E-Malt.com News article: The Czech Republic: Beer industry to be saved by specialty beers

Even in the country that boasts the highest beer consumption per capita, beer sales haven't exactly been stout in the past few years, and now even larger brewers are trying out the strategy that has kept microbrewers afloat for years: brewing specialty beers that set them apart from the competition and attract a younger, trendier clientele, The Prague Post reported on December, 7.

"If we speak about really big breweries, specialty beers are still not that popular, but there are more breweries of larger sizes involved in specialty beers that are different from pilsner-type beer," said Jan Veselý, director of the Czech Beer and Malt Association (ČSPS).

The Vyškov brewery in south Moravia is one of a handful of larger breweries looking to capitalize on new specialty brews in an overall down market. Bought out by the Czech Beverage Industry Company in April this year, the Vyškov brewery had historically been known as the brewer of typical Czech lagers, in addition to several unique beers aimed at different export markets. This year, the company wants to launch several new beers on the market, including a variety of India Pale Ale.

"Now a lot of young people under 30 are traveling around the world and they want to try different styles. It's not for a classical restaurant, but for specialty pubs," said Vyškov Brewery Director Miloš Hrabák. "It's for a small segment of customers, but I think in the Czech Republic this segment of customers is increasing the fastest."

Hrabák says that though there are other microbreweries that have been successful with similar pale ales, Vyškov is the first industrial brewery to launch such a product with high production capacity.

The Bernard brewery in Humpolec is another industrial-size brewery that has experimented with specialty beers, especially flavored and nonalcoholic beers, like its plum- and bitter cherry-flavored beers. But Veselý says the "specialist of specialties" when it comes to nontraditional beers from large breweries is the Primátor Brewery in Náchod, which has taken advantage of its 130,000 hectolitre per year capacity to produce mass quantities of various ales, stouts and fermented wheat beers.

"Microbreweries started that boom, but it is closely connected with microbreweries anyway because they cannot be cheaper or of comparable price to the larger breweries because they are too small, so they have to do something special," Veselý said. "From the very beginning, they had to be focused on specialties in order to survive."

The microbreweries' formula for survival will likely have increasing appeal for larger breweries as sales remain low. ČSPS members saw just a 1 percent production growth year on year in the first three quarters of the year, and tap beer output was 13 percent lower in 2010.

"It's quite a trend now in the Czech Republic, and consumers want it," Veselý said.


09 December, 2011