Erste Pilsener Actienbrauerei

I have for quite some time thought about the origin story for Pilsner Urquell of which it is said that the first brew was made on October 5th and served on November 11th, a production time of 5 weeks and a couple of days. With primary fermentation likely lasting around 10-14 days, that leaves around 4 weeks for lagering. Both the production time and time of the year leads me to think that the brewery started by putting out winter beer, also known as schankbier/schenkbier, whereas the lager beer would have been put out in the following late spring, likely around May which is when the Bavarian lager beer season started. I came across some ads which I thought were interesting in light of this.

Firstly I would also like to reference Carl Jacobsen's travels to Pilsen in May of 1869 where he writes in a letter to his father:

The old beer he is refering to is lager beer, the young beer schank beer. In 1870 the Bürgerliches Bräuhaus would get some additional competition in the form of the Erste Pilsener Actienbrauerei. The following advertisements are taken from the paper Pilsener Zeitung.

First we have an ad dated September 8th 1870 from Bürgerliches Bräuhaus announcing the sending out of their schankbier starting by the middle of the month.


Next we have an advertisements from "the completed" Erste Pilsner Actien Brauerei announcing that on December 10th they will start to send out their schankbier.


If we jump forward a bit in time to 1871 we find this advertisement dated May 5th 1871 from Bürgerliches Bräuhaus announcing that their Lagerbier will be sent out starting towards the middle of the month. In other words May, the month in which the traditional start of the Bavarian lager beer season.

Next we have a similar advertisement from the Actien Brauerei also from 1871 announcing that their lagerbier will be sent out starting towards the beginning of June. So they started selling Schankbier in December and the following June their Lagerbier.

Then we get to August of 1871 where Bürgerliches Bräuhaus advertises that their schankbier will be snet out at the start of September.


If we jump ahead a bit more to 1873 we find this advertisement for Bürgerliches Bräuhaus dated May 10th 1873, announcing that their Lagerbier will be sent out starting on 20th of May (d.M=dieses monat=this month).

From 30th of September 1873 we find this advertisement for the schankbier of Bürgerliches Bräuhaus announcing that the beer will be sent out starting October 1st.

Also from October 1st the same year we find this advertisement for Actien Brauerei's schankbier which announces that their schankbier has already started being sent out, and also that they have some stocks of Lagerbier which they can suply as long as they last.


There is a pattern here which is interesting in which the two breweries by their competitive advertising show that they are following the Bavarian seasons for brewing and drinking. The newly established Actien Brauerei, in 1870 no less, begins by selling schankbier and begins selling lagerbier only in the summer the following year. My suspicion is that the same applied to Bürgerliches Bräuhaus in 1842, whereby they brewed the first schankbier brew on October 5th and served it November 11th, starting to brew their lagerbier later in the year (around December/January) and sold it starting in May or thereabouts.

I personally think that this is of interest since it gives us a better understanding of the time period and the beer itself.

 

Pilsner/Pilsener was simply the terminology used by German speakers within and outside of Pilsen, just as beer from Munich was known as Münchner or Münchener bier to German speakers. It followed standard German naming conventions. Which was then copied and used also in non-German speaking countries where Pilsener type beer was imitated and brewed. Then you have the separate topic of lawsuits and attempts at reaching agreements in individual countries on how the name Pilsner or Pilsener could or couldn't be used, but that's a different story.

 

I just figure most will have heard about the century-plus old controversy already by now .

One thing I didn't get to mention in my OP due to having to rush off to work was that the Erste Pilsner Actien Brauerei is the origin of the beer brand Gambrinus, the best selling beer brand in the Czech republic today (by what margin I do not know). The brewery was "Czechinized" after independence from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire into Plzeňský Gambrinus, which was later combined with Plzeňský Prazdroj after the Soviet/Communist takeover post WW2 and the two are now owned by Asahi.

Pre independence they sold their Pilsner Kaiserquell bier:


With independence they became Plzeňský Gambrinus:



Hence the year 1869 on the modern label (note the "Gegründet 1869", founded 1869, on the Kaiserquell label) which was the year when the brewing company was officially formed, the construction of the brewery taking place in 1870 and the first beer sold on December 10th 1870.

