Volume 21, Number 1
PIVO AND POHODA: THE SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND SYMBOLISM OF CZECH BEER-
DRINKING
Timothy M. Hall, University of California/San Diego
 2003 Timothy M. Hall All Rights Reserved
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"A Czech never says that he's going out to
`have a few beers,' and he never counts the
beers while he's having them. You go out
for a beer. A beer is like a woman: when
you're with a woman, you never think of
women that you've been with before, and
you never think of the next woman. It
would be disrespectful. Iťs the same with a
beer. You go out and you have one
beer...and maybe, when the unfortunate
time comes that you reach the end of your
relationship with your beer, then maybe
you'll have another."1
Such was my first introduction to the importance
of ceské pivo, at the start of a long night of
drinking and pub-hopping in Prague in 1998. As
I learned, beer provides an entrée to many of the
core features of Czech culture. Beer itself is an
emblem of Czech national identity as well as a
major mediator of sociality and a key element in
recreation and leisure time. Beer and several
Czech liqueurs (Becherovka and slivovice) play a
key role in Czech folk ideas of illness and health,
while the etiquette around bar behavior
highlights Czech attitudes towards money,
hospitality, and reciprocation, and also acts as a
forum of contention between Czech and Slovak
ethnic identities and values. The Czech word for
beer, pivo, comes from the same root as the verb
to drink, pít, and is cognate with the English
word beverage (from Latin bibere, to drink).
Beer is such a common beverage among Czechs
that many do not consider it a form of alcohol:
"iťs just beer." At the same time, it is a nearly
sacred substance, which demands respect and
must be handled in clearly prescribed ways. The
normative values of heavy beer-consumption and
lenient attitudes towards inebriation both
demonstrate some basic Czech values, such as
the importance placed on relaxation and comfort
(pohoda; cf. Kuras, 1999: 19-21, 32-33), and
contribute to the substantial medical and social
problems caused by alcoholism.
History and Economics
Czechs themselves refer to their country
as lying in the "heart of Europe" (srdce Evropy)
but Benjamin Kuras' image is perhaps more
accurate: a bridge between East and West, trod
upon by both sides (Kuras, 1999: 9). Certainly
the Czech people have existed in an ambiguous
state, geographically at the center of Europe. The
Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and part of
Silesia) were politically and culturally united
during the Middle Ages under the Přemyslid and
Luxemburg dynasties, but the Czechs lost their
political independence to the Austrian Habsburgs
beginning in the sixteenth century. After the
Protestant Hussite defeat at the battle of White
Mountain in 1621, most of the Czech
intellectuals and much of the aristocracy went
into exile (cf. Sayers, 1998: 45-50). By the time
of the National Revival in the 19th century, the
Czechs had nearly lost their linguistic and ethnic
identity under centuries of Habsburg rule. Prague
itself, the historic capital of the Czech lands, was
called the city of three cultures: Czech peasants
and bourgeoisie, German aristocrats, and Jewish
intellectuals. When the country achieved
independence in 1918, little remained in the
cosmopolitan cities of Prague and Brno, or the
Czech-speaking countryside, from which to build
the symbols of a new Czech nation, and after the
devastation of the Holocaust and the subsequent
expulsion of the Sudetan Germans in 1945, two
of the three cultures were gone. Aside from the
specifically historic sites and the famously
difficult language, one of the single bestrecognized
Czech products abroad was beer.
Beer-making has a long history in the
Czech lands and the quality of Czech beer and
hops are recognized by beer-drinkers around the
world (Brewers Journal, 1903: 692). Czechs take
their beer very seriously and have done so for a
long time. In his history of Czech identity,
sociologist Derek Sayer quotes a passage from
Josef Pekář, one of the great Czech historians:
"Writing to Ladislav Pohrobek after his
coronation in 1453, the Pope suggests that the
Volume21, Number 1
Czechs will not let their new boy-king go `until
he masters Czech [language] -- and beerdrinking'"
(Pekář, Žižka a jeho doba. Prague:
Odeon, 1992, vol. 1: 265; cited in Sayer, 1998:
42).
Most Czech beer is lager (ležák), as
opposed to ale. Lagers are brewed at lower
temperatures with yeast that lies on the bottom of
the vat during fermentation. The product is
usually lighter than ales, which are brewed at
higher temperatures with a yeast that rises to the
top. Czech lagers are generally highly hopped,
which gives them a clean, bitter taste. They are
slightly higher in alcohol than most western
European and North American beers (especially
the Czech 12° beers; see below), and are almost
exclusively made with barley, as opposed to
North American beers in particular which often
have a high content of rice or corn.
Two of the most popular types of beer
in the world today originated in Bohemia and are
still sought out by western tourists. The recipe
for pilsner-style beers originated in the West
Bohemian town of Plzeň (Pilsen in German) in
1842. The newly incorporated Burgeliches
Brauhaus (now Plzeňský Prazdroj, A.S., a
division of SABMiller, the worlďs second
largest brewer) adopted a Bavarian style of lagerbrewing
and modified it by increasing the
content of hops and allowing it to undergo a
secondary fermentation called krausening, which
produced the foamy head desired by Czech beer
drinkers (Brewers Journal, 1903: 692; Hernon
and Ganey, 1991: 36). The Pilsen model was
later copied by other brewers and exported from
both Germany and Bohemia to western Europe
and North America. It has now come to indicate
any light, lager-type beer, and pilsner beers are
among the most popular in the world. The town
of Plzeň has been brewing beer at least since it
received a charter from Václav II in 1290, and its
Pilsner Urquell (the German form of the name,
used for export, or Plzeňský prazdroj in Czech;
both mean Pilsner Original Source) is the single
most popular beer in the Czech Republic and the
most recognized Czech beer abroad.
The town of Ceské Budějovice in South
Bohemia gave the world the original Budweiserstyle
beer. Brewing in the town dates at least to
1265. By the mid-19th century, several breweries
in the town had been producing a particular style
of slightly sweet lager for a number of years,
marketing it under the Czech name Budvar and
the German name Budweiser and exporting it to
western Europe and even to North America. The
name in the United States, however, was first
registered as a brand name by one Carl Conrad,
an American importer of wine and liquor. In
1875, German-American immigrant and brewer
Adolphus Busch bought the rights to the name
from Conrad and began large-scale production.
Anheuser-Busch ran into problems in 1907 when
they attempted to trademark the name in the
U.S.; they were challenged by a German brewer
on the grounds that it was a geographical name
and had originally been used in Europe. In 1911,
Anheuser-Busch reached a settlement with both
the German brewer and Budějovický Budvar,
under which Anheuser-Busch received the rights
to use the name in North America but agreed not
to market their product in Europe; the Czech
brewer retained the rights to sell Czech Budvar
in the U.S. under the label "Imported
Budweiser." In 1939, this agreement was
modified and Anheuser-Busch obtained the
exclusive right to market Budweiser in the
United States (Hernon and Ganey, 1991: 35-38).
