Hundreds of thousands of litres of beer have since gone wasted and unsold due to the forced bar and restaurant closures during COVID-19 restrictions.
Instead of dumping the country’s most precious resource into the canal, Bernard Brewery is turning it into a 40% alcohol beer-based brandy.
Radek Tulis, a spokesman for the brewery, said that the new product isn’t going to sell as well as the beer, but will be much less painful than letting it go to waste.
“Beer brandy might not save the brewery, but it still gives new meaning to good beer and all the work that people put into it. Pouring beer into the canal is just a painful idea.”
Bernard has lost 14% of its sales so far from the COVID-19 restrictions, mostly because of bars not being able to sell their draft beer.
Beer brandy is made by slowly distilling beer and putting it into used casks. For every 10 litres of beer distilled, about 1 litre of brandy can be made. The final product is between 40-44% alcohol and has a malty, honey-like taste.
Plzeňský Prazdroj (Pilsner) has also begun making the product. Rudolf Šlehofer, Prazdroj’s manager of tourism says that the new beer brandy is mostly just an experiment in resourcefulness.
“Our objective isn’t to try to penetrate some new market, we consider it as an interesting test of how to use raw material that was initially intended for disposal.
