The Lobkowicz family, Vysoký Chlumec and five centuries of brewing.

The name on the label belongs to one of Bohemia’s oldest noble families. English Wikipedia says the House of Lobkowicz goes back to the gentry of north-eastern Bohemia in the late 14th century, that its members were made princes by Emperor Ferdinand II in 1623, and that in 1786 Emperor Joseph II created the seventh prince Duke of Roudnice. The family’s web address, lobkowicz.cz, belongs to the House of Lobkowicz itself rather than to the beer, which is worth knowing when searching for either.

The family’s brewing link runs through Vysoký Chlumec, a village near Sedlčany in the Příbram district of Central Bohemia. The South Bohemian tourism board, jiznicechy.cz, dates the first mention of brewing there to 1466 and says that from 1474 the brewery belonged to the Roudnice branch of the Lobkowicz family, which kept it, with interruptions, until 2006. Czech Wikipedia adds that the brewery was destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War and rebuilt in 1652, and that it was nationalised in 1948.

After the fall of communism the brewery went back to the family. Czech Wikipedia says it was restored to the Lobkowiczes in 1992 and run as the Princely Brewery Lobkowicz, and the national tourism portal Kudy z nudy says the whole brewery was reconstructed in 2006. Czech Wikipedia, citing a July 2005 report on iDNES.cz, says the family sold half of the brewery in 2005 to the German firm LBC Management and later sold the rest.

A premium lager launched in 2009, and a crest on the label.

The brewery then passed to a new Czech brewing group. Czech Wikipedia dates the purchase of Vysoký Chlumec by K Brewery Group to 2008, while a fundamental analysis of the group published by Fio banka in August 2014 places it in 2009. The same analysis says the group launched the Lobkowicz Premium brand in October 2009.

The premium lager was not made at the old family brewery. Kudy z nudy says Lobkowicz Premium is brewed in Protivín in South Bohemia, at the former Schwarzenberg brewery best known for its Platan beers. Czech Wikipedia says the Schwarzenbergs acquired that brewery in 1711, that it passed to the town of Protivín in 2000, and that K Brewery Group became its owner at the end of January 2008. Czech Wikipedia also says the Lobkowicz Premium labels carry the coat of arms of the Lobkowicz family, and that the Lobkowicz Premium and non-alcoholic beers are filled into green returnable bottles of the standard Czech type, where the Platan beers use brown ones.

The family history runs through the range itself. The company describes its Premium lager as a triple-hopped twelve-degree beer made from domestic ingredients with the brewery’s own yeast strain, and says its Vévoda 11 lager takes as its patron Ferdinand Josef Jan Nepomuk, Duke of Roudnice and a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The range now also includes a dark lager, a wheat beer, an IPA and non-alcoholic beers sold as Refresh.

Vysoký Chlumec itself has stopped brewing. The South Bohemian tourism board says beer production there ended in 2021, and Seznam Zprávy reported in December 2025 that the group had closed its breweries at Vysoký Chlumec, Klášter Hradiště nad Jizerou and Uherský Brod several years earlier.

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 K Brewery Group to CEFC, and on to CITIC.

The group behind the brand took shape quickly. Fio banka’s 2014 analysis says K Brewery Group formed in 2008 by buying the breweries at Protivín, Rychtář, Klášter, Uherský Brod and Jihlava, added Vysoký Chlumec and then Černá Hora in 2010, and in May 2014 sold shares to the public on the Prague Stock Exchange. At that point the group ran seven small and mid-sized breweries, most of them, the analysts wrote, with histories reaching back to the Middle Ages. Czech Wikipedia says the holding took the name Pivovary Lobkowicz Group on 1 February 2012.

Ownership then moved to China. Reuters reported on 5 September 2015 that the Shanghai-based CEFC China Energy would lead a deal to buy a 79.4 percent stake in Pivovary Lobkowicz through a special-purpose company, holding 70 percent of it alongside the Czech investment group J&T and the brewer’s chief executive, Zdeněk Radil. A statement quoted by Reuters said CEFC’s involvement would create opportunities in Asian markets. When CEFC’s European business ran into trouble, the state-owned CITIC Group stepped in: Echo24 reported in April 2019 that CITIC had completed the purchase of all of CEFC Europe at the end of March, including its stake in Lapasan, the company that controls the brewing group. Finance.cz wrote in March 2024 that Pivovary Lobkowicz Group belongs to Lapasan, which falls under CITIC.

The group is smaller than it was. Seznam Zprávy reported in December 2025 that it now runs breweries in Protivín, Hlinsko, Černá Hora and Jihlava, and that besides its own brands it brews private-label beers for retail chains.

For a design guide, Lobkowicz shows how a beer brand can borrow five centuries of authority from a family name and a crest, even after the family has left brewing and the beer has moved to another town. Compare Budvar, the state-owned brewery of České Budějovice, and Staropramen, the Prague lager. For this guide we use bottle green, heraldic gold and Roudnice red with an inscriptional serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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