Since the end of Communism in
Czechoslovakia in 1989, the two companies have
again been engaged in international trademark
battles. The American version of Budweiser
(including Bud Lite) is the single best-selling
brand of beer in the world and one of the most
recognized trademarks. It currently accounts for
one fifth of the U.S. beer market. AnheuserBusch
Companies is the single largest brewer in
the world, with an output several times larger
than that of all the breweries in the Czech
Republic combined and nearly one hundred
times that of Budějovický Budvar (Reuters,
2001). On the other hand, Czech beers are
famous throughout Europe and many
connoisseurs believe that Bohemia produces the
best hops in the world. Anheuser-Busch has
attempted to resolve the matter by purchasing a
stake in Budvar, but the Czech government has
thus far refused all offers. Budvar is one of the
most profitable Czech companies and the
government are understandably reluctant to sell
it to a foreign investor and long-time competitor.
The Czech government has petitioned the
European Union to designate "Budweiser" and
"Budvar" as geographically specific names, like
"champagne" and "Roquefort", which would be
the first time that a beer has been so recognized.
The matter is still under consideration. Starting
in 2001, Budějovický Budvar began marketing
its beer in the U.S. under the name "Czechvar," a
portmanteau of "Czech" plus "pivovar", which
means brewery.
Volume21, Number 1
Czech beer is measured by "degree"
(stupeň), which tends to confuse foreigners.
Degrees do not measure percentage of alcohol
directly; rather, they indicate the amount of malt
used in brewing.2
The degree does correlate with
the amount of alcohol, a higher degree indicating
a higher percentage of alcohol within the same
brand of beer, but 12° beer from one brand can
have a lower alcohol content than a 10° from
another brand, depending on the strain of yeast
and the brewing process. A higher degree beer
also commands a higher price within a given
brand of beer. The most common degrees are 10°
(desítka) and 12° (dvanáctka), but the range goes
from 6° to 19°. Czech brewers produce both light
(světlé) and dark (černé literally, `black') beers,
but the international repute comes from the light
lagers. In Britain, Ireland, and North America,
dark beers are typically more strongly flavored,
heavier, more caloric, and are perceived to be
higher in alcohol content -- typical men's drinks.
Among Czechs, the gender stereotypes are
reversed. Though the darker beers are still more
caloric, they are much sweeter than the highly
hopped lighter beers, and are often dismissed by
men as "women's drinks."
Beer is not only gendered, but also
reflects ethnic differences. Bohemians,
inhabitants of the northern and western twothirds
of the Czech Republic, are the most
prodigious beer-consumers in the world, and
Bohemia produces some of the worlďs best
hops. The climate, however, is generally too cool
and damp, with too short a growing season, to
boast much in the way of wine. Slovakia, on the
other hand, produces and consumes more wine
than beer, with Moravia, the eastern one-third of
the Czech Republic, somewhere in between. One
can often identify the Moravians and Slovaks in
a pub in Bohemia by looking for the wine-
drinkers.
Under communism, Czechoslovakians
enjoyed a higher average standard of living than
the inhabitants of most other Soviet-bloc
countries, continuing their previous position as
the industrial heart of the former AustroHungarian
Empire. While the inhabitants of the
Baltic states were deported to Siberia or killed
outright, Czechoslovakia was in part bought off
with a tacit social contract. Although they were
effectively forbidden to travel abroad or to
purchase foreign-made consumer goods, and
even staple foods were often of low quality or in
short supply, Czechs and Slovaks could always
count on inexpensive and available beer and
liquor, and most Czech and Slovak families had
a cabin or cottage (chata or chalupa) to retreat to
on the weekends -- where the main forms of
entertainment were hiking, playing games,
singing songs, and drinking high-quality,
government-subsidized beer. Bútora (1995)
reports that beer prices in Czechoslovakia
remained practically unchanged from 1955 to
1980. Even with the relaxation of the belated
temperance campaign and the reduction of
government subsidies in the post-Communist
period, beer has usually been the least expensive
beverage by volume in Czech bars and
restaurants. In a society where free water is
practically unknown except in a handful of
tourist-oriented restaurants and where food
prices are slowly but steadily increasing to
approximate European Union norms, the
continuing low price of liquor and specifically of
beer demonstrates the governmenťs reluctance
to end subsidies for such a culturally valued
commodity. Beer and alcohol prices will rise
over the next few years in preparation for joining
the EU. It remains to be seen how the Czech
public will react, but people are already
complaining.
Beer as the medium of sociality and leisure
Czech men rarely socialize without beer
and Czechs in general often relax with some
form of alcohol. "Dáš si panáka?" -- "Will you
have a shot?" is a common gesture of hospitality
when visiting someone's home. However,
Czechs' consumption of Becherovka or rum by
the shot-glass does not match the Russian or
Polish consumption of vodka. The most famous
Czech opera by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884),
Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride) praises
beer with the following lines: "Beer's no doubt a
gift from heaven, it chases away worries and
troubles and imparts strength and courage to
men...Without beer we should cut a poor figure;
there's so much trouble in the world -- that
foolish is he who cares too much! (Smetana,
1866: Act II, Scene 1)."
Czech drinking establishments are
divided into several categories, some far more
common than others. The most basic of these
and central to Czech leisure time is the hospoda
or pub, usually a fairly casual, neighborhood
tavern whose customers drink mainly beer,
though some may have wine or hard liquor. A
basic hospoda serves some beer food as well,
usually at least párky (steamed or boiled
sausages like frankfurters), tatranky or oplatky
(sweet wafer cookies with cream filling), pretzels
Volume21, Number 1
and nuts. Many also have other traditional "beer
foods": nakládaný hermelín (a brie-type cheese
marinated in oil with onions, bay leaves, allspice
and other flavorings), utopenci ("drowned ones"
-- small sausages marinated in vinegar with
onions and spices), or sekaná (slices of
forcemeat, similar to baked or fried bologna). All
of these are served with slices of brown rye
bread flavored with caraway (kmín -- one can
hardly escape the flavor of kmín in Czech
cooking), and if you're lucky, the párky or
sekaná will come with horseradish-enhanced
mustard and a sweet gherkin. Higher quality
hospody have more extensive offerings of food,
though it tends toward the fairly basic: sausages,
soups and goulashes, and the kitchen often closes
long before the last call. At the upper end,
hospody shade into low-end restaurace.
Many of the traditional Czech bar foods
are threatened by European Union (EU)
regulations. Utopenci and nakládaný hermelín in
particular are both marinated foods which are
normally kept at room temperature. Even though
both are cooked, and pickling is a traditional
means of food preservation, they do not meet EU
standards for food safety. New regulations
passed in anticipation of EU accession require all
establishments serving food to maintain certain
standards, including refrigeration and a stainless
steel food preparation environment. Most small
pubs and even some restaurants cannot afford to
purchase new equipment and retrofit their
kitchens. In the end, many will probably stop
serving food altogether or go out of business,
while many others will probably attempt to
bypass the regulations by removing the
offending food items from the menu but still
providing them to regular customers who know
to ask for them.
