I'll toast to that! Open Championship partners with new official beer: Pilsner Urquell

A bitter and sudsy news alert coming across the wire has me hankering to start happy hour early today…

The Open Championship has a new official beer, partnering with South African beer giant SAB, owners of the world’s first pilsner beer, Pilsner Urquell from the Czech Republic.

This might be bad news. Drinking one of these fantastic bitter beers (my favorite beer in the world actually, especially when I’m in a local Czech pub) has a tendency to turn into two - or three - or six. We might see a lot of golfers at Turnberry this summer missing their tee time.

I drink Pilsner Urquell all the time, actually. I find I hardly ever get a hangover off the stuff (unless it’s a chaser after a few shots of Becherovka). And because it’s owned by SAB, they have great worldwide distribution, including right here in Austin, Texas. It’s even served on tap at a few places, including the best beer bar I’ve found downtown: Ginger Man, which offers scores of beers on draught and countless more in bottle.

I toured the Pilsner Urquell brewery a few falls ago in Plzen, mixing it with a round of golf at the nearby Golf Park Plzen (read about it here). It makes for the “golf and pivo” tour in central Europe. You can get there by train from Prague in about an hour, too.

I won’t be at Turnberry this summer, but you can bet I’ll be watching the action on the tube with a glass in my hand, saluting the winner on Sunday afternoon with a fitting “na zdravi!“

* Attention Pilsner marketing exec coming across the blog: email me and I’ll give you my home address so you can send me a free case of beer for this shameless plug.