Inside the amazing new £15m Pilsner Urquell beer experience in Prague - opened by a Yorkshireman

But the Leeds-born property developer, who grew up in Garforth and attended Pocklington School, has now embarked on a very different type of project – opening a beer experience aimed at emulating Dublin’s Guinness Storehouse and the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam.

Neale and his business partners have just opened Pilsner Urquell: The Original Beer Experience, which tells the story of how the Czech drink became the foundation of most modern-day lager through interactive displays, a talking hologram and the chance to pour – and taste – a few rounds yourself.

Neale, who founded commercial real estate company Portland Trust in the late 1990s which subsequently agreed a long-term joint venture with US fund management giant ARES Management Corporation, invited The Yorkshire Post out to Prague to visit him at the newly-opened experience.

His time in the country began in 1991 after being offered a job by a Scottish property firm called Ryden which was setting up a new office in Prague.

It was early in his career after stints in London and Prague. Neale says he didn’t anticipate he would end up staying and building his career and life in the city.

“The Velvet Revolution was about two years before I came over. Prague is an incredibly beautiful city but many of the buildings were in a bad state of repair. They’d had 40 years of communism.

“My father thought I was very brave coming out here but I thought I would give it a year and see what it was like.

“But it has always been a fantastic place to live and work and I was very lucky to have been picked for Prague.”

In the years since, Portland Trust has developed or refurbished around 800,000 sq m of commercial space in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania, including the Metropole shopping centre and the English International School of Prague.

Portland Trust is the project manager of the Pilsner Urquell scheme, with a company called the Original Experience Company set up to run the site. Neale is a founding partner, along with fellow businessmen Chris Mruck and Nick Penny.

Neale says the concept of the Beer Experience was first pitched to him during Covid and he thought it was a “fantastic idea”.

He and his partners took on a long-term lease in an historic city centre building which used to be the home of the Prague Credit Bank.

“We did this deal in the middle of Covid, which was quite a brave thing to do in retrospect,” he adds.

“We’re very lucky to get this building as it is really quite stunning in an absolutely prime pitch at the bottom of Wenceslas Square and was partially fitted out for use.”

They have invested around £15m in transforming the building into an impressive and engaging experience involving a 45-minute interactive tour and the chance to take part in an “academy” showing you how to best pour the beer yourself.

This isn’t as simple as it might sound – there are three different Czech ways to pour a Pilsner Urquell known as hladinka, šnyt, and mlíko. The latter – which is the Czech word for milk – was traditionally served as a dessert and is around 90 per cent foam head with just a small bit of beer at the bottom. “You probably wouldn’t get away with serving that in Yorkshire,” Neale says with a smile.

While the experience itself is built around the fascinating history of the beer, the tour and decor have been very much designed around modern sensibilities – including interactive games on the walls and the chance to take plenty of social media pictures.

Visitors are greeted on the ground floor by an enormous beer tower with flashing green and white lights – the colours of Pilsner Urquell.

Nick Penny, who is managing the experience and, like Neale, is a fellow Englishman and a Leeds United fan, explains the strategy is to be unpretentious, fun and welcoming to all, whether you are a beer expert or not.

“Prague is wonderful and the whole city is almost a museum and it is so beautiful to walk around. But there aren’t many larger attractions.

“We kind of took Amsterdam as a benchmark where you have got seven or eight of this kind of thing.

“I think we can do 300,000 to 400,000 visitors a year and we want to build up towards that.

“We are aiming towards the younger end of the spectrum but it is designed so that families can go. It is very Instagrammable. People now take photos of everything and want fun images of themselves.”

While the initial ambitions are more modest than the well-established Guinness and Heineken experiences in Dublin and Amsterdam, which can both attract more than one million visitors a year, Penny says initial feedback has been positive in the first few weeks of opening.

“People are starting to come in but what I’m very excited about is all the reviews we are getting are excellent so we know people are enjoying the concept. When you set out to do a concept like this, it is a bit of a shot in the dark. The first step is to make sure people like it.”

The tour explains the story of how the first bottom-fermented lager ever produced was made in Pilsen in 1842 – marking a step-change in quality, taste and reduced hangovers with the technique soon being copied across Europe.

With the beers served in glasses rather than the traditional ceramic mugs, the invention also helped kickstart the Czech glass industry.

Part of the tour focuses on the notoriously bad-tempered Josef Groll, who was the first master brewer of Pilsner Urquell and whose hologram appears to “chat” with staff members at one stage in proceedings.

“Pilsner Urquell is the brand which basically invented Pilsner beer, which is 70 per cent of the world’s beer,” says Penny.

“The story of the brand is very powerful and the most interesting story in beer really.”

While it is possible to tour the Pilsner Urquell brewery in Pilsen, Neale says that, with the city around a 90-minute drive from Prague and most tourists tending to come to the capital for weekend breaks, the developers felt there was an ideal opportunity to tell the beer’s story in a different way.

“This is not a beer tour, this is an animated exhibition with a really true and interesting story attached to it. Pilsner made the first pilsner in the world. It is 100 per cent indigenous from the water to the hops to the idea,” adds Neale.

“This is the Eureka moment of making lager.”

www.pilsnerexperience.com.

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