The typical hospoda is a ground-floor
or basement establishment with a number of long
tables and benches, occasionally having smaller
tables and chairs. Ceilings are low and the air is
smoky except in summertime when windows and
doors are opened to admit cooler air. Regulations
call for separate non-smoking areas in places that
serve food, but this is rarely enforced and comes
as news to most Czechs. Approximately 70% of
the adult population smokes, and the others are
more or less used to it. Seating, as in all but the
fanciest Czech establishments, is more or less
do-it-yourself. The pub world has a certain
camaraderie and a certain Czech pragmatism:
empty seats at one of the long tables are
available to all comers, so long as they are not
being saved or reserved. (An interesting and
sometimes frustrating feature is that most Czech
establishments count on only a single seating in a
night, so places that accept reservations will keep
a table empty for hours while awaiting a party
who called ahead.) One asks whether the seat is
available "Je tady volno?" and sits down.
Accounts in most pubs are kept on
tallies of paper (lístek or učet), usually left on the
table. Beers are marked at the bottom of the tab
with a "P" for pivo, and other items are listed at
the top by their cost. At fancier nightclubs, one
receives a konzumační karta or consumption
card, which one pays before exiting. Waiters
assume that men will have half-liters of the light
beer, and usually only ask whether one wants
10° or 12°-- "desítku nebo dvanáctku?" Women
will sometimes be asked if they want a one-third
liter "small beer" (malé pivo) or dark beer.
Most pubs have an exclusive contract
with a single brewer for their draft beer, which
provides them with a discount but restricts them
from offering other brands; to order a pivo thus
means a half liter of the draft beer from the brand
that a given pub serves. Sometimes other beers
are available in cans, but Czechs rarely order
them and sometimes appear puzzled when
foreigners ask for a non-draft beer. (Tourists,
used to the wider range of offerings in western
countries and hoping to taste the two best-known
Czech beers, Pilsner Urquell and Budvar, often
attempt to order them in cans or bottles. I was
never able to determine why Czech pubs even
stock beers in cans or bottles, except for the
occasional non-alcoholic beer, usually the
German near-beer Clausthaler, which no one
would order in sufficient quantity to justify
keeping on tap.) This exclusivity is changing
slowly as the brewing industry is privatized and
restructured. Some breweries have merged and
their customers can now offer several brands of
beer on draft, but a wide selection of beers
remains the mark of a somewhat overpriced
tourist bar.
The camaraderie of the pub is
somewhat mitigated by Czech conventions of
exact payment, however, a point about which
Slovaks occasionally complain. Ethnographers in
Britain, Ireland, and North America (Cavan,
1966: 112-135; Scheper-Hughes, 1979: 54-55)
have noted the practice of "standing rounds" or
buying a round of beer for everyone at the table,
everyone in the group of friends. Similarly, in
singles bars, buying someone a drink is a fairly
innocuous gesture of flirtation and buying drinks
Volume21, Number 1
for one's friends is not that serious a statement of
solidarity. In the practice of buying rounds, each
person typically takes a turn, but in a larger
group, not everyone gets a turn on a given night.
Ordinarily, as long as no single person gets out
of buying a round too regularly, no one minds.
The Czech situation is rather different,
however. Except between extremely close
friends, or late in the night when someone is very
drunk, or when someone is celebrating a birthday
or name-day, Czechs rarely buy rounds of drinks
for the table. This reflects a general pattern of
precise accounting in restaurants and pubs, in
which tabs are divided at the end of the evening
down to the single crown (the unit of Czech
currency, koruna). Buying a round for other than
very good friends can engender some anxiety
until the recipient has the opportunity to repay
the buyer's largesse. Even switching pubs in the
course of an evening can bring on some anxiety
between acquaintances if one has bought a round
of beers, because the beer in the next pub could
cost more or less than the beers in the first pub,
thus obviating exact repayment. Slovaks
comment on this point quite unfavorably when
the topic comes up. While Czechs are quite
hospitable to their personal guests, hospitality
holds a much higher ranking in the pantheon of
Slovak values. Slovaks do each stand their round
when drinking in a pub, and small items such as
snacks or cigarettes are freely, even
ostentatiously, shared among the drinking
comrades. The greater Czech emphasis on
individuality and account-keeping strikes the
Slovaks as cold and calculating, and they often
contrast it with Slovak generosity and warmth of
feeling.
At the end of the evening, one of the
headwaiters (not a busboy) comes and tallies up
the marks on the card. Individuals keep track of
what they have, and waiters in pubs and more
casual restaurants typically assume that
customers will be paying separately, though they
usually ask: "Dohromady nebo zvlasť?"Although
people in pubs do not normally buy rounds for
the table, each person usually drinks about the
same amount, which makes keeping track easier.
It is fairly unusual simply to divide the bill
equally in a Czech pub, unless the parties
involved are quite good friends or the bill
involves many items and individuals all
consumed roughly the same amount.
Some of the tropes of the pub also
reflect the pervasive discourse in Czech society
about how things "ought" to be, a picture of an
idealized past under Communism or in the
traditional life of the village. As an example, one
of my favorite pubs in Prague had a wall covered
with a collage of different kinds of playing cards.
When I asked why, people invariably answered
that it is traditional to play cards in a pub, and so
they fit the décor. In more than three years of
fieldwork, often in bars and pubs, I may have
seen a deck of cards in a pub on a total of one or
two occasions in which I did not actively seek
them out. The traditional Czech and Slovak card
game is mariáš, which is played mainly by men
and mainly in pubs. As a further example,
though most of my informants agreed that mariáš
was a traditional pub game, I only met one
person under the age of forty who knew how to
play, and he was from Ostrava, the least
international of the larger Czech cities and the
one whose population has most recently moved
to an urban setting.3
Other types of establishments exist. In
summer, many restaurants have outdoor seating
(called a garden or zahrada, though often more
like a patio or sidewalk seating). The Czech
Republic does not have the sort of welldeveloped
Biergarten culture that Germany has
refined, but independent beer gardens operate in
some of the larger parks during good weather.
Other types of establishments include the
vinárna or wine-bar (which sometimes
advertises itself as "Moravian", presumably
indicating better quality wine) and the vinný
sklep (literally "wine cellar", usually smaller
than a vinárna). A herna is a small gambling
joint or casino, often open late or non-stop, with
slot machines and possibly other games such as
darts. A herna is rather seedier than a normal
bar; while it may act as a neighborhood bar, it
often serves as a stop-over for drunks whose bar
has closed for the night. Beer in a herna is often
only bottled or in cans, and comes with a higher
price tag. The disco or diskoteka is a dance club,
where people may drink beer but also wine,
spirits, and mixed drinks. A kavárna is
nominally a café, but nearly all of them also
serve alcohol and a substantial number of men in
a kavárna in the afternoon or evening will be
drinking beer. All of these can be described as
podníky or establishments.
