Small restaurant breweries, which cannot compete with larger rivals in terms of quantity and price of beer produced, are trying to attract customers with other beers than the light lager which is so widespread in the Czech Republic and around the world. Due to their smaller production quantities they can be more experimental and brew more speciality beers and flavoured beers. In the Czech Republic there are now about 130 microbreweries.
At the start of the 20th century there were about 100 breweries. “For example 14 of them were in what is now Karlovo náměstí and its surroundings,” says Jan Veselý, CEO of the Czech Beer and Malt Association. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries this association of maltsters and owners of small Prague breweries resolved to face the competition of big industrial breweries such as those in Smíchov, Holešovice and Libeň. They therefore built the Prague Maltsters Communal Brewery in Braník, which soon became one of the biggest in the country.
There were still three big breweries in Prague in the 1990s. Besides Staropramen and Braník there was also the First Prague Citizens’ Brewery in Holešovice. Together these three breweries formed Prague Breweries plc. In 1993 the British brewing group Bass bought a 34% share in Prague Breweries. Among other changes this brought the extensive modernisation of the Smíchov brewery. Bass formed a group which also included the North Moravian Ostravar and breweries in Svijany and Vratislavice in the Liberec region. The British owner closed the brewery in Holešovice and moved production to Smíchov.
In 2007 the subsequent owner of the Staropramen brewery, the Belgian company Inbev, ceased production in the Braník brewery. In mid 2007 the Staropramen brewery complex in Braník was sold. The property, covering an area of 52,000m2 with a complex of 13 buildings, was acquired by ING Real Estate Development, which stated that it plans to build apartments on the site.