Budweiser Budvar
Budweiser Budvar
The story of Budweiser Budvar is one of the most fascinating, fiercely contested and proudly defiant in the entire history of brewing – a story that begins not in 1895 when the modern brewery was founded, but in 1265, when the King of Bohemia granted the city of České Budějovice – known as Budweis in German – the right to brew beer. For a time the city served as the imperial brewery of the Holy Roman Empire, and by the early 16th century brewing accounted for 87% of its entire civic revenue, making Budweis one of the most celebrated brewing cities in the known world. When American entrepreneur Adolphus Busch visited České Budějovice in 1876 and was inspired to name his own American lager «Budweiser», he was paying homage to a brewing tradition that was already six centuries old.
The modern brewery was founded on 7 October 1895 in an act of deliberate national defiance, when Czech brewers led by August Zátka established an entirely Czech-owned and Czech-operated brewery in a city whose existing brewing establishments were dominated by German-speaking interests – creating, in their own words, an independent brewery for the Czech people, owned by the Czech people. The Budvar trademark was registered in 1930, and today Budweiser Budvar remains the only brewery in the Czech Republic still owned by the state – making it, as its founders intended, a genuinely national institution with, as the brewery proudly claims, ten million owners and quality controllers. The beer is brewed exclusively in České Budějovice using artesian water drawn from on-site wells sunk to a depth of 300 metres, hand-selected Moravian barley and the finest Saaz hops, and then lagered for a full 90 days – vastly longer than most commercially produced beers – giving it its characteristic malt and vanilla aroma with a delicate note of apple fruit.
The name dispute between Budweiser Budvar and the American Anheuser-Busch, which has been running continuously since 1899 and spans more than 60 countries, is the longest-running trademark battle in legal history. In 2010, Anheuser-Busch lost its attempt to trademark the Budweiser name in the European Union and must sell its beer there as «Bud», while Budvar's beer is sold in the Americas under the name «Czechvar» – a pragmatic solution to an argument that neither side has any intention of ever fully conceding. Exported to 76 countries and produced exclusively at its single site in České Budějovice, Budweiser Budvar is one of the world's great brewing originals – a beer that has been making the beer of kings for longer than most nations have existed.