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Beer and Bubbles in the Czech Spa Towns
Story and photos by Tim Leffel

I’m looking out at ornate buildings lining both sides of a narrow river, all brightly painted and looking new, while I sip a pint of pilsner in the country that makes the original and still the best. The people walking by are sipping something else from dainty porcelain cups. The day-trippers have left, the foot traffic is thinning out, and this Czech Spa town of Karlovy Vary is feeling more magical than I had ever could have expected from just seeing the photos before.

Before making this trip back to the land once known as Bohemia, I pull up a map and take a look at where past trips have led. I had gone south (Moravia region), west (Ostrava), and north (Bohemian Switzerland and Teplice), as well as spending time in Prague, but I’d never been to the UNESCO spa region or the birthplace of Pilsner. So this trip I am exploring the east, starting with Pilzen.

For true beer lovers, a visit to the Pilsner Urquell brewery is a pilgrimage akin to a wine lover going to Bordeaux or a coffee lover making a journey to Ethiopia. This is the place where it all began. This is the spot where brewers transitioned from top-fermenting ale that could be produced at any temperature (within reason) to bottom-fermenting lager that required cold cellars for its yeast to thrive. Although it’s hard to believe now, the clear and yellowish lager we now know as beer—the most common type around the world by far—was usually dark and cloudy ale before this technological development came along.

The Pilsner Urquell Pilgrimage

Back in 1839, some 250 local brewers around Pilzen decided to combine forces and standardize in response to local anger over, quite frankly, the crappy product most of them were putting out into the pubs. They hired a Bavarian brewer who was experimenting with a new method, Josef Groll, and together built a large brewery that could produce a quality beer at scale. The first batch rolled out in 1842. It was wildly successful from the start and the word “pilsner” entered the vocabulary to denote a new kind of beer coming out of Bohemia.

We join a group tour of the Pilsen brewery with quite a crowd and make our way through the small batch lab, past the historic water tower that used to store the spring water high above, the packaging area with bottles whizzing past. Then we explore the brewhouses: one just a historic exhibit of where they used to brew, then the newer one that can crank out “10,000 hectoliters of hopped wort per day,” which sounds like a whole lot of beer.

The “raw materials exhibit” has some hops to smell, some buckets of barley, brewer’s yeast, and the spring water from way below the surface. We stop by the ice room, where hearty men used to stack ice from lakes and rivers in the winter to keep beer cold all through the summer. Then we finally get a payoff at the end, where a local worker is tapping barrels to serve us a glass of fresh pilsner from the source. That’s not enough, of course, so I hit the pub on the premises for another pint. The bartender serves what I’ve learned is a perfect pour here, with a healthy head at the top that the Czechs believe preserves the flavor.

We then take a path from the brewery that leads directly to the center square. At Muzeum Loutek we get to learn about something besides beer that this city is famous for among the Czechs. This Pilzen puppet museum is dedicated to the area’s fame as a launch pad for this enduring form of entertainment, both for the making of the marionettes and the companies that toured around giving shows. It’s the kind of museum that can please anyone from age 8 to 80, with a fascinating, well-presented collection joined by a hands-on area and a puppet show staging area. The marionettes range from tiny to gigantic, from universal historic figures to the Spejbl and Hurvinek characters unique to Czechia.

Dinner that night a few blocks away at Na Parkanu is a true Czech experience. I watch the bartender fill 12 pilsner pints in a row and a minute later they’re gone, one of them ending up at my table. Since we’re in the home town of Pilsner Urquell, the company still delivers their unfiltered, barrel-tapped beer to local pubs and restaurants. So I’ve got fresh beer to go with my fried cheese, pork tenderloin, and “dumplings” that look a lot like small oval versions of Wonder Bread.

Biking Around Pilzen

The next day we’ve got a chance to work some of it off: we’re going biking through countryside to reach a few special stops in villages outside of the city. The first time I visited the Czech Republic—now officially Czechia—I spent most of it on a bicycle exploring the Moravia wine region. I marveled at how easy it was to move from village to village without getting on a major road and admired the work various greenways organizations had accomplished in getting all the various farm paths and country lanes connected.

It’s a similar story throughout this country, which is a dream destination for casual cyclists. After getting lost a few times trying to exit the city, it is smooth sailing on bike paths for more than an hour, with no need to get onto a road until we want to climb up the to St. Peter and Paul Rotunda, one of the oldest structures in “Old Pilzen” that was part of a castle complex.

We then ride through the village, stop for a hearty lunch, and then lock our bikes up in front of the giant cork at Bohemia Sekt. This is the company that produces half of all sparkling wine drunk in the country; only about 4% of what they produce gets exported. We take a tour of the facilities and see some areas devoted to everyday bubbly: one tank supposedly holds the equivalent of a million bottles and the production here can reach 140,000 bottles of bubbly wine per day. Other sections are devoted to high-end products made using the traditional Champagne Method, however, with regimented steps of bottle turning at different angles over a period of months.