Concerning what sort of beers were brewed in Pilsen in the late 1860s there are some nice tables found in Gustav Noback's book on the 1873 Vienna world exposition showing statistics from 1868 and 1869 for Bohemia and its administrative regions.


Pilsen here is a region rather than the town itself, but it follows the general pattern of Bohemian beer brewing with beers of 9-10 degree worts ("9 Grad", "10 Grad" on the horizontal) making up a majority of production and sales (with a 9 degree beer being allowed to be brewed to between 9-9.9% plato and a 10 degree beer being allowed to be brewed to between 10-10.9% plato at this time as per Austrian-Hungarian beer taxation). A Schankbier from either Erste Pilsener Actien Brauerei or Bürgerliches Bräuhaus likely being around 10% plato and a lagerbier around 12% plato. Hopping rate would have been lower for the schankbier and higher for the lagerbier with numbers from the latter half of the 19th century pointing to 300-400 grams per hl for the schankbier and 400-600 for the lagerbier.


Here is what Braungart writes around the turn of the century:
"The ten degree beer, the Vienna Abzugbier, is sent out after 4-5 weeks of lagering time; the 13 degree beer, the regular lager beer, attains a lagering period of 3, 4, 8 up to 10 months and beyond; 14 and 15 degree beers are Export beers, the 16 degree beer is Bock beer, which is similar to the Kulmbacher. For light colored Bohemian beer the hop addition per 1 hl wort amounts to at:
10.5% original gravity 300-400 grams per hl
11.5% original gravity 350-430 grams per hl
12.5% original gravity 420-500 grams per hl
13.5% original gravity 450-550 grams per hl

As per Schwackhöfer:
Vienna beer
Abzug 10.5%=200-250 grams per hl
Lager 13.5%=350-400 grams per hl
Export 14.5%=400-450 grams per hl
Bock 15.5%=450-550 grams per hl
Bohemian beer
Abzug 10.5%=350-400 grams per hl
Lager 12.5%=450-600 grams per hl"

So around 10.5% plato wort and 300-400 grams of hops per hl for Bohemian schankbier and around 12.5% plato wort and around 400-600 grams of hops per hl for lagerbier.


Here is a page from a Swedish brewery journal from September 1931 showing brews of Pilsner klass II (class II, which was capped at 10.5% plato and 3.2% abw/4% abv from 1923-1940), shortened as Pils (@JackHorzempa) using 28 kg of Saaz hops for 86 "hl vört i jäskaren" (hl wort in the fermenting tuns), which comes out to 325 grams of hops per hl. The original gravity was 9.8% as measured in the fermenting tun and turned over to the lager cellar at between 3.2-3.7% plato, or around 66-62% apparent attenuation, which would have been increased by a circa 1 month long storage period.

 

Ah sorry, I thought that was clear from the OP, but yes the Erste Pilsner Actien Brauerei was located in Pilsen Bohemia, within the Austro Hungarian Empire, a town which (like many other towns and regions within the empire) was obviously ethnically and linguistically mixed and where the local German speakers had their own newspapers, among which was the local Pilsner Zeitung which is where these ads are all from.

 

Doing some more investigating I realize that Prvni Plzensky Akciovy Pivovar is Czech for First Pilsener Stock brewery. So I figured maybe there were some Czech language equivalents to the German advertisements in the OP and turns out there are. In Plzenske Noviny from 1876 one finds advertisements from Prvni Plzensky Akciovy Pivovar (i.e Erste Pilsener Actien Brauerei) and Měšťanský pivovar (i.e Bürgerliches Bräuhaus).

In it we find the advertisement below from Měšťanský pivovar/Bürgerliches Bräuhaus, advertising Plzensky lezak (lager). 8. kvetna is obviously a date, and it turns out that kvetna is the word for May in Czech. May 8th. Lezaku looks like it's derived from lezak.

On the same page we have an advertisement from Actien brauerei/Akciovy Pivovar, advertising lezaku, the date in the ad being May first.

