Náchod’s burghers, a lost brewing right and a municipal steam brewery.

Beer in Náchod, a town in East Bohemia close to the Polish border, is older than the brewery that carries the Primátor name. Czech Wikipedia says a shared brewery of the town’s burghers, who held the right to brew, is first mentioned in 1495, and that the right was taken away in 1623 by the owner of the estate, Marie Magdalena Trčková z Lípy, a loss confirmed by the next lord, Ottavio Piccolomini, in 1636. For decades afterwards the town had no beer of its own.

The modern brewery was the town’s own project. According to Czech Wikipedia, the council voted unanimously on 30 June 1871 for a proposal by the mayor, Josef Bořík, to build a municipal steam-powered brewery. It was designed by the Prague engineer Josef Vincenc Novák, and the foundation stone was laid in April 1872. The company’s own history says 17 brews of 10° and 11° beer were made in October 1873 and the first beer went on sale on 6 December 1873; Czech Wikipedia names the first head brewer as Antonín Lutz. From 1874 the business was known as Obecní pivovar v Náchodě, the municipal brewery in Náchod.

A twelve-degree lager followed in 1877, and dark and thirteen-degree beers in 1887. Czech Wikipedia records a 15° dark beer sold as Salvator from 1908, and a new brewhouse built by the Prague engineering firm ČKD from 1929.

A mayor’s title on a dark lager, then a turn to speciality beers.

The name arrived in the 1930s. The brewery says the trademark “Náchodský PRIMÁTOR” was introduced for a new dark 12° beer brewed in the Bavarian manner from special malts, first documented on 4 September 1935 and registered on 30 December that year. Primátor is the Czech title for the mayor of a large town, and the brewery says the name has been in use ever since, apart from a short break.

After the Second World War the brewery was absorbed into the state system: Czech Wikipedia says it became a plant of the national enterprise Východočeské pivovary in Hradec Králové in 1961, and that in 1983 it began brewing an alcohol-free beer called Pito. With privatisation in 1993 the town of Náchod became its owner again.

The late 1990s set the course the brand still follows. Czech Wikipedia says the management chose not to compete on cheap volume but on speciality beers, beginning with a 21° strong pale beer, PRIMÁTOR Imperial, in 1998 and a 24° dark special, PRIMÁTOR Double, in 1999. In 2002 the brewery added equipment for top fermentation, starting with a wheat beer and later a stout and an English pale ale.

The look of the brand has been redrawn twice in recent memory. The brewery says that in 2007 it changed its whole visual presentation, starting with a new rendering of the PRIMÁTOR logo, and changed its labels at the same time. MediaGuru reported in July 2018 that the Czech agency Little Greta had produced a redesign for Pivovar Primátor. In 2018 the brewery introduced its own shaped half-litre bottle, which Czech Wikipedia says carries the brewery’s name moulded into the glass, together with labels the company says were redesigned to stress the craft character of its beers.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Czech beers: Bernard, Krušovice, Gambrinus, Radegast, Primátor, Svijany and Lobkowicz. Between them they cover most of the ways a Czech brewery can be owned today. Finance.cz wrote in March 2024 that Gambrinus and Radegast belong to Plzeňský Prazdroj, whose sole shareholder is Japan’s Asahi; that the Royal Brewery of Krušovice belongs to Heineken; that Svijany and Primátor sit in the Czech holding LIF Group; that the Belgian brewer Duvel Moortgat has held half of the family brewery Bernard since 2001; and that Pivovary Lobkowicz Group belongs to Lapasan, a company under China’s CITIC.

A Czech beer brand’s identity is usually carried by a name, a town and a label rather than by a single bottle, and the brewery behind the name may have changed hands several times, or moved production to another town. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who founded the brewery, who owns it now, and where the beer is actually brewed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the town hall to a Liberec brewing group.

The town sold its brewery in 2009. E15, reporting for the Czech news agency ČTK in October 2017, said Náchod sold the brewery in March 2009 to LIF, a company from Liberec, and that a rival bidder, the Hanušovice brewery Holba, went to court to have the sale declared void. The case ran for years: the Supreme Court sent it back to the regional court in 2016, and the regional court dismissed the suit again in October 2017. Czech Wikipedia, citing iDNES, says the dispute ended in 2020 with a settlement between the town and Holba.

Under the new owner the range widened again. The brewery says that in the summer of 2009, at LIF’s request, it began brewing an 11° lager, which soon became its most popular beer at home. The group link also shows in production: ČTK reported in April 2022 that Primátor’s cans were filled at Svijany, its sister brewery, and that Poland, France, China and Slovakia were its main export markets. The business finance site finance.cz reported in March 2024 that the Svijany, Rohozec and Primátor breweries all sit within the LIF Group holding, in which Miroslav Kučera and his son Tomáš Kučera hold the largest stake through LIFPRO.

One practical note: primátor is also the ordinary Czech word for the mayor of a statutory city, so searches in Czech for the brewery return a great deal of municipal news; the brewery’s company name is PRIMÁTOR a.s., based in Náchod.

For a design guide, Primátor shows how a civic title chosen for one dark lager in 1935 can become the umbrella for a range that runs from pale lager to wheat beer, stout and imperial-strength specials, and how a regional brewery can mark its bottles with its own glass shape. Compare Svijany, its sister brewery in the LIF Group, and Budvar, the Czech brewery that stayed in public hands. For this guide we use burgundy, hop gold and lager straw with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Primátor’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.