Water & Soil

How hard is the water in Brno and Znojmo? No reliable measurements exist for the two breweries, and that's precisely why claims like “the water makes the beer” feel overblown here. Modern breweries treat their water, softening it or adding salts until it suits the desired style.

What can be seen, however, is the landscape. South Moravia is hill country with a mild, dry climate, its vast stretches covered in loess and loam. Vines grow here on south-facing slopes, and those same slopes carry barley fields. Driving south from Brno, you pass through wine villages before reaching the Austrian border.

Beneath the towns lie cellars. Znojmo holds a sprawling labyrinth of passages under its old town, the Znojemské podzemí. Such spaces stay cool even in summer and were once ideal for storing cask beer. That was the prerequisite for a bottom-fermented beer that needs long, cold maturation.

In the glass, the difference from other Czech regions shows up more as attitude than chemistry. Brewers reach for Moravian barley malt, and their beers are known as round and full-bodied. According to Starobrno, this comes from traditional recipes using Czech hops and Moravian malt.

The climate also shapes storage, since Moravian summers run considerably warmer than Bohemian ones. Cask beer has therefore always needed cool places, and Znojmo and Brno had plenty of them beneath their houses. In Znojmo the passages sometimes run several levels deep; in Brno, vaulted cellars belong to many old taverns where beer is once again being poured on tap.