Beer! Glorious Beer!

If theres one thing Plzeň is famous for then it's drunkn foreigners mispronouncing the name. Second on the list would be the several beer breweries. A close third would be the Skoda car plant, but that's only really useful if you need to drive somewhere to get beer.
The most famous in the area is the Pilsener Urquell brewery which has over the years, along with the Gamrinus brewery, been acquired by the SABMiller company. It's a little sad that something so vital to the Czech economy (and way of life for that matter, Czech's drink a lot of beer) has been acquired by a faceless corporation but it's also helping get tasty tasty beer to other countries like Australia, so I can forgive them for that.
History seems to be quite important at this brewery as they have kept most of the old, and occasionally original, buildings and structures. From the outside as we milled about we could see several of these including the main gate, an old water tower, brew house, and several of the old barrels used to hold the beer whilst it was fermenting. Another important thing seems to be public image as the whole tour was very swish with a defined route, bus that takes you between some of the more distant buildings, and a multimedia presentation on the beer brewing process. They've even turned the old brewhouse into a museum for part of the tour. This detracts a little bit from the whole experience, but you get over it rather quickly once you hit the beer tasting.
As part of our tour we saw the packaging plant, which sounds terrible until you get in there. This is where they put beer into cans and bottles and the machinery required to wash, label, fill, and test all the bottles and cans is mightily impressive. We unfortunately arrived when they were cleaning and performing maintenance on the bottle filling machines but we did get to see the can filling machine in action.
We moved on to the old brewhouse where we saw the old copper tanks used to boil the water, barley and hops. It turns out that the method of triple boiling was originally an accident, as the Czechs had obtained the services of German master brewer Josef Groll and upon seeing what he thought was terrible ingredients he ordered them to be boiled three times (instead of the usual one). The result ended up being rather unique and the technique is still used today. We also tasted each of the main ingredients used, barley, hops and malt, either in their grain form or powdered in the case of the hops.
Next stop was the new brewhouse, a large glass affair but still with large copper tanks used to boil the ingredients. The tanks used are still copper and are heated by a direct heat in the same way the brewing has beer traditionally done except for the two large stainless steel filtration tanks that are a more modern addition.
We headed back out through the old brewhouse again and on the way saw the first open steel brewing container that was used to brew the first Pilsener Urquell batch of beer.
At this point we were approaching the crux of our tour, the beer tasting part. We descended into the cellars below the plant which are kept at a frosty 7 degrees. The process produces a 'bottom-fermented' beer which is produced at a much lower temperature than other beers, using a yeast unique to Pilsener Urquell (which is even stored at several different yeast banks around the world). While they use big tanks now a small amount of beer is still brewed in the cellars in the large barrels and we got to taste some unfiltered, un-pasturised beer which was an excellent end to out long walk. We only walked thorough a few hundered meters of tunnels on our tour, but there are still several kilometers of tunnels beneath the brewery that were carved out over many years to make room for all the beer that was brewed there.