes and now the brewery, which has exhibitions of 30,000 hl of beer per year, can join the Association instead of the existing 10,000 hl of beer per year.
“Over the past few years, the mini-breweries have suffered many blows. From covid and undercompensation, to energy price hikes, to increases in fuel and raw material prices. Now we see as a problem a consolidation package that we strongly and fundamentally disagree with. He was not consulted by us and, for example, we do not understand at all how the Government came to increase collection by EUR 1.5 billion by increasing VAT on draft beer. £. It doesn’t work out that way for us and it hasn’t been explained to us until now,” says Michal Voldřich, president of the Czech-Czech Minibrewery Association.
Together with the Czech Union of Brewers and Malthouses, the Czech-Czech Minibrewery Association aims to add Czech beer culture to unesco’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
“In February this year, the Czech Union of Brewers and Malthouses submitted an application for the inclusion of beer culture in the South Bohemia Region on the regional list of intangible cultural heritage and we are very pleased that the Council of the Region granted the proposal in May. A few days later, a similar success was held in The Plzen Region, where the application was filed last year. After the successful inclusion of beer culture on the regional lists, there is nothing to stop us from trying to add Czech beer culture to the national list of intangible heritage from which the Czech Republic can nominate this cultural good to the UNESCO world list,” michal Voldřich describes, adding: “We are aware that the definition of Czech beer culture is crucial for the registration. That is why we jointly created the Unesco-listed Council for the Inclusion of Czech Beer Culture, which is made up of experts with a relationship to brewing, who have academic background in the fields of history, sociology, ethnology and cultural science, and who want to actively participate in the project of writing czech beer culture among non-material cultural goods and, prospectively, on the UNESCO list.”
JK
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