For those of you who can read Czech, there are many really good beer resources on-line. Among the blogs that I follow, my favourite perhaps are Pivní Recenze and Pivníci; then, there’s Pivni.info, that besides blogs, forums and brewery directory has a sort of aggregator of beer news. There’s one more, one that I’ve come across relatively recently, Pividky, a bit of a strange creature.
It’s not a blog, it doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, they don’t do reviews though they publish some truly fantastic and very well written beer stories (this one about the mysterious disappearance of the minipivovar in Buštěhrad is a good example), but the most amazing feature in this website is their interactive, and up to date, map of breweries in the Czech Republic and near the border in the neighbouring countries. Each dot represents a brewery, clicking on it will open a new browser tab with all the relevant information about the brewery, including a more detailed map with its location. Below the map there’s a full list of all the breweries included in it, divided by region (according to that list, there are 213 breweries of all sizes operating in the Czech Republic right now). If you scroll it, you’ll notice that some breweries are marked with a red star. That red star points to one of the most interesting things I’ve seen done about beer, mapping the on-trade market share of 67 breweries nationwide, at a municipal level! (only industrial and bigger micros were tallied)
This project is part of Pivdícy’s “Fakulta pivních studií Univerzity alkoholu ČR” (Faculty of Beer Studies, Alcohol University of the Czech Rep.). You can find a comprehensive explanation of this project here, but basically, the thing goes like this: The data was gathered from another great beer resource in Czech, Beer Borec, a social network (?) of pissheads where registered users say what beers they had were. The data can be considered statistically relevant because it doesn’t only span the whole country, but also all sorts of on-trade establishments that sell beer; pubs, cocktail bars, cafés, pizzerias, clubs, etc. To tally that data they counted all the pubs in a given town and how many times a given brand appears in all them, e.g. (and as Pivdíky explain), if town X has pubs, and Gambrinus appears three times, Kozel twice and Žatec once, that town will have 6 entries where Gambrinus will have 50% market share, Kozel 33.3% and Žatec 16.7%. As far as I know, this is something that nobody has ever attempted, anywhere in the world, and provides an interesting picture of the Czech beer market.
What’s really unique about the Czech beer market is not so much how much beer per capita people drink here, but how (or rather, where) they drink it. Almost half of the beer is drunk on tap (it was more than half until a couple of years ago). Now, if you look at the maps of some regional breweries you’ll see how strong they are in their own regions. Here you have a few examples (all ©Pividky).
a.k.a. Primátor
a.k.a. Regent
a.k.a. Tambor
Even smaller ones like Vyškov and Tambor have over 50% market share near their chimneys, and it is a pattern that can be seen with most of the rest of the regional breweries (and even a couple of the bigger micros).
We know that Plzeňský Prazdroj has around 45% of the market share, with Gambrinus 10º still being the best selling beer in the country by far. But that figure accounts for the whole of the beer market, both on-trade and off-trade sales. The bigger breweries in the country have very well oiled distribution networks that can make their products available in any format absolutely everywhere in the country. It doesn’t matter where you go, you will always find Pilsner Urquell, Gambrinus and, I believe, also Staropramen and Braník in almost any sort of shop that sells bottled beer, but you’ll be hard pressed to find, say, bottled Polička in a small town in Liberecký Kraj; in fact, outside Prague, you might even have trouble finding the products from a local brewery at the branch of a supermarket chain (Kaufland in Strakonice, for example, stopped stocking the local Dudák a couple of years ago). At the same time, I’ve heard that some regional brewers sell up to 75% of their production in kegs. This leads me to believe that the picture would be very different if we tallied only the on-trade sales.
Looking at these maps has also made me wonder about a few things. How much can things have changed in the last five years? And if we went back 10-15 years? How different would those maps look like? But there’s an even bigger question, how different will this map look in the coming 5-10 years?
Na Zdraví!
You can read more beer ranting in my own blog Pivní Filosof – Beer Philosopher, on my Facebook Page or even on Twitter.
