Czech Lager Experience: The Pours

At Sojourn, the journey and experience go hand in hand, while we will offer a wide variety of beer and cider, today we’d like to introduce you to the Czech Lager Culture. We will draw from Mike’s experience brewing in Austria learning from a Czech brewmaster to make our lagers a bit different. This has a strong influence on both our brewing and service process. We are installing special faucets from Lukr in Czechia.

These faucets produce wet foam, which makes our experience fundamentally different from other bars in our area. The ‘wet foam’, because it is mostly beer, persists for many minutes, it adds a creamy texture. Wet foam also rounds and slightly mutes the bitterness. Foam is the most overlooked component of beer service, yet it is the component that is most unique to beer.

You’ll notice 3 traditional Czech Pours, the hladinka, snyt, and mliko. Hladinka has the traditional layer of 2-3 fingers of wet foam, the snyt ‘50% foam – 50% beer’, and the mliko, which looks kind of like milk as it is basically all wet foam. These pours with the wet foam can really only be produced with Lukr Faucets. It takes a lot of skill for the bartender to accurately pour each of these. It also impacts the beer experience. 

 There is a general relationship between the amount of wet foam and sensory. As the amount of wet foam increases, the perception of bitterness decreases and the ‘creaminess’ of the texture increases. The same beer can taste quite different depending on who and how they pour it.