Plzen, the Pilsner City

In 1842 the town's brewers, fed up with their own product, built a new brewery together and brought in a Bavarian brewer, who used bottom fermentation and pale kilned malt to make a clear golden beer that had not existed before. The combination that made it work is local: very soft water, Saaz hops from the north, Moravian malt. The brewery quarter east of the centre is a walled works entered through a triumphal arch, with a malt house, a brewhouse of copper kettles and kilometres of sandstone cellars cut under the yard where the beer was once lagered in oak. Tours end underground with unfiltered, unpasteurised beer drawn from a barrel.

What you actually see

• The gate arch - the arched entrance built for the brewery's fiftieth year, now the city's emblem.
• The lagering cellars - kilometres of cold sandstone tunnels under the brewery yard.
• The brewhouse - rows of copper kettles kept as they were, alongside the modern plant.
• The barrel sample - unfiltered beer drawn straight from wood at the end of the tour.

When to go

Year round; tours run several times a day with English departures at set hours, and both need booking online in summer and at weekends. Autumn brings a beer festival to the brewery grounds around the anniversary of the first brew. Winter visits are fine, as almost everything on the tour is indoors or underground.

Honest expectations

The tour is a polished corporate operation with a film, a bus ride round the yard and a group of forty; anyone hoping for brewing detail will be frustrated, and the cellar sample only comes at the very end. Photography rules are enforced. Beyond the brewery and the main square, Plzen is a working industrial city with little to hold you for the rest of the day.

Nearby

The main square with its very tall Gothic church tower, and the medieval cellars beneath the old town.