The payoff at the end is a Bohemia Sekt tasting. It ranges from their Ice Pink brand they’re pushing for pretty cocktails and weddings up to a Bohemia Sekt Prestige, Chateau Radyne, and frequent award-winner Louis Giradot. With some Czech wine varietals that you don’t see in the mix much elsewhere going into these blends, like Welsh Reisling and Gruner Veltliner, the stars of the tasting are both elegant and unique.

Pilsen isn’t technically a spa town since there are no mineral baths here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get a good soaking in. We just need to soak in beer instead. Yes, the land of pilsner has combined its spa history with its most famous export into a dream pampering experience with double the suds. We bike up to the Purkmistr brewery after a half hour of riding, a brewery that also has a beer spa on site, and check in for a bit of mid-ride relaxation.

As I take off my robe and climb into the tub, I’m thrilled to find not just a pint of beer sitting next to the tub, but a tap at the ready for refills, This is no mass-market beer either: Purkmistr is brewing with traditional methods, producing unpasteurized and unfiltered beers made exclusively with Czech ingredients. The sensation is a bit strange, with what looks like the cast-off wort in the tub and some hops floating on the top, but when I take a few sips from my glass and close my eyes while resting my head on the end of the tub, I’m feeling content and that all is right in the world. There’s just that tiny nagging feeling that I still have to bike back to the city…

Into the Czech Spa Triangle

Marianske Lazne is a spa town in the historic tradition of the word “spa,” which is more about healing with water than getting a massage priced at car payment level at a resort. When we check into our room at Ensana Hvezda, the brochure in our room doesn’t just list some nice rubdowns and herbal wraps. The first page has a photo of the medical staff conducting appointments at the spas at the seven local Ensana hotels, with M.D.s specializing in urology, joint injuries, respiratory illness, oncology, diabetes, and neurology. Apparently with the right guidance, these wonder waters can treat everything from multiple sclerosis to long COVID and help the rehabilitation process after a multitude of injuries.

Our guide Iva guides us past a statue of Goethe—a frequent visitor in his later years—and explains the town’s history while helping us understand how the 40 local mineral springs work. I’ve been to other spa locations where a lot of soaking and sunning was going on, including at the Dead Sea where they treat skin conditions, but here in the Czech spa towns, the water is drunk as much as it’s bathed in. This practice goes all the way back to the 1600s when a Karlovy Vary physician, Vaclav Payer, started touting the benefits of drinking the water from various springs in the area. Over time, with different experiments and scientific tests, physicians learned more about which minerals worked on different ailments and they refined the treatments accordingly.

We taste the water from a few fountains coming from the Marianske Lazne springs and I am secretly glad I’m not a patient. “Coming here for a weekend to receive treatment is really a waste,” Iva tells us. “Whatever condition you are trying to treat by drinking from these springs, the healing process doesn’t really start working until day three or four and then it should be continued for some time.” I’m glad I’m feeling healthy because the tastes range from tangy and slightly salty to something akin to sucking on a dirty old coin I just found in my pocket.

Since we are only around two nights, we enjoy the therapeutic effect of soaking in the mineral water instead. At our own hotel is a huge warm pool in a pleasant area surrounded by windows. The pool could easily host 100 before getting crowded. The elderly German tourists around us bounce between the giant hydrojets shooting water down on their backs and the bubbling hot tub area.

We then put on our bathrobes and walk down the street in them, that alone a big thrill for my wife, who wishes she could do that during every hotel stay. After a few blocks on the curving sidewalks, we come to our second spa stop at sister hotel Nove Lazne. Here the baths are Roman style, with grand columns, frescoes, and inlaid tiles creating a sense of elite luxury. In one area we find a large whirlpool and a larger pool with gentle jets, while another room has soaking pools next to an area with sauna, steam bath, and a cold water bucket for shocking the body in between.

Royalty and Celebrities in Karlovy Vary

Karlovy Vary is only about a 90-minute drive from the popular Czech capital city, so a lot of travelers visit it on a day tour from from Prague or from Germany. That should be a last resort choice though because the city is at its most magical as the sun is going down, with the forests and fancy hotel buildings glowing in the Golden Hour. Then at night, the buildings along the river are lit up on both sides and Karlovy Vary looks like something out of a fairy tale.

We arrive by train from Marianske Lazne, a picturesque ride through woods and valley, with an occasional castle in the distance out the window. After checking into the tallest and ugliest building in town (built in the 1970s during the communist era), we find that our Hotel Thermal room is a different story, with great views of the town and hills. We meet up with local guide Jitka to see and hear the history of this unique spa town next to forests and mountains.

Also known at times as Carlsbad or Karlsbad in German, Karlovy Vary has been attracting spa visitors since the 14^th century, but it really took off in the Belle Epoque era of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when investors, celebrities, and royalty poured money into the grand hotels and homes in the area. The prevailing architecture of the time was ornate and grandiose: Art Nouveau, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Renaissance, Baroque, and a few hybrids compete to grab attention. The whole town feels like something you’d see in a fantasy movie.