The one establishment that does not
serve alcohol to most of its customers is the
čajovna or tea room, which also provides one of
the few smoke-free public venues in the Czech
Republic. Čajovna patrons tend to be a younger,
Volume21, Number 1
somewhat alternative crowd, who smoke pot and
listen to various kinds of alternative music when
not in the tea room. The čajovna scene itself
represents the current Czech (and more generally
Central and Eastern European) fascination with
elements of "eastern" mysticism -- astrology,
Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine,
vegetarian and other diets -- as a replacement for
both Communist ideology and organized,
western religion in a post-Communist, postCatholic
world.
The Etiquette of Beer
Beer is a metonym of relaxation and
leisure (pohoda), but it commands a certain
respect and formality, and also points up a
number of peculiarities in Czech drinking
behavior. The general rules of beer-drinking all
express respect for the beer and for one's
companions. Beer is not wasted, it is not mixed,
and the good feeling and even the next day's
hangover mark a certain sense of communitas
with one's drinking fellows. It is, in a sense, both
a sacral drink and a medium of liminality.
One of the first rules that you learn in
the Czech lands is that you never leave a beer,
though this is perhaps more a statement started
by young men and carried into adulthood for
some time, comparable to the "rule" among
some young men in the United States that a party
cannot end until the keg is finished. Nonetheless,
to leave a beer glass with a noticeable amount of
liquid in it is to say that something is wrong with
the beer. Either it has gotten warm, or perhaps
the glasses were not adequately rinsed and have
been contaminated with soap. Either way, it is a
statement that the beer was not up to par.
Beer is treated differently than other
beverages. If possible, beer is normally put on a
coaster, usually provided by the brewer and
bearing various advertisments for that brand of
beer. Sometimes the coaster is left out if the beer
will be placed on a tablecloth, but even then a
coaster is typical. A half-liter of cold beer does
generate a lot of condensation in a humid Czech
pub, but so do other drinks not equivalently
honored with a coaster (such as a half-liter wine
spritzer -- vinný střík -- or even a cold soda).
The first round of beer of an evening, or
in a given establishment, normally calls for a
toast (připítek). It also requires that one wait
until everyone in the group is present and seated;
to start without toasting or without waiting for
someone else in the group is to show disrespect.
To make a toast classically means to raise one's
glass while looking into the eyes of one's
companion, clink the glasses together lightly and
say "názdraví" (to health). Rather more
informally, one can simply use the various
salutations, most commonly "čau" but also the
old Sokol4
slogan "nazdar" which means much
the same thing, or the informal greeting "ahoj."
A somewhat humorous pun is to say "nádraží",
which sounds like "názdraví" but means "train
station." (Zíbrt, 1910: 65-71 et passim, describes
a number of Czech toasts and drinking lore from
the 16th through 19th centuries.)
A few rules must be followed. One
must look into the eyes of one's partner while
clinking the glasses together, and clink the
glasses one at a time rather than in a group. To
do otherwise is to be insincere, not to give the
other person the attention or respect they deserve
(cf. Zíbrt, 1910: 49 for the antiquity of this
custom), and is occasionally attributed to
Germans, as this custom seems not to hold in
Germany. Part of this general rule of toasting
with a single person at a time, each in
succession, states that one may not reach under
or over another person's glass in order to clink
glasses with someone else. (At the other extreme,
Hungarians never clink when toasting. The clink
of glasses during a toast was once the signal for a
coup, and today no Hungarian patriot will touch
glasses while toasting. Several neighboring
cultures also require looking into one another's
eyes while toasting: Austrians and Slovaks do,
but Germans apparently do not. Neither is it
required in Britain or the United States.) As is
the case with many understandings of culture as
prescriptive rules, many Czechs think that
foreigners take some of the toasting a bit too
seriously. Failure to look into someone's eyes
directly while toasting is grounds for reproach,
but Czechs sometimes say that foreigners
concern for toasting with every last person is
excessive. And then they proceed to do precisely
that, and to express insult when they are
overlooked.
Among students and young men, there
is a more elaborate form of clinking glasses. The
simplest elaboration is to tap the glass on the
coaster or a wooden table top after clinking
glasses and before taking the first drink. A slight
variation on this is to clink the glass additionally
against an ashtray or any other glass or ceramic
item on the table that is not a cup. The idea in
this is that it makes a different quality clink than
either the glasses together or the tap against the
Volume21, Number 1
table, but clinking one's glass against another
glass sitting on the table is either rude (to the
person whose glass it is), or distasteful and in
any case runs the risk, especially as the evening
progresses and the tally marks on the tab
increase in number, of breaking the target glass.
The fullest variation is to clink the glasses
together first top, then bottom, then angled to
one side and the other, then to rub the glasses
against one another, tap them firmly on the
tabletop or coaster, and then to take a long drink.
People see this as a deliberately humorous
caricature of the toasting tradition and usually
smile while doing so; as nearly a parody, it
practically demands either the most formal
"názdraví" in a tone of mock gravity or
suppressed laughter, or something silly like
"nádraží."
A beer should always be treated with
respect, and a sign of this is that a beer is never
mixed or poured from one container to another.
Czech beer is ideally served cold, with about two
centimeters of foam on top. A holdover from the
Communist era is that all glasses are marked
with a measuring point which should be reached
by the meniscus of the liquid.5
Bartenders can
short their customers somewhat by serving
greater amounts of foam; ideally, the beer should
be level with the mark when the foam is nearly
dissolved, and to fall short of this is to give bad
measure. Bartenders learn a complex art of
drawing beer from the tap in order to achieve the
right amount of foam (pěna or smetana) on the
beer, involving several glasses and pouring foam
off from the main glass into others, where it will
settle into a few centimeters of liquid beer which
is then topped off from the tap to serve a later
customer. This process is most necessary for the
first several liters of beer to come out of a newly
tapped keg.
The bartender, however, like other
handlers of sacred substances, is the only person
permitted to mix beer or pour it from one glass to
another. Once a beer has arrived in its final glass
and been placed on the table, it should not be
poured into another glass or mixed with
anything. Neither do Czech pubs serve pitchers
of beer; beer is always served in individual
glasses straight from the tap (though sometimes
people will carry home beer from a local pub in
liter bottles if a party at home runs short --
essentially beer take-out). On my first trip to
Prague, I discovered this rather painfully. I was
sitting in a pub with a group of Czech men,
drinking and talking. The waiter had already
brought the next round of beers, though we were
only about halfway through our half-liters, but he
had brought small beers. I thoughtlessly poured
the small beer into the large beer, to cool down
the large beer and clear some space on the
increasingly crowded table as I might do in a bar
in Boston or San Diego. Conversation suddenly
stopped and my companions looked at me as
though I had spit into the beer. I have seen
Czechs occasionally split beers or consolidate
beers, but it usually occurs late in the evening,
among close friends, and rather surreptitiously,
as it is considered more than a little gauche.
There do exist a couple of mixed drinks
involving beer, but none are common, and some
Czechs claim not to have heard of them. I have
seen all of them served in bars at some point
during my time in Prague. One is beer with
Sprite, at a mixture of about half and half. Most
informants responded that this sounded like an
abomination and was probably a German drink.
