Breweries in Bohemia and Moravia
The structural heritage of traditional production sectors
The industrial age is over. This does not mean that industry no longer exists, but it does mean that it is no longer the prime moving force in society and it has ceased to be the decisive criterion in determining how advanced a country is. New technology and production techniques, together with increasing pressures for the sustainability of all future development of humanity, have introduced a reduction in the amount of energy and raw materials consumed in the process of industrial production. The central axis around which the industrial age revolved – coal, steel, machinery – has lost its relevance. Today, production is less ostentatious, more low-key, and engaged in spheres other than those traditionally pursued, and often based on new principles and using different types of buildings.
The origin and onset of the industrial age (which in the Czech lands began around the first quarter of the 19th century and continued to the First World War) was accompanied by an extraordinary boom in the construction of buildings of various types, character, and size. Today these very same buildings, many of which are of exceptional architectural quality, are often abandoned, put to inappropriate use, are gradually falling to ruin, or are often the targeted for destruction. Industrial structures from every branch of industry have suffered from such a fate – from mining structures to textile plants.
Breweries are no exception to this trend: with the gradual concentration of production into large energy-efficient and economically effective units, small-production enterprises were abandoned. But there may be a difference in one respect: Beer is a typically Czech drink, and brewing a national industry. Therefore, the effort to conserve at least a fraction of the breweries that still exist has been more successful than in other sectors. The sheer number of breweries in the Czech lands is astonishing. Few villages and towns are not home to at least some brewery structure on some scale. Historically the network of breweries across the territory of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia was proportionately distributed, and it comprised over a thousand brewery buildings. Before the spread of mass production almost every town or village had its own brewery. The establishment of modern industrial complexes at the end of the 19th century, combined with the effects of the First World War, signalled the first wave of decline for smaller-scale breweries. In the aftermath of the Second World War more production enterprises disappeared. The breweries that survived the war and renewed production usually served only local consumption needs. Rarely were meaningful new functions found for those breweries that shut down. In more optimistic cases they were used for storage, but most of them remained abandoned. The nationalisation of property and socialist planning just accelerated the process of decline of what were often very attractive structures. The Research Centre for Industrial Heritage at ČVUT in Prague, which works to document industrial heritage sites, currently has approximately 1400 brewery sites in its database (the Register of Industrial Heritage) – and that figure includes both functional breweries and those now used for different purposes, and defunct or abandoned breweries. Although the oldest buildings of existing and in some cases still functioning breweries were built during the Renaissance and Baroque periods (Rožmberk Brewery in Český Krumlov dating from 1560 or Schwarzenberg Brewery in Třeboň from 1698–1712), the brewery profiles that we are more intimately familiar with and are more immediately recognisable only date from the second half of the 19th and the start of the 20th century. These harmoniously designed complexes emerged out of the union of two relatively independent parts of the production process – the malt house and the brewing house – within a single structural unit. Thus the malt-house kiln, the tall building of the hot-air kiln, terminating in a metal-capped smokestack, and the brewing refinery, with the tall windows and the distinctively shaped brewing tanks on several levels, became the breweries’ unmistakeable features. These unusual structural elements also often inspired builders to create striking architectural designs.
A stock of buildings has thus emerged over the course of several centuries, which today offers unique evidence of an age closely associated with production. The aim of this publication is to present as much information as possible about these spaces, buildings and sites.
The chapter titled “Malt Houses and Breweries in the History of Beer Production” presents historical brewery buildings in three chronological stages of evolution, from the earliest evidence and traces of brewery production on Czech territory through to modern industrial complexes. These stages are set according to the years of specific events that had an impact on the construction and structural organisation of breweries and malt houses.
The ground plan and the spatial arrangement of the technological areas in the breweries and the malt houses is the topic of the chapter titled “The Building Structure of Breweries and Malt Houses”. The evolution of production sites is introduced in relation to the process of improving technology from a craft to an industry and is presented using real examples of existing buildings and with the aid of building plans.
The following four chapters represent four basic ways in which to approach the use of the structural “wrapping” that the original production buildings provide:
• The building continues to be used for production, either in its original function or converted for a new production function.
• An entirely new function is introduced into the building.
• The building is left unused and remains a ruin.
• The building is demolished.
Other possibilities are just combinations of these four – mainly in the sense of putting the buildings to various uses at once (production partially continues, and in part a new use is introduced), or in the sense of a change over time (a ruin – then demolished, or a ruin – then converted to new use).
The selection of breweries presented in the production is not representative or exhaustive; it aims only to highlighting the unique qualities of one genre of production buildings that owing to dramatic changes in society became a category of structures at risk.
The objective is to draw attention to a thus far neglected structural form and the diversity and uniqueness of its architecture, while looking at little-known authentic internal production spaces that were developed in close connection with remarkable technological equipment. Many breweries have been and will yet be demolished. However, we believe that many of the abandoned brewery structures can be conserved and brought back to life, primarily through the introduction of new functions not related to production.