It has appeared in a fair number of movies over the years, plus its annual international film festival attracts a who’s who of cinema. Photographs in the city’s hotels are like the front rows of seats at the Academy Awards. In a way this is just a continuation of tradition in Karlovy Vary: in the 1800s it hosted equally famous people of the time: Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Chopin, Sigmund Freud, and even Karl Marx. (Marx was getting regular treatments for cirrhosis of the liver,.)

Jitka takes us through the hotel of choice for the Hollywood elite over the years, Grandhotel Pupp, which played a prominent role in the Queen Latifah film Last Holiday. Then we board a funicular leading to a hilltop with panoramic views. We have a hearty lunch there in the shade and I order a Radler to mix things up. On a longer trip we could have walked to town—there are some 120 kilometers of hiking trails in the surrounding forests—but we take the funicular back down to continue our city tour.

We head over to a building that appears frequently in the James Bond film Casino Royale. Its name translated to the Imperial Spa or Emperor Spa when it opened in the late 1800s in anticipation of the high-profile guests from around Europe and beyond that would soon arrive. This spa featured peat mud baths, however. It was quite technologically advanced for its time, with elevators for the peat mixtures, heated floors, and flush toilets. It is open now as an event center and museum, with the grand interiors restored and the courtyard converted to a high-tech concert hall.

People both famous and humble still come here to cure what ails them. They soak, they drink mineral water out of painted porcelain cups with built-in straws, and stroll this place of beauty to get a well-rounded treatment. As in Marianske Lazne, fountains bubble all around town, the mineral-laden waters coming up from far below the surface. I take another couple of tastes and decide I’ve gotten the idea. Jitka agrees with our first guide in the other spa town: there’s no point in drinking this water if you’re heading out of town a day or two later. Your body needs a regular regimen for the minerals to work.

Biking to Loket Castle (not Montenegro)

The next day I get on a bike again and five minutes after picking it up, I’m on another Czech greenway away from cars and traffic. I ride through fields, through forests, beside a river, and past an area of geologic formations called Svatos Rocks. It’s a mostly flat, pleasant ride and I make note of the places where other cyclists are already stopping for a beer so I can hit one on the way back.

My destination is only about 12 kilometers, but in the Casino Royale movie it’s a whole other country. Loket Castle is one of the oldest and grandest in the region, but when Daniel Craig’s Bond has lunch at an outdoor restaurant in the main plaza, he’s supposedly meeting with an operative in Montenegro.

I lock up my bike across from the same restaurant where he was in the film and stroll to the end of the historic village and back to get a feel for the place. I walk across the bridge spanning the Ohre River to get a sweeping view of the imposing 13^th-century castle. It’s just a few steps from there to my lunch and beer stop: St. Florian Brewery and Restaurant.

Loket town brewed beer continuously from the 1400s to the modern age, but craft production had to take a pause in the communist era and it took a while to recover. St. Florian started back up in 2006 in the former 14^th-century malt house and now the owners brew a range of beer to accompany their hearty Czech meals—including a weekly “earth grill pork” that was coming out of the ground while I sipped a smoky dark beer from the tap and ate goulash with red cabbage.

Taking the Waters in a Czech Spa Town

I do stop for one more beer on the way back, at one of the many trailside options, watching kayakers set off into the water and head down the river beside others on inner tubes. I want to get back to take advantage of Hotel Thermal’s namesake attraction though: it’s giant pool and saunas complex.

We don’t have to worry about cramped basement mineral baths at this place. Like a huge rooftop resort swimming area instead, Hotel Thermal’s bathing area has two pools filled with thermal water. One is clear, like a lukewarm swimming pool, with various hydrotherapy features scattered around the edges. The other is hotter and filled with 100% mineral water. Ample lounge chairs are on the deck and a bar is serving the expected pilsner on tap. The view from here is better than anywhere else because you’re looking out of the ugly “brutalist architecture” hotel toward the more attractive historic buildings from the 1800s instead of the other way around.

After hours of soaking, water massages, lounging, we head out for dinner and have the best meal of our trip at Tusculum, a farm-fresh restaurant that is attempting to elevate Czech cuisine without losing its essence. It’s a fitting end to our stay in this land that has hosted royalty for centuries, our last hurrah before we leave Bohemia and its enchanting spa towns.

If You Go:

The Visit Czechia website is an excellent source of information for the whole country, but you can also find plenty on the Visit Pilzen and Visit Vary Region sites too. Follow these links for info on visiting Bohemia Sekt sparkling wine facility and the Pilsner Urquell brewery.

Editor Tim Leffel is an award-winning travel writer and blogger who is based in Mexico when not moving around as a nomad. He is author of several books, including The World's Cheapest Destinations, Travel Writing 2.0, and A Better Life for Half the Price on living abroad. See his long-running Cheapest Destinations blog at that link.

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See other Europe travel stories in the archives.