(Later research found that this is in fact a
German and Austrian drink called a Radler,
though some Czechs drink it on rare occasion
and call it pivo se sprajtem.) Beer can also be
mixed with Fernet or Becherovka, analogous to
the Japanese-American "sake bomb", but this is
equally rare. Czechs generally demonstrate
disgust at mixing anything else with beer, like
lemon slices in German Hefeweizen or lime
wedges in Mexican Corona. Wine, however,
which most Americans would balk at mixin, is
often drunk mixed with soda or cola.
There is one legitimate exception to
mixing beer, and an exception to the rule that
men do not normally drink dark beer. There
exists so-called "cut" beer -- řezeno pivo or řezák
-- which is a 50-50 mix of light and dark beer.
This is not like a Black and Tan, in which
Guiness is floated on a lighter beer, but is in fact
blended. One is not supposed to mix beers from
different breweries in making this drink, but
given that most pubs have contracts with a single
brewery, that concern is more hypothetical than
practical. The heroine of Hrabaľs Cutting it
Short describes quite lyrically:
`Half-and-half,' I told myself into the can
and then I sipped in and gradually, holding
back the desire to pour down the whole
measure at once, ever so slowly and
sweetly I swallowed down that light lager
mixed with dark garnet, that half-and-half,
mutra the maltsters called it, I drank it ever
so slowly and tenderly, just like when on a
Volume21, Number 1
summer's evening out there beyond the
brewery, on the margins of the fields of rye,
someone sits sweetly... playing for himself
his melancholic song (Hrabal 1976: 87).
The Healing Powers of Pivo
Beer and various Czech herbal liqueurs
also play a major role in Czech folk medicine.
Many Czechs swear by the healing powers of
pivo. They say that it has "a lot of vitamin B"
and that iťs very nutritious.6
The belief in
alcoholic beverages as medicine extends to
several liqueurs peculiar to the Czech lands and
Slovakia which have reputations as "digestives"
and "medicinal." When translated through the
models of folk biology, this effectively states
that they have herbs in them. Absinthe is a
liqueur once popular across Europe but banned
in most countries other than the Czech Republic,
Slovakia, and Spain since the nineteenth century.
It is a decoction of herbs in grain alcohol,
prepared from a combination of wormwood
(Artemisia absinthum), licorice, angelica, and
other herbs, and has an alcohol content of some
70-80%. Less potent but still strongly herbal and
fairly alcoholic are Becherovka, from the Jan
Becher distillery in the spa town of Karlovy
Vary (Carlsbad) in western Bohemia, and Fernet
from the Stock Plzeň-Božkov distillery in Plzeň.
Both belong to the same Central European
family of herbal liqueurs as the German
Jägermeister and the bitter Hungarian cordial
unicum. Both Becherovka and Fernet are drunk
straight as shots or mixed with tonic (beton is
Becherovka with tonic, bavorák is Fernet with
tonic). Also common with local variations
throughout Central and Eastern Europe, slivovice
or plum brandy carries a reputation for general
but unspecified medicinal powers. (Less
common variations are made from a number of
fruits, including apples -- jablkovice,
huckleberries or bilberries -- borůvkovice, pears -
hruškovice, apricots -- meruňkovice; and even
pine needles -- borovice).
Czechs believe with almost
superstitious fervor that "mixing" drinks -- in the
sense of switching from one category of alcohol
-- beer, wine, liquor -- to another in the course of
an evening is bad. This does not stop them from
doing it, of course, but doing so will often draw
comment from someone in a group, especially if
the sense is that the group is just out for a couple
of beers. Some Czechs will actually show some
nervousness -- as in warning that "you really
shouldn't mix different kinds of drinks" -- and
some will even comment on switching different
brands of beer, if one is switching pubs. I have
heard this given as a mild reason not to switch
pubs -- presumably it was in fact being given as
an excuse that was motivated by something else,
but the fact that it could be given as an argument
at all is suggestive. It was not that they disliked
the brand of beer at the proposed pub, but rather
that we had been drinking brand X all evening
already and should not "mix" our drinks.
Slightly more common is the comment, if
changing between pubs with contracts to the
same brewer, "Such and such a pub even has the
same kind of beer, so we won't be mixing."
A final consideration in the folk
medical beliefs around alcohol strictly prohibits
drinking while taking antibiotics. This warning is
given in other countries of course, and has two
major justifications from a medical viewpoint.
Alcohol can increase the risk of various side
effects of antibiotics, including toxicity and
carcinogenicity. It also can increase clearance of
the antibiotic from one's body and reduce its
effectiveness, either by increasing urination or by
stimulating metabolism of the drug by the liver.
The Czech folk belief holds a peculiar horror for
mixing alcohol with antibiotics, however, as
distinct from all other categories of medicine
which might have interactions with alcohol, and
also distinguishes two categories for the Western
category of antibiotic -- true antibiotics and
"chemotherapeutics" (chemoterapie). Western
medicine draws a technical distinction between
bactericidal antibiotics, which actually kill
bacteria, and bacteriostatics, which merely
impede their growth and allow the body's own
immune system to clear them, but this does not
seem to be the exact distinction represented by
that between antibiotikum and chemoterapie, and
the absolute prohibition on alcohol consumption
in the public consciousness is reserved for
antibiotikum per se.
The Dangers of Drinking: Alcoholism
Czechs consume more beer per capita
than anyone else in the world, and have
consistently maintained one of the highest rates
of general alcohol consumption over the last
century. Total alcohol consumption has in fact
increased nearly threefold since the 1930s, from
3.6 liters per person per year in 1936 to 9.9 liters
per capita in 1999. Beer consumption has
increased two and a half times over the last seven
decades, from 64.8 liters per capita in 1936 to
165 liters per capita in 2002 (See Tables 1, 2 and
Volume21, Number 1
3). Most authorities suspect that reported alcohol
consumption underestimates the true numbers
(ÚZIS 2001, 2002b). The World Health
Organization numbers, for example (Table 3),
are substantially higher than the estimates by the
Czech Institute of Health Information and
Statistics (ÚZIS).
Many Czech thinkers have discussed
the problem of alcoholism in their writings and
speeches. Tomáš Masaryk stated that "a nation
which drinks more will undoubtedly succumb to
one that is more sober. The future of each nation
and especially of a small nation depends
on...whether it stops drinking. Each nation
destroys itself by drinking and drinking injures
everyone who does not resolve himself against it
(Masaryk, 1905a; see also Masaryk, 1905b,
1912; Beneš, 1915)." Recognition by the general
public, however, has been slow in coming.
Bútora describes how the phenomenon
of alcoholism, like many other social and
psychological ills, was either hidden or
caricatured under Communism. The communist
press portrayed alcoholism as a degenerate
behavior of the bourgeoisie, alien to the
authentic, right-thinking, socialist Czechs and
Slovaks (Bútora, 1995: 39-40; 1980a). The
image of a wild-eyed, dissipated counterrevolutionary
clearly did not fit the more
insidious problems of ordinary Czechs: missing
work or arriving late because of a hangover
(kocovina), fights with spouses and neglect of
children, or an untimely death from cirrhosis. As
Nancy Scheper-Hughes comments on the status
of alcoholics in rural Ireland, the existence of a
notorious and well-known drunkard within a
community or on its fringes reinforces the
normality and acceptability of other community
members's behavior. Only the one or two "town
drunks" have a problem, and their flagrant
dysfunction normalizes the less dramatic
problems of ordinary people in the community
(Scheper-Hughes, 1978: 83).
