The Making of a Classic: U Fleku Dark Lager
All photos on this page courtesy U Fleků
It’s easy to see the seasons shift in the fall just by glancing at a taplist. Lots of festbiers, pumpkin beers, and (around Oregon) fresh-hop beers. But things also take a darker turn as styles with a little roast malt make an appearance. A few years back, as lagers were becoming more popular, breweries started experimenting with dark Bohemian lagers, known in Czechia as černé pivo (black) or tmavé pivo (dark). As Americans have largely turned their backs on darker beers, Czech tmavý is a bit of a cheat code—looks dark, but tastes sweetish and chocolatey, with the smooth drinkability lagers offer.
Tmavý—almost always described as “Czech dark lager” in the US—isn’t a giant presence, but it keeps growing incrementally. Yet even where it has found a following, the style remains obscure to most people, and unlike other ur-beers that define their style (Saison Dupont, Schneider Weisse, and Pilsner Urquell), the small brewpub that defines tmavý is unknown to any American who hasn’t visited Prague. U Fleků is nevertheless one of the most interesting breweries in the world, possibly the oldest, and absolutely the most important example of a tmavý brewed today.
Five and a Quarter Centuries
Many European breweries have very old dates on their labels, and most of them are bogus. They date their lineage back to purported early examples of brewing in a town or region, often with centuries of intervening nothingness. But U Fleků is legit. The building currently housing a brewery has been the same one where brewers first fired up the mash tun in 1499.
The turn of the sixteenth century was a somewhat quiet period between the two major defenestrations of Prague, when a minor king ruled Bohemia. A malthouse may have preceded the brewery that would become U Fleků —not surprising given the time and place. Vít Skřemenec was the first owner, and he sold it to a woman named Ludmila Skřemenecká, who sounds like a colorful figure. [I get some help from Evan Rail here, who says she was almost certainly his wife.] It remained in the family until the Battle of Bílá Hora delivered Prague back into the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1620. The family fled Prague and the brewery was idle and abandoned until seventeen years later, when a new owner took up brewing there—but still under the old name. It shifted hands a few times under the same name until brewer Jakub Flekovský bought it in 1762. He only owned it for 45 years, but the name stuck.
The “modern” era began in the early 19th century, when a former mayor, František Pštross, bought it. He brewed ales there for decades until 1843, when he converted it into a lager brewery, making beer the classic Bavarian way (and by classic I mean dark). Finally, Václav Brtník was the last owner before the brewery was nationalized by the communists after WWII, and the Brtník family managed to get it back in 1991. (Source.) They own it still.
When I was writing The Secrets of Master Brewers, I corresponded with the brewery, hoping to learn what they made before 1843 when lager-brewing started. (In case you’re not completely up on your dates, Josef Groll brewed the first pilsner a year earlier 56 miles to the Southwest, in Plzeň. In the coming three decades, the erstwhile ale country would convert almost entirely to lager.) “Various types of light top-fermented beer were brewed in Prague and in U Fleků before 1843,” spokesman Martin Plesný wrote me. He didn’t have more information, and I’ve never come across a history of Czech brewing in English, so the kinds of beer breweries might have been making in Prague in the centuries before lager-brewing remains mysterious.
The Unusual Beer
During Covid, U Fleků unexpectedly introduced a pale lager, but for the 177 years prior, it made a single beer—their 13° “Flekovský” tmavé pivo (dark beer). You’d think the recipe and formulation would be a state secret, but in fact, there’s not even a fixed recipe—and it’s not a secret at all. Plesný wrote: “Every master brewer has his own way to brew the beer, and there is no exact written recipe. The method is basically inherited generation by generation, and the outcome should be always the same: a 13° dark beer of a smooth taste and a bitterness which is agreeable, not excessive.” That seems to be true, too. Digging around newspaper archives, Gary Gillman found separate references to the use of sugar in Communist-era brewing (1956 and 1982).