Looking at the German language paper Pilsner Zeitung from 1876 we find that Bürgerliches Bräuhaus announced that their lager beer would be sent out on May 8th, whereas Actien Brauerei announced that their lager beer was being sent out as of "this day", May first. So the dates correspond between the Czech and German language advertisements.

Then later in the year there is this double advertisement, one from each brewery. I'm familiar with the term vycepni pivo, the Czech term for schankbier, and here we find piva vycepneho and vycepneho piva. Clearly they are talking about schankbier. 1.Listopadu is obviously a date and listopadu apparently means November in Czech. The one from Actien Brauerei is dated 20 rijna 1876, October 20th 1876, and it first appears in the 29th of October issue of Plzenske Noviny.



So both the Czech and German speakers were advertised to in their own language in their own newspapers. Unfortunately the 1876 editions are the only post 1870 editions available online, which is when the advertising competition takes place.

 

Much appreciated. I just figure that this is information that should be shared for the benefit of anyone who is interested in beer history. I find this stuff fascinating.

 

I would certainly agree that Czechs made up the majority of the population, but it is also true that German/German speakers made up a significant minority population in the city, especially in the time period discussed in this thread (1870s).

I came across this article (pdf file), "Talking ,Pilsenish‘ Documentation, popularization and staging of a urban colloquial language as a ‘lieu de mémoire’" dealing with "an investigation of the special vocabulary of German origin in Jan Hajšman’s “Plzeňsko-český slovník” (2017) for lexical, phonetic and morphological features of diatopic varieties of German." In other words an article dealing with German influences on the language spoken in Pilsen.

Where on page 24 it lists the population of the city and the percentage of German inhabitants thusly:

 

Came across an article on the then new Actien Brauerei in a German language paper based in Prague, Jechl's land- und volkswirthschaftliches Wochenblatt, dated January 5th 1871 which has some good information.

The article noting that the brewery began its operations on October 15th. Below is an advertisements from the Franconian newspaper Fränkischer Kurier dated November 28th 1870 which announces that the completed Erste Pilsner Actien Brauerei, which came into operation on the 15th of October, d. J., dieses Jahr, this year, will send out their schankbier on December 10th. With a 10-20 day fermentation, likely on the lower end for schankbier, that would leave around or slighly more than 5 weeks of storage before the premiere on December 10th for the first batches.

The 12% beer mentioned in the article would be the lagerbier, which would be sold starting in June of 1871, so either the author got to try lagerbier which had already been brewed and stored for a short time before the paper was printed January 5th 1871, or the author was served schankbier and didn't make a distinction between the two. I lean towards the latter explanation since the author doesn't make a distinction between lagerbier and schankbier. Similar to Carl Jacobsen's experience during his visit to Pilsen in 1869, though he at least distinguished between the young beer and the old beer (lager beer).

I could be wrong however and the author did in fact get to try some young lager beer, the 12% beer, which had recently been put into the lager casks (likely sometime in December).


As to the color of the two breweries beers' this table from Der Bierbrauer aus Böhmen, the beer brewer from Böhmen, notes that the schankbier from Bürgerlichen brauerei in Pilsen had a golden yellow color, was clear and had a strong foam. While the schankbier from Actienbrauerei in Pilsen was a shade paler, rich in carbonation but was slightly hazy. Today's Gambrinus made with caramel and color malt is significantly darker compared with Pilsner Urquell.


I also found this list of points of distribution for the brewery from 1877 in a short description of the company to be quite interesting showing cities and town with their own depots and depots owned by sales agents which had an ice cellar, "Eiskeller", and those handling bottled beer, "Flaschenbierversandt". Notable cities include Prague and Vienna where the brewery had their own ice cellar and sent bottled beer, Berlin, Mnich, Nuremberg, Zurich, Paris, Alexandria (Egypt, where there was an ice cellar), Cairo, Matamoros Mexico, New York, San Francisco and Shanghai. The presentation also notes that the company has their own fleet of refridgerated train cars (eisbierwaggon) and that the brewery distributes both lager, export and schankbier to non-local markets, lager and export beer all year round, the export beer also in bottles to countries overseas.