Most Czech males begin drinking with
friends in mid-adolescence, around the age of 15
or 16, and are regularly spending time with
friends in pubs by the age of 18 or so. The
drinking age is only loosely enforced, and 16and
17-year-olds are often served if they are with
a group of older friends or are not obviously
under age. A series of studies have found
significant levels of alcohol consumption among
Czech and Slovak adolescents: a 1995 survey of
26 European countries found that 91% of 10thgraders
had consumed alcohol in the last twelve
months and 54% had been drunk at least once
during that time (ESPAD, 1997); a 1993 study
found that 38% of 15-year-old boys and 18% of
15-year-old girls drink alcoholic beverages at
least once a week (WHO, 1996); and another
1993 study found that 87% and 88% of 14-yearolds
and 16-year-olds, respectively, had used
alcohol in the past year (European Commission,
1995). The general acceptance and availability of
alcohol as compared with many western
countries appears to offer a protective factor
against teen drinking, as alcohol is not forbidden
and offers less allure. My informants reported
that they initially disliked the bitterness of beer.
Most Czech teenagers manage to overcome this
initial distaste by the end of high school,
however, and males in particular often socialize
in pubs by the age eighteen when they can
legally drink. Certainly by adulthood, drinking
alcoholic beverages and especially beer has
become the normal mode of socializing, and
attitudes towards alcohol consumption and even
frank inebriation are quite tolerant.
Czech women drink substantially less
than their male counterparts, though still a
considerable amount. Women are more likely to
drink wine than are men, are less likely to drink
hard liquor, and drink smaller amounts in a
single episode of drinking (ÚZIS 2002b).
Women often drink with their male partners,
husbands or boyfriends, but are less likely to go
to a hospoda alone. The exception to this is that
young women in the cities, especially single
young women, do go alone or more often in
groups of female friends to dance clubs, where
they drink wine or mixed drinks. Women in
cities also often go out dancing with their
boyfriends, and will of course drink alcohol at
parties. The pub, however, is gendered as
masculine territory to the extent that one will
only rarely see groups of women in a pub by
themselves. The typical crowd in most pubs
comprises groups of men, or in pubs which
attract a younger crowd, groups of men and
mixed groups of young men with their
girlfriends. In fact, the advertising campaign in
2002-2003 for Staropramen beer bears the slogan
"chlapi sobě" ("guys for themselves") and shows
groups of obviously working-class men enjoying
themselves with cold half-liters of Staropramen.
(For further discussion of gendered aspects of
Czech drinking, see Bútora, 1995; Hall, 2003;
Kubička et alia, 1993, 1995; ÚZIS, 2002b.)
Volume21, Number 1
Heavy drinking behavior and frequent
consumption of alcohol are supported by cultural
norms of drinking beer in most social situations
and a concomtant tolerance for drunken
behavior. Drinking beer on a morning "coffee
break" at work does not raise eyebrows from
coworkers, and the equivalent of the threemartini
lunch -- the three- or four-beer lunch -- is
fairly common. Alcohol is available in Czech
cities twenty-four hours a day. There are no
official closing times for bars. Although most
pub owners do not find it profitable to stay open
past 3:00 A.M. or 5:00 A.M. in the case of
discos, small casinos are open near the central
train or bus station all night long in the larger
towns and cities. In the largest cities, such as
Prague and Brno, kiosks on the main square or
near the train station sell beer and liquor along
with sausages and fried cutlets (řízek) through
most of the night. Czechs can and do drink
alcohol in public: there is no prohibition of
alcohol in parks or at beaches, and it is the rare
restaurant that does not have a license to sell beer
at the very least. Even family-oriented
establishments such as McDonalďs and KFC
have beer on the menu and cafés offer a selection
of liquor-infused coffees (Algerian with custardflavored
egg-cognac, Irish with whiskey, African
with coffee liqueur, Brazilian with rum, and
others). In short, alcohol is easy to obtain and
there are few if any sanctions for drinking
alcohol in itself.
Drunkenness and the effects of
drunkenness are also treated with a fair degree of
leniency. Czechs feel little guilt at calling in sick
or showing up late to work when they have a
hangover, and feeling under the weather due to
heavy drinking the night before at one's own or a
frienďs birthday or name-day celebration is
fairly common. In contrast to the United States
or Britain where intoxication is de facto evidence
of culpability, Czechs consider that
overindulgence in alcohol reduces one's
responsibility for neglect of duties, at least up to
a point. A colleague of mine spent a wintry
weekend teaching English to businessmen on a
study retreat at a hotel in the mountains. Both
nights, the caretaker stayed up late drinking with
some of the businessmen. As a result, he allowed
the furnace to go out both nights, leaving the
hotel cold and without hot water, and was too
hung over to prepare breakfast. Not only did no
one complain, but when my colleague remarked
on this the second cold morning without
breakfast, several of the businessmen defended
the caretaker: "But he'd been up drinking all
night." Similarly, several prominent celebrities
and politicians are known to drink heavily on a
regular basis, with minimal criticism in the press.
A study by Kubička et alia (1985) of
young males in Prague found that drinking five
half-liter beers at a sitting was considered
acceptable behavior by most respondents and
41% said that it was normal to drink 6-8 beers in
an evening (3-4 liters of beer). Preliminary
results from my own research showed that males
who had drunk beer on their last night out
reported consuming an average of five and a half
beers (2.75 liters). This does not count other
sources of alcohol; my data suggests that Czech
men drink either beer or wine, but usually have a
strong preference for one over the other. Both
wine-drinkers and beer-drinkers often have shots
of hard alcohol in addition to the beer,
particularly if celebrating something or later in
the evening.
Actual rates of alcoholism, as of any
psychiatric condition, are difficult to measure
and in a cross-cultural situation particularly,
must be considered against the prevailing social
norms and the local effects of alcohol
consumption. In her thoughtful study of
alcoholism and depression among the Flathead
Indians of Montana, Teresa O'Nell (1996) makes
a case for the prosocial functions of heavy
alcohol consumption and occasional bingedrinking
in a Native American community. She
argues that in the local community, drinking
serves as a major mediator of social interactions
among adult men, and a certain level of
"excessive" or binge drinking is socially
normative. In such a setting, teetotalling by itself
was often a sign that healthy social relations
were lacking and the threshold for diagnosing
alcohol abuse or dependence should accordingly
be raised above that which would obtain in a
middle-class Anglo-American setting. This
compares to findings by Shedler and Block
(1990) that adolescents who experimented with
marijuana and alcohol but did not use them to
excess, were in fact healthier on several
measures of intra- and interpersonal function
than were either habitual users or total
abstainers. Simple application of norms derived
from other societies, particularly norms for pure
consumption of alcohol which ignore social
context, may not adequately detect dysfunctional
or harmful levels of alcohol consumption in the
Czech and Slovak Republics. However, it is clear
even from the society-specific data that Czechs
Volume21, Number 1
do experience relatively high rates of alcoholrelated
problems.
