The most exciting was definitely visit of Pilsner Urquell brewery, one of the world most recognized brand among of beers.
This brewery is almost fully automatized
thousands of new bottles per one minute are filled and storaged.
There is regular manufacture switch between creating four czech brands of beer each 3 hours:
Kozel
Pilsner Urquell
Gambrinus
Master
The process of creating czech top-quality beer is quite difficult,
how really does it work? Well, let's go step by step, I'll try to roughly explain.
First, three resources are essential to create a beer: barley, hops and water.
1) Creating Malt
Barley is mixed with water and this mixture, called malt, stands still for five days, until barley beginns to sprout.
Then the malt is left to dry out.
2) Malt grind and mixing
The malt is crushed and this so-called crushed malt is completely mixed with water, creating a white mash, called ''Rmut'' (untranslateable) The purpose of this part is to activate relevant enzyms.
3) ''Rmuting tub''
One third of the white mash is led to the ''Rmuting tub'' and heated to appropriate temperature,
where the substances of the malt change to maltose (or malt sugar-organic chemistry-carbohydrates)
The process of making Pilsner Urquell beer, and I say it wih national pride, is worldwidely unique because this process is repeated three times in order to reach top-quality beer.
3) Lautering
The next step is lautering, or getting rid of insoluble substances of the malt (dregs) which results in dregs staying on the bottom of the tub, creating a natural filter. Through this filter is led whole content of the tub into ''youthful kettle'' (this expression is NOT accurate - see footnotes)
Pilsner brewery has, as I saw, three very modern kettles.
4) Hops addition
After creation of the basic substance it's time to add unique czech hops to make the beer distinctively tasty bitter
In ''youthful kettle'' the ''sugary substance'' is cooked together with hops. Hops is prepared in form of mildly crushed pellets, which enables the brewery to add fresh hops during the whole year.
This cooking is very intensive ( in the room it was very hot,actually ) in order to create the right bitterness.
5) Brewers yeast
Yeast and beer were always tied firmly together.
After the substance with hops from ''youthful kettle'' is cooled down and augmented with oxygen, brewers yeasts are added. They need the oxygen to proliferate themselves.
Yeast are unicellular organisms, which can run chemical reaction of change from simple carbohydrates to ethanol and carbon dioxide. Their resources can be monosaccharides (glukose,fruktose,galaktose) , disaccharides (sacharose,maltose) or trisaccharides ( rafinose, maltriose)
Here, yeasts change maltose to ethanol (alcohol) and CO2 which are crucial to the final taste of the beer.
This process of fermentation lasts for 12 days.
6) Maturing
After the fermentation the ''young'' beer is pumped into lager beer tanks or barrels where the beer matures for the next 30 days by low temperatures.
The Pilsner Brewery has it's unique underground storages, more than 9 kilometres long.
the map of the underground system
7)Racking
Finally, the prepared and ready beer is pumped into bottles in the bottling line (first and second photos of this post) and distributed along the Czech Republic, Europe and the world.
Footnote: The names of processes are products of my own amateur translation, originally these words are unique in czech and are difficult to translate accurately, for original names of processes, please visit original page of the brewery listed below.
My sources: my own photos,memories from the excursion and materials and some photos from http://www.pilsner-urquell.cz/cz/Jak-se-vari-pivo
www.vscht.cz
www.cs.wikipedia.org
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