is the northwestern part of the Czech Republic comprising about two thirds of the country. Historically Bohemia was a kingdom (from 1158 until 1918) within the Habsburg and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of the famous Czech brewing towns are situated in Bohemia including Budweis (Ceské Budejovice), Krusovice, Pilsen, Prague, Saaz (Žatec), and Velké Popovice. Bohemian brewing became famous in the 13th and 14th centuries when some of the aforementioned towns were granted brewing privileges and banlieu rights (which meant that within a certain distance of the town only beer brewed by the town’s burghers could be legally sold). Part of this fame might be credited to the hops from (and of the variety of) Saaz (Žatec). Hops of that origin were considered so valuable that the hop bales were branded with the town’s official seal and that it was legally prohibited to export hop sprouts out of Bohemia. The brewing industry suffered greatly during the 30 Years War (1618–1648), which wiped out two thirds of the population and saw local nobility and town councils on the losing protestant side. Brewing privileges were revoked and many breweries were taken over by Catholic nobility loyal to the Habsburg emperor. It was not until the invention of the pilsner-style beer by Josef Groll in 1842 that Bohemia was put back onto the map as a leading brewing country. In the three decades following the invention of pilsner beer the whole industry changed dramatically, as brewers abandoned their traditional warm-fermenting techniques for the new cold lager fermentations. Pilsen’s technology was widely copied across the region and was more or less unchanged for more than a century, especially since the western obsession with producing “cleaner tasting” beers was not shared by Bohemia’s communist rulers in the second half of the 20th century. The traditional Pilsner beers, with their somewhat darker color and their sometimes noticeably buttery diacetyl content, would come to define something that was understood as “Bohemian-style pilsner.”

See also czech republic, diacetyl, pilsner, and saaz (hop).