Table 4 presents data from the Czech Ministry of
Health for hospitalizations due to alcoholism.
Two patterns are apparent from the numbers:
relative numbers of individuals hospitalized for
alcoholism have increased over the last two
decades among both men and women, and the
number of women showing problems associated
with drinking has increased at a faster rate than
the comparable number of men. A consistent
finding is that women's drinking patterns,
particularly among younger, more educated, and
urban women, are slowly but surely becoming
more similar to those of their male counterparts
(ÚZIS, 2002b). Other measures of alcoholism,
such as the number of deaths from cirrhosis and
alcohol-related liver damage, are also high in the
Czech Republic. Bútora reports that the rate of
cirrhosis rose 470% between 1950 and 1990,
from 5.4 to 24.7 deaths per 100,000 population.
WHO numbers show that the numbers have
continued to rise throughout the 1990s (see
Table 5). Overall, Czech and Slovak authorities
have begun to recognize the deleterious effects
of heavy alcohol consumption, but the general
public still holds fairly tolerant views of social
drinking and even of frank intoxication. Exact
numbers, both in terms of consumption and in
individuals dependent on alcohol, are hard to
determine, but the presence of the problem is
indisputable.
A Culture of Beer
We can see then that if any culture in
the world qualifies as a beer-drinking culture, it
is the Czechs. Images of beer and beer-drinking
pervade Czech literature and film, from Hašek's
drunken anti-hero Švejk or the brewery which
dominates Hrabaľs Little Town Where Time
Stood Still, to the scenes from the popular
musical Stařci na chmelu (The old folks in the
hops). Beer acts as a major mediator and
occasion of sociality, and Czechs are among the
greatest beer-drinkers in the world. This set of
associations and values, however, has a dark
side. Czechs have high rates of alcoholism and
other health and economic consequences from
their high alcohol consumption. So what
happens now, as both Communist-supported
temperence programs and government subsidies
wither away, as young Czechs increasingly have
opportunities to travel and study (cf. Nash,
2003), and the Czech Republic increasingly
opens itself to European and international
influences? Will the camaraderie of the hospoda
go the way of mariáš lingering only in among
pensioners in villages, or will beer and alcohol
more generally maintain their hold on Czech
social life? It remains to be seen what will
happen to Czechs' relationship with their beer as
the nation "returns to Europe."
Acknowledgements
This article would never have been possible
without the help of Karel Vrbenský, my first
guide to the world of české hospody and
someone who takes his pivo quite seriously.
Many thanks also to Vojtěch Kostiha, Dušan
Quis, Bohdan Ševčík, Margaret Rance, and the
staff of Stella bar, Alcatraz, and Angel. This
article is based in part on my dissertation
research in Prague, Czech Republic, which was
supported by the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship,
U.S. Dept. of Education; the MST Program at
UC San Diego School of Medicine (NIH grant
#5T32GM07198); a language training fellowship
from The Rotary Foundation; the Center for
Gender Studies and the Committee on Human
Development at the University of Chicago; and
the Melford E. Spiro Fieldwork Grant from the
Dept. of Anthropology, UC San Diego.
Timothy M. Hall is completing his M.D. and
Ph.D. at the University of California - San Diego
with a specialization in psychiatric anthropology.
He can be reached at mccajor@post.harvard.edu.
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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 1978, Saints,
Scholars, and Schizophrenics: mental
illness in rural Ireland. Berkeley, CA:
California.
Shedler, Jonathan; and Block, Jack, 1990,
Adolescent drug use and psychological
health: A longitudinal inquiry,
American Psychologist, 45(5): 612-630.
Smetana, Bedřich, 1866, Prodaná nevěsta
[The Bartered Bride]. Libretto by Karel
Sabina. Program notes by František
Bartoš in English, French, and German
and libretto in Czech with translations.
Prague, Czechoslovakia: Supraphon,
1982.
ÚZIS (Ústav zdravotnických informaci a
statistiky České republiky -- Institute of
Health Information and Statistics of the
Czech Republic. URL:
http://www.uzis.cz), 1998a, Aktuální
informace (AI) č. 67: Psychiatrická
péče v psychiatrických lůžkových
zařízeních ČR v roce 1995 a 1996.
(Prague, Czech Republic: 9.1.1998)
--------, 1998b, Aktuální informace
(AI) č. 67: Psychiatrická péče v
psychiatrických lůžkových zařízeních
ČR v roce 1997. (Prague, Czech
Republic: 7. 12. 1998)
--------, 2001, Aktuální informace (AI) č. 41:
Zdravotně riziková konzumace alkoholu
v ČR (srovnání šetření HIS CR 1999,
CIDI 1999 a studie SZÚ 1996) [Healthrisking
alcohol consumption in CR
(comparison of results of HIS CR 1999,
CIDI 1999, and a study by the State
Health Institute, Prague)]. (Prague,
Czech Republic:10.7.2001)
--------,2002a,Aktualní informace (AI) č. 57:
Hospitalizování v psychiatrických
lůžkových zařízeních ČR v roce 2001
[Hospitalization in psychiatric beds in
CR in 2001]. (Prague, Czech Republic:
3.12.2002).
--------, 2002b, Aktualní informace (AI) č. 9:
Šetření zdravotního stavu české
populace (EUROHIS 2001) Díl XI.:
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status of the Czech population
(EUROHIS 2001), Part XI:
Consumption of alcohol]. (Prague,
Czech Republic: 22.2.2002)
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Volume21, Number 1
Zíbrt, Čeněk, 1910, Řády a práva
starodávných pijanských Čechů a
družstev kratochvilných v zemích
českých (Přiloha časopisu ,,Sládek"
neodvislého týdenníku pivovarského,
ročník druhý). Prague: Knihtiskárna V.
Kotrba.
1
Notes
1
Karel Vrbenský, hospoda U medvídků, Praha,
June 1998.
2
The degree system was developed by Carl
Joseph Napoleon Balling in England based on
earlier research density measurements and
saccharometry. It was introduced into British and
German brewing in the 1840s. Each "degree" in
the Balling scale represents 1% sugar content by
volume (in the mash, for brewing contexts) at
14° R (63.5 °F or 17 °C). The Balling scale uses
the Rankine temperature measurement, an
absolute temperature scale using Fahrenheit
degrees. The system has since been replaced in
brewing by the Plato scale and in wine-making
and confectionary by the Brix scale, which were
developed later and calibrated to degrees Celsius
(Brewers Journal, 1903: 48-49, 80-81;
Goldammer, Ted. The Brewers' Handbook: The
Complete Book to Brewing Beer. Herndon, VA:
Apex Publishers, 2002).
