Černá Hora

Appearance & taste

All variants of Černá Hora are bottom-fermented beers. The pale beer is golden yellow to golden brown, foams well and has a medium to strong, full taste with a clean malt and hop note and hop aroma. According to the specification, the full taste comes above all from unfermented residual extract. The bitterness is medium to strong, slightly to moderately harsh, with a longer aftertaste; a very slight yeast or fruit note is permitted.

The dark beer is reddish to reddish brown, has a very full taste and pleasant hop notes; caramel and malt aromas are permitted as secondary flavours. The specification distinguishes pale lager (3.8–6.0 % vol.), pale draught beer and unfiltered draught beer with a typical yeast taste (3.5–4.5 % vol. each), dark lager from caramelised and browned malt, garnet red to reddish brown (3.6–5.7 % vol.), and semi-dark draught beer, reddish to garnet red with a slight caramel note (3.5–4.5 % vol.).

Production

The ingredients are a pale barley malt from two-row spring barley, called “Czech malt”, hops of the semi-early Saaz red variety as dried hops or extract, soft to medium-hard water from local springs and exclusively bottom-fermenting yeast.

Mashing follows the two-stage decoction process: part of the mash is boiled separately, and the step is repeated twice. After lautering, the wort is boiled with hops for 80 to 120 minutes and reduced to the original gravity of the finished beer, which does not change afterwards. Primary fermentation takes 6 to 12 days in open fermentation vats at no more than 9.5 °C. Separately, secondary fermentation and maturation follow in closed tanks at up to about 0 °C and slight overpressure, for 21 to 60 days depending on the original gravity. During this time the beer clears, absorbs carbon dioxide and rounds off. It is then filtered or left unfiltered and filled into kegs, bottles, cans or tanks.

Origin & history

The area is the municipality of Černá Hora in South Moravia.

According to the specification, beer has been brewed there continuously since the 13th century; the first written record of the brewery dates from 1530. The brewery had many owners, was nationalised in 1949 and became independent again in 1996 in the course of privatisation; according to the specification, it always brewed by the traditional methods. Documents on its history, for example from the time of the Dominican order in Černá Hora, are kept in the Moravian Provincial Archives in Brno. Every April and September the municipality holds events around the beer, the “Welcome to Spring” and the “Beer Festival”. In 1995 the Brno historian Leoš Vašek published a book on the brewing history of the village.