Pilsner Urquell Brewery in Plzen — Where Lager Was Born

Before 5 October 1842, there was no golden lager. Every beer in Europe was dark — ales and wheat beers in various shades of amber, brown, and near-black. Then a Bavarian brewer named Josef Groll, hired by the citizens of Plzeň who were fed up with their terrible local beer, combined Bohemian Saaz hops, Moravian barley, the city's remarkably soft water, and a bottom-fermenting technique he'd brought from Bavaria. He brewed the first batch in the stone cellars beneath the new Citizens' Brewery. The result was pale, clear, and golden — something nobody had seen before. It was the birth of pilsner, and it changed beer worldwide.

Today, nearly 200 years later, the Pilsner Urquell Brewery still stands on the same site in Plzeň, still uses the same water source, and still brews the beer that started it all. The brewery tour is one of the best day trips from Prague — not just for beer lovers, but for anyone interested in how a single product from a single city in Bohemia became the template for the most popular beer style on Earth.

The Brewery Tour — What You Actually See

The Pilsner Urquell brewery tour runs daily and takes approximately 90 minutes. It covers the full production process, from malting to bottling, but the two highlights are the historical underground cellars and the unfiltered tasting at the end.

The brewing exhibition walks you through the modern production facility, which is vast — Pilsner Urquell produces around 11 million hectolitres annually. You'll see the copper brew kettles (the originals from the 19th century are on display alongside the modern stainless steel versions), the fermentation halls, and the packaging lines. The scale is industrial, and the contrast between the original small-batch brewing and today's output tells its own story about what happens when you invent a product the entire world wants.

The underground cellars are the tour's emotional centre. These are the original stone tunnels — carved 9 metres below ground in the 1840s — where Groll brewed the first pilsner. The cellars stretch for nine kilometres beneath the brewery grounds. The temperature stays at a constant 4-6°C year-round, which made them ideal for the lagering (cold-storage) process that bottom-fermented beers require. In the early decades, before mechanical refrigeration, these cellars were packed with ice harvested from the Radbuza River in winter.

Walking through the tunnels, you pass rows of massive oak lagering barrels, some of which are still used for small-batch experimental brews. The walls are coated with the same mould that has been there for over a century — a controlled fungal environment that the brewery considers part of the flavour ecosystem. The air smells of damp stone, oak, and hops.

Insider detail: The brewery still maintains a small batch of beer brewed and lagered the original way — in oak barrels, in these cellars, without modern filtration or pasteurisation. This is available only at the end of the tour, drawn directly from the barrel in the cellar. The taste is markedly different from the bottled version you buy in shops — softer, with more complexity and a subtle yeasty sweetness. You cannot get this beer anywhere else. It's the single best reason to take the tour.