3
Mariáš is normally a three-person game,
though variants exist for four or two players. It
ultimately derives from a French game called
mariage and is related to other local games in
Central Europe, such as the Hungarian ulti. The
game is played with a special deck of 32 cards,
which look more like Tarot cards than English
playing card. There are four suits: hearts or red
(červené), balls (kule), acorns (žaludy) and
leaves or green (zelené); each of eight cards: ace
(eso), king (král), over-knave (filek), underknave
(spodek), and numbered cards 10, 9, 8,
and 7. Mariáš is played in tricks, one player
against the other two, with a trump suit. Scoring
and bidding are quite complicated, which may
partly explain why younger Czech men less often
take the time to learn the game. The complexities
of mariáš probably also explain why most
Czechs who do not play cards regularly seem
unable to name the cards or suits: the names of
mariáš suits overlap partly but not completely
with the names of suits in regular cards, which
seems to generate some confusion. Information
about a number of obscure card games including
mariáš and its relatives can be found at
www.pagat.com. Booklets of rules for Czech
card games are published in the Czech Republic
and sold in gaming stores. Cards are available in
game stores and some pubs.
4
Sokol is an athletic organization which began
in the nineteenth century and played a significant
role in the Czech and Slovak nationalist
movements. Nazdar! was one of its slogans and
passed into the vernacular as a greeting. The
organization still exists.
5
Ordinarily 0.33-liter or 0.5-liter glasses for
most beers. Velvet, a relatively new beer with a
wheat-beer taste, semi-opaque consistency and
small, descending microbubbles like Guinness, is
served in special 0.4 liter glasses. Some
expensive tourist-oriented bars also serve beer in
0.4-liter glasses.
6
Beer probably constituted a relatively healthful
beverage in a pre-industrial setting. Turning
barley into beer preserves the calories through
the winter, reducing the chance of spoilage or
loss from mold and rodents, and also provided a
source of sterilized liquid in an era when most
water was probably contaminated with bacteria.
Beer does contain small amounts of B-complex
vitamins, but not of nutritional significance. Beer
contains amounts of B-vitamins comparable to
the vitamin C content of potato chips.
Volume21, Number 1
Table 1: Total beer consumption per person per year, in liters of beer
Year Czechoslovakia Czech Republic
1936 51.8 64.8
1955 79.1 89.2
1960 100.1 109.0
1965 130.0 140.7
1970 139.9 154.1
1975 143.4 157.3
1980 137.8 148.5
1985 130.8 146.9
1988 131.7 149.7
1989 131.8 151.0
1990 135.1 155.2
1995 --- 156.9*
2000 --- 159.9*
2002 --- 165
(Adapted from Bútora, 1995; Statistical Yearbook of Czechoslovakia; ÚZIS, 2002a; *Data directly from ÚZIS; Lidové
noviny, 06.01.2003. Data for the Czech Republic was tallied separately within Czechoslovakia; the Czech and Slovak
Republics separated in 1993.)
Table 2: Total alcohol consumption per year, in liters of pure ethanol per person over 15 years of age
Year Czechoslovakia Czech Republic*
1936 3.4 ---
1949 3.9 4.2
1955 4.3 4.5
1960 5.4 5.7
1965 6.7 6.5
1970 8.2 7.8
1975 9.0 8.3
1980 9.6 9.0
1985 9.4 9.0
1988 8.5 8.1
1989 8.7 8.2
1990 9.3 8.9
1999 - 2001
--- 9.9
(Adapted from Bútora, 1995; Statistical Yearbook of Czechoslovakia; ÚZIS, 2001, 2002a. *Data for Czech Republic before
1993 was provided separately by Czechoslovakian sources. Data for 1999-2001 provided directly by ÚZIS: same amount
each year.)
Volume21, Number 1
Table 3: Consumption of alcohol calculated as liters of ethanol per person over 15 years of age in the Czech
Republic, WHO estimates.
Year
Liters of pure
ethanol
Liters of
ethanol as beer
Calculated liters
of beer
Liters of
ethanol as wine
Liters of
ethanol as
spirits
1961 10.04 6.36 141.3 2.34 1.35
1965 11.94 7.66 170.2 2.86 1.41
1970 13.58 7.99 177.6 2.60 3.00
1975 14.95 8.30 184.4 2.94 3.71
1980 15.54 8.10 180.0 2.84 4.60
1985 15.24 7.70 171.1 2.93 4.61
1990 15.73 8.89 197.6 2.64 4.20
1995 15.25 8.67 192.7 2.65 3.93
1999 15.33 8.62 191.6 2.74 3.97
(Adapted from WHO Global Alcohol Database. Data compiled from FAOSTAT - United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization's Statistical Database, World Drink Trends, regularly published by Produktschap voor Gedistilleerde Dranken
[The Netherlands] and direct government data.  Liters of beer calculated by the author using WHO conversion rate of beer
as 4.5% ethanol by volume.)
Volume21, Number 1
Table 4: Hospitalization due to alcoholism,
Czechoslovakia 1980-2001.
Absolute numbers hospitalized for
alcoholism
Hospitalizations for alcoholism per 100,000
population
Year Men Women Total Men Women Total
1980 6,628 813 7,441 132.3 15.3 72.1
1981 6,785 968 7,753 135.9 18.2 75.2
1982 6,462 1,020 7,482 129.2 19.2 72.5
1983 6,711 1,224 7,935 134.0 23.0 76.9
1984 6,709 1,363 8,072 133.9 25.6 78.1
1985 6,586 1,394 7,980 131.3 26.2 77.2
1986 6,694 1,386 8,080 133.3 26.1 78.1
1987 6,920 1,471 8,391 137.8 27.6 81.1
1988 6,784 1,543 8,327 134.8 29.0 80.4
1989 6,970 1,811 8,781 138.4 34.0 84.7
1990 6,713 1,861 8,574 133.3 34.9 82.7
1991 5,473 1,720 7,193 109.4 32.4 69.8
1992 5,130 1,835 6,965 102.4 34.6 67.5
1993 3,915 1,278 5,193 78.0 24.1 50.3
1994 6,536 2,146 8,682 130.2 40.4 84.0
1995 6,821 2,340 9,161 135.9 44.1 88.7
1996 7,262 2,602 9,864 144.8 49.1 95.6
1997 7,564 2,624 10,188 151.0 49.6 98.9
1998 7,280 2,717 9,997 -- -- 97.1
1999 -- -- 9,511 -- -- 92.5
2000 7,082 2,896 9,978 142 55 97.1
2001 7,291 2,885 10,176 146 55 99.1
(Adapted from ÚZIS 1998a, 1998b 2002a.
Individuals counted in this table received a diagnosis
of Alcoholism: ICD-10 diagnosis F-10, and were
treated in a hospital setting.)
Volume21, Number 1
Table 5: Deaths from cirrhosis and chronic liver
disease (ICD-10 diagnoses K70,K73-K74,K76),
absolute numbers and number of deaths per
100,000 live births.
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
M total 1192 1234 1188 1218 1314
F total 537 533 512 546 594
M / 100 000 23.1 24.6 23.7 24.3 26.2
F / 100 000 10.1 10.0 9.7 10.3 11.2
(Adapted from World Health Statistics Annual,
Geneva: WHO.)