Dobruška brewing
Brewing Beer in Bohemia
“The Czechs used to sing, they used to sing from the heart, They sang and sang, for all the days of the year…” The oldest record of beer brewing in our lands dates back to 1088. In the founding charter of the collegiate church at Vyšehrad, the canons are allotted a tithe of hops for brewing beer. Although Bishop Saint Adalbert in 993 forbade brewing beer from wheat or rye bread under the strict penalty of excommunication for anyone who ignored the ban, at the intercession of King Wenceslas I, Pope Innocent IV revoked this ban in 1244 through the abbot of Břevnov.
The inhabitants of market settlements (the embryos of later towns) as well as villages originally brewed beer at home for their own use without any permit, but with the rise of urban centers in the 13th century, beer production became one of the most important rights of burghers. This privilege, however, initially belonged only to royal towns, where at that time any burgher could brew freely, and also to monasteries, where production became concentrated and specialized. Gradually, over the course of the 14th–16th centuries, non-royal—subject—towns also obtained this right by privilege of their feudal lord. In Bohemia, between 1232 and 1350, brewing rights were granted or confirmed in documentary form: 1307 – Ronov, 1320 – Dobruška, 1321 – Žiželice, 1328 – Kostelec nad Labem, 1331 – Chotěboř, 1336 – Přídolí, 1337 – Bělá pod Bezdězem, and 1347 – Český Krumlov.
Brewing and the closely related malting began at this time to be counted among the crafts—guilds were founded. Maltsters had in their emblem two crossed “limpy”—little “paddles” for turning the malt during drying, kiln-drying on the “valach.”
Brewing in Dobruška
“Too little hops, too much water. Is that beer? Damn it all!”
If we start from the text of the so-called Mutina settlement of 1320 (which is also the oldest surviving written record known to us about Dobruška as a town), which indeed confirms the burghers’ brewing right: “…that the fellow townsmen themselves should hand over to Lord Mutina the levy, popularly called ‘šos,’ namely on the feast of the Nativity of the Lord (25/12) and on the day of St. John the Baptist (24/6), from all houses and fields according to their location and previously established and arranged sizes, with the exception of corner houses and those that have breweries; these houses by the Water Gate are to give and pay properly twelve groschen, the other houses shall be obliged to pay eight groschen; for before the town wall was built, Dobruška was called the village of Leštná, and the householders of the houses and breweries freely brewed beer on their land and are to brew without hindrance. In witness whereof our seal was affixed. Done and given in the year of Our Lord 1320.
Mutina of Dobruška himself admits that beer was brewed here even at a time when the town he founded did not yet stand and also did not belong to him, and that it should continue to be brewed in the brewing-right houses without hindrance. At that time, only burghers of royal towns and places could brew freely and without any privileges. Dobruška obtained the other municipal rights, known as Hradec or Magdeburg law, only in 1364 from Sezema of Dobruška, Mutina’s son. Thus Dobruška had confirmed a significant medieval right that in fact already existed—the right to brew beer freely.
More precisely, the brewing right for Dobruška was formulated by Jan Jaroslav Trčka of Lípa (the knightly, later noble, Trčka of Lípa family held Dobruška and the manorial estate from 1494 to 1634) in a privilege issued on 16 December 1582. There he decreed that for the burghers of Dobruška “…no brewery should be built in times to come to their detriment, nor should the present one, or any they might later have, be demolished or taken away from them, nor should they by any contrived means be deprived of brewing beer in Dobruška, of wine taverns and the sale of salt, nor should they be compelled by my heirs and future successors to take manorial beers.”
Further, in this privilege he also grants the privilege of purchasing barley and preparing malt and tapping beer. We may therefore justly assume that in the 1580s a new shared malthouse was built in Poddomí (house no. 243 – the former Adast dormitory).
The Hek Episode
At the beginning of the 19th century, the history of brewing in Dobruška is closely linked with the name of František Vladislav Hek (1769–1847), Jirásek’s F. L. Věk, who from 1790, among other things, owned the brewing-right house no. 17 on the square. When a regulated magistrate was established in 1793, Hek was elected a councillor and recorder. In 1813 he became the accountant of the maltsters’ (brewers’) revenue office in order to pay off debts from the fire of 1806, which destroyed, among other things, the town hall together with the brewery, the malthouse, and 269 houses.
The accountant was at that time the representative of the brewing-right holders, convened meetings at the town hall, and correspondence was addressed to him. Therefore, only someone who owned a brewing-right house could be elected to the post. Hek did not relinquish this important function until 1817. In April 1817, at the instigation of the town lawyer, an experienced councillor and Hek’s sworn enemy Jan Jettmar, 19 brewing-right holders lodged a complaint against him with the magistrate. Allegedly he did not provide proper accounts of the society’s income and expenditures and the shares of individual members, calculated the increase in malt in individual years too low, and unnecessarily allowed excessively high costs for the annual meetings with refreshments, etc.
Brewing Anew
Another major town fire in 1866 prompted the maltsters to speed up the construction of new brewery cellars on Novoměstský Hill (Belvedere), because the brewery on the square had cellars that were small and already insufficient. For the construction they borrowed 6,000 gulden from the Charouz Foundation in Opočno. After the fire they also purchased, near the already standing cellars, another plot in Křovická Street together with a small house no. 267 (until 1883 no. 11 d.), and on its site the present brewery complex with a malthouse was built from 1868.
The brewery with the malthouse continued its modernization with further reconstructions even in the years after nationalization. At the malthouse, however, manual work has remained more or less unchanged to this day. Despite that, in its time this small center produced 425 tons of malt per year, and its quality could match far more modern malthouses.
God Grant Good Fortune!
History of the Dobruška Brewery – excerpt from J. Ptáček’s publication “Dobruška Brewing” (2001)
Trip tip: today you have the opportunity to tour the Sladovna production complex in its original artisanal form and the Brewery, where you will see the premises of classic beer production, such as the brewhouse, fermentation room, and cellar. And what can you take home? For example the regional beer “Rampušák”—and believe us, you’ll enjoy it!
