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Plzen in the Czech Republic was literally born to make beer. When King Wenceslas II of Bohemia founded the city in 1295, he granted its 260 households the right to make beer. For hundreds of years, this worked great. Yet as might be expect with this many home brewers, quality varied over time. It was easy to get beer but not so easy to get good beer. In 1838, several of the more enthusiastic brewers in town declared 36 barrels undrinkable and dumped them out in front of the town hall. This drove the brewing households to join forces and collectively build a brewery -- The Citizens Brewery of Plzen. The idea was to create a state of the art brewery to put in place a series of new beer making practices that were making their way across central Europe, such as the production of pale malt. Under the main building they dug a network of ice-cooled tunnels for another new technique called laagering (from the German 'lager'- to store). Four years later they revealed a golden clear, crisp, light-bodied beer that blew the doors off the dark and cloudy beers of the time. Pilsner Urquell is still brewed in the same brewery with the same soft Plzen water, saaz hops from Zatec, Czech barley from Moravia, and the same H-strain yeast. We still germinate and malt ourselves, and continue to triple-decoct our mash over open flames. Pilsner Urquell is the Worlds Original Pilsner.