Fill All Fruit With Ripeness — Jitka Ilčíková’s Wild Creatures in Moravia, Czech Republic
If we begin with the premise that beer is a product of its environment—that a beer, particularly a wild-fermented beer, functions as a message in a bottle, a transmission of a finite moment’s rain, light, bugs, bacteria, and other ambient conditions—then what kind of environment is Mikulov?
A beautiful one, to be sure. A place that feels destined to occupy postcards and get sold as a “hidden gem” to the kinds of travellers who abhor being called tourists. Mikulov is far from the crowds that flush into Prague’s Old Town each day to pose in front of the Astronomical Clock and transform the Charles Bridge into one long step and repeat—Europe as backdrop, Europe as film set. It’s not a major hub like nearby Brno, or a site of beer pilgrimage like České Budějovice.
Photography by Claire Bullen
Instead, Mikulov is a place of mellow fruitfulness, a town that delights in ornament for its own sake. Every building seems either painted the colour of sherbet, inscribed with sgraffito, or covered in statuary. Every road seems to end at the hilltop baroque castle, drawing the eyes and then the legs inexorably upwards, offering as reward views of its land face-up. From on high, it’s easy to see how Mikulov nearly falls off the edge of the map. The Austrian border is so close that its lights are within winking distance.
The visitors who find their way to this corner of Moravia, the Czech Republic’s sun-gorged deep south, come to drink the wine that flourishes here, in the hottest and driest part of the country. Vines have been cultivated amidst the limestone outcroppings of the Pálava Hills since Roman times. Today, they fan out around the town, thousands of acres of Welschriesling and Grüner Veltliner and St. Laurent and Blaufränkisch. The sun, as it starts to fall, melts across them like butter.
This picture is a pretty one, but it’s not complete. Underneath all that beauty lies the more complicated truth. One aspect being: among those rows of vines is Wild Creatures, a brewery that is challenging Mikulov’s seemingly omnipresent wine culture—drawing from it, and, in the process, making it into something new.
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Contemporary travellers seem to regard most European cities as inert places—somewhere between living museums and theme parks—forgetting that their photogenic surfaces belie centuries of tumult, conflict, and subjugation. On this count, 800-year-old Mikulov is no different. The Hussites burned it; the Thirty Years’ War saw much of its viticulture destroyed. During the Second World War, Mikulov’s long-established Jewish community was decimated. In the latter half of the 20th century, under Communist rule, the town was less a beauty spot than a panopticon.
“It was not always such a city,” Jitka Ilčíková, the founder of Wild Creatures, tells me. “During Communism [...] property was confiscated, and it was a punishment to live in Mikulov. That time it was an ugly city, and heavily armed, so it was necessary to live here under the eye of the state. And every step was watched, and they knew everything about you.”
Jitka was born in 1982, seven years before the Velvet Revolution ended four decades of one-party rule. Though she was just a child during the tail end of the Communist period, she still recalls it as one when Mikulov was sapped of its vibrancy. “It was dark, everything was grey, not so colourful,” she says. “I can imagine how hard it is to imagine, but we had also some statues of Lenin here.”
Her mother’s family hailed originally from the central Czech Republic, and her father’s from nearby Vienna, although once they left they never went back.
“They were watching the border their whole lives,” Jitka says. “But they were not allowed to go there, because during the Communism, [the government] were worried that you would not come back.”
And so they stayed in Mikulov, where, among other things, they made wine. The business of wine was then exclusively conducted through the state, but there was no prohibition on producing wine for your own consumption.
“[W]e bought some vineyards and also the wine cellar, and it was a place where the whole family was gathered always for the wine harvest, so that’s where I grew up,” Jitka says.
““I would [more likely] believe her to be a garbage collector, astronaut, or man of the cloth.””
Wine is Jitka Ilčíková’s birthright. As a child, she helped her grandfather and father with the everyday tasks of grape-tending and production. Even before she was able to drink it, she learned to syphon wine from wooden barrels. At the time, her work in the vineyards and in the cellar felt too quotidian to be notable, and it would be several decades before she returned to it. But it still left its imprint in her habits, familiarising in her the routines and smells and repetitive muscle memory of viticulture.
“If you live here in this region and you were born here, you still do what you were [taught] when you were small,” she says. “I also walk through the vineyards, do the work—I love it. You spend some calm moments there. I can relax there.”
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There is a joke told repeatedly here, that even while South Moravia is the heart of the Czech Republic’s winemaking industry, lager is still its most popular drink. And yet, Mikulov did not have its own contemporary lager brewery until 2011, when Jitka and her husband, Libor Ilčík, founded Pivovar Mamut, or Mammoth Brewery. Its name is a tribute to the region, whose soils continue to yield whole mammoth skeletons today.
The pair first met as teenagers when they led the same local scouts organisation. Libor went on to study biotechnology in horticulture and winemaking, and Jitka majored in economics. The next decade took her far from the vineyards of her early years, first to Brno and then abroad.
She worked for a shipping company and then for a corporation making avalanche safety equipment before completing her master’s degree in economics and becoming a financial analyst. But she and Libor had stayed in touch, and the couple later settled, and married, in Mikulov.
It was only after their first child was born, in 2010, that another path presented itself. When Libor, who worked in wine, suggested that the two start a brewery, Jitka said yes.
“If she told me this 15 years ago when we met, I would be laughing—loudly,” says Ivana Solarikova, one of Jitka’s closest friends. “I would [more likely] believe her to be a garbage collector, astronaut, or man of the cloth. We were both born in the winery region and never discussed beer at all. It is admirable how quickly she penetrated the beