From a joint-stock brewery of 1869 to a beer renamed for a new republic.

Gambrinus is a Czech lager brewed in Plzeň by Plzeňský Prazdroj, the company behind Pilsner Urquell, which the Japanese brewer Asahi has owned since 2017. Prazdroj says the brewery’s history dates from 1869.

The brewery began as the town’s second modern brewery. Czech Wikipedia says a commission whose members included the industrialist Emil Škoda prompted its founding in 1869, after a new land law allowed anyone who paid a fee to open a brewery or a pub. The firm První plzeňský akciový pivovar — the First Pilsen Joint-Stock Brewery — was entered in the commercial register on 25 June 1869, building began that summer, and the brewery started selling beer on 10 December 1870. Its first registered trademark called the beer simply “Pilsner Bier,” under the brewery’s German name.

The beer did not yet carry the name Gambrinus. According to Czech Wikipedia, after a visit by Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1907, in which he praised the local beer, the brewery’s board approved the trademark Pilsner Kaiserquell, or “imperial spring.” Part of the cellars has been nicknamed after it ever since, the same source says.

That name did not survive the end of the empire. After Czechoslovakia became independent in 1918, the brewery chose Plzeňský Gambrinus in place of Kaiserquell, and Czech Wikipedia dates the trademark to 1919. Citing a 2014 Czech handbook on brand names, it says the reason was plainly commercial: a name tied so closely to old Austria and its emperor, a selling point in the nineteenth century, had become an anachronism in the new republic. The first Gambrinus beer label was used in 1920, the same article says.

A legendary king, a raised glass and a red palette.

The name belongs to a figure of legend rather than a founder. Gambrinus is the mythical king and patron of beer, and Czech Wikipedia traces the story to a sixteenth-century German chronicle and links the figure with Duke John I of Brabant, the patron of the Brussels brewers’ guild, who was pictured as a smiling man with a crown of hops and a foaming glass. By the late nineteenth century he was a popular figure in Bohemian beer advertising, and Czech Wikipedia notes that the Smíchov brewery in Prague, today’s Staropramen, also used him in its promotion.

Because the name is a legend, it is not unique. English Wikipedia lists other beers and breweries called Gambrinus in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Romania, and a defunct American brand of that name, none of them connected with the Plzeň beer. The Czech brand’s own site is gambrinus.cz.

The king himself has stayed at the centre of the brand. Purple Creative, a London design agency, says in a case study on its website that it was asked to refresh Gambrinus after the brand’s appeal had slipped because of outdated branding and what the agency calls a low-quality stigma. The agency says it recrafted the Gambrinus icon, the patron saint of beer, to give him more warmth, charisma and confidence than the fairy-tale character he had been; tweaked the Gambrinus wordmark to be more modern and minimal while keeping a sense of craftsmanship; and “premiumised” the brand’s red colour palette so it could work across every channel. The case study quotes Dominika Drvoštěpová, Gambrinus senior brand manager, saying the changes made the brand “modern, relevant and confident again.”

For many Czechs the name is also tied to football. Plzeňský Prazdroj was the title sponsor of the country’s top football division from the 1997–98 season to 2013–14, and for those seasons the competition was called the Gambrinus liga, Czech Wikipedia records.

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.

One Plzeň brewery through mergers, nationalisation and foreign owners.

The brewery’s independence ended between the wars. Czech Wikipedia says that from 1926 the Plzeň brewers began to talk of combining, that the Burghers’ Brewery — the maker of Pilsner Urquell — bought up Gambrinus shares, and that Gambrinus then took over brewing the town’s ten-degree beer. The merger was completed in 1932, when Gambrinus was joined with the Světovar brewery into a single company, Plzeňské akciové pivovary.

After the Second World War the business was nationalised with other breweries, and from 1964 it formed part of the state company Západočeské pivovary. After 1989 it was privatised, and in 1994 the company took the name Plzeňský Prazdroj a.s., Czech Wikipedia says; its article on the brand dates Gambrinus’s place in the company to the completion of privatisation that year.

Foreign ownership followed quickly. A United States Department of Agriculture trade report dated August 2000 says that in October 1999 South African Breweries bought Plzeňský Prazdroj and the Radegast brewery, which had both been owned by the Japanese investment bank Nomura, merged them in March 2000 and added Velké Popovice that June, creating a company with four beer brands: Pilsner Urquell, Gambrinus, Radegast and Velkopopovický Kozel. South African Breweries became SABMiller in 2002. When Anheuser-Busch InBev bought SABMiller, the European Commission required the sale of SABMiller’s Central European businesses, and Asahi took over Plzeňský Prazdroj on 31 March 2017, Radio Prague International reported that day.

Prazdroj presents Gambrinus as a Plzeň beer: its brand page describes its unfiltered lager as the pride of “our Plzeň brewers” and lists the range by the Czech degree system, from a ten-degree draught beer to a twelve-degree lager and a reduced-sugar Dry.

For a design guide, Gambrinus shows how a beer can change its name to suit a new country, borrow a legendary king as its emblem and keep him at the centre of its identity for more than a century. Compare Kozel, the Velké Popovice beer in the same Prazdroj group, and Radegast, its Moravian stablemate. For this guide we use Gambrinus red, lager gold and foam white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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