That is not the case today. Fleků’s basic recipe is well-known: 50% pilsner malt, 30% Munich, 15% caramel (or “toffee”), and 5% roasted malt. When Evan Rail spoke to longtime brewer Ivan Chramosil, who made the beer for 44 years, he gave more specifics: the caramel malt he used was CaraMunich and the roast Carafa II. As with all Czech lager-breweries, U Fleků uses decoction mashing (I think two but can’t quite nail it down), and adds Saaz to bitter to about 25 IBU. The brewery employs a coolship, and it’s the shallowest I’ve ever seen—ideal for quick cooling. In the classic Czech formulation of a day per point of gravity, it goes through a 13-day primary fermentation. Finally, the finished beer spends 4-5 weeks lagering.
The coolship.
If the process is perfectly standard for a Czech brewery, the beer itself is not. In Czechia dark lagers are often stronger beers. “Flekovský ležák,” as the brewery likes to call its flagship, is actually just over the line into silné-strength (strong) beers, though dark lagers are sometimes much stronger. Czech beers are categorized by the strength of their original, pre-fermentation gravity. A 13° beer would normally be above 5% ABV, perhaps 5.4%, but Fleků’s comes in at just 4.6%. So while the starting gravity would imply a stronger beer, it’sunder-attenuated, and the unfermented sugar left behind (over 4 degrees Plato) gives it a fuller, silkier mouthfeel than most tmavé pivos.
The beer seems to defy the laws of physics. It’s a fairly sweet beer, and, especially with the caramel malts, it should be too sweet. Yet a hint of roast turns everything in a cocoa/chocolate direction, and the lagering somehow produces a wonderfully smooth, supple finish. It’s full without being too sweet. I didn’t detect any diacetyl, though given my sample size, I don’t want to claim it’s never been in the beer. But it shouldn’t be. That would knock the balance off. The night I tucked into mugs of the stuff, it was perfectly balanced, allowing for a session that never felt heavy. (The dumplings I had with my duck—those were heavy.) Yet perhaps the beer doesn’t defy physics as much as time.
I often dream about time travel, imagining sitting down for a pint of London porter in the late 1700s or a Vienna lager in the 1840s. Munich in the mid-19th century wouldn’t be bad, either, and that’s the relevant moment for our purposes. In the 1840s, as U Fleků started making its dark lager, Munich was a dark lager town. If we want to imagine what those beers tasted like, Flekovský ležák may give us a good sense.
By all accounts—and here I mean by all Ron Pattinson’s accounts—the Bavarian dunkel lagers of that day would have been underattenuated by modern standards, too. Thanks to various quirks in history (wars and occupations), Czech brewing didn’t evolve the way it did in Germany. When you look at those old recipes Ron posts, they look a lot like U Fleků. Take Pschorrbräu, a Munich export dunkles from 1891: OG of just under 14P, finishing at just under 5P for an ABV of 4.8% (other examples he offers are very close, too). U Fleků appears to be basically a 19th century Bavarian dark lager.
Czech dark lagers aren’t like the local pale lagers, which have quite strict guidelines in terms of ingredient, process, and presentation. They range from session to doppelbock strength and may be roast-free to pretty dang roasty. Yet they shouldn’t come off like a schwarzbier, a lean, crisp style that drinks like a pale lager. It’s hard to fully grasp the distinction—unless you’ve have the fortune to sit down at U Fleků. It is one of the beers that highlights the difference between the Bohemian and Bavarian approach to lager beer most distinctly.
Based on the Czech dark lagers I’ve had in the US, I don’t think many brewers have had the chance to taste U Fleků. Or, perhaps they have decided it’s too odd for modern tastes. Or perhaps, in the manner of some of those other indelible, titanic classics of style, no one is comfortable doing a direct knock-off. Whatever the reason, Flekovský ležák remains one of a kind, and still the one example everyone who loves this style should try. It is not just a link to living history, but, given the strange nature of this luscious, frothy beer, perhaps an evocation of history as well.