Bernard
Bernard
The story of Family Brewery Bernard is one of the most inspiring and quintessentially Czech stories in modern brewing history – a tale of three men who looked at a bankrupt, technologically obsolete and commercially ruined brewery and saw not a liability but the realisation of a dream. Brewing in Humpolec, a small town in the Czech-Moravian Highlands roughly halfway between Prague and Brno, dates back to 1597, when the owners of the Herálec estate first held the right to brew beer on the site. By the time communism collapsed in Czechoslovakia in 1989, however, the brewery was in a desperate state: years of chronic underinvestment had left it technologically defunct, its beer had a poor reputation and its sales were at rock bottom. In 1991, in an act of extraordinary conviction, Stanislav Bernard, Josef Vávra and Rudolf Šmejkal bought the brewery at auction under the small privatisation scheme – paying five times its assessed value – and set about fulfilling their shared dream of producing honest, uncompromising Czech beer.
What followed was a remarkable transformation. Bernard became the first brewery in the Czech Republic to introduce microbiological filtration without pasteurisation, acquired its own spring water source from the Czech-Moravian Highlands, purchased a traditional floor malthouse in Rajhrad near Brno in 2000 and cultivated its own unique yeast culture – a set of uncompromising quality decisions that quickly earned the brewery a national and international reputation for excellence. Stanislav Bernard also took the battle beyond his own brewery walls, founding the Association of Small Independent Breweries and waging an almost two-year campaign that successfully persuaded the Czech government to reduce excise taxes on breweries producing fewer than 200,000 hectolitres annually – a landmark decision that enabled hundreds of small Czech breweries to survive and thrive, with more than 500 independent breweries operating in the country by 2020.
In 2001, the legendary Belgian brewery Duvel Moortgat acquired a 50% stake in Bernard, providing the capital for further essential investments while leaving the brewery's founding ethos and creative independence fully intact, with Stanislav Bernard and Josef Vávra each retaining a 25% shareholding. The brewery's guiding philosophy – encapsulated in its slogan «Vlastní cestou» or «Our Own Way» – runs through everything Bernard does, from the retro flip-top bottles and wooden crates that became an instant commercial and cultural success to the award-winning range of lagers, dark beers, wheat beers and seasonal specialities that have made Bernard one of the most respected and beloved names in Czech brewing, a brewery that stayed true to its convictions when it would have been far easier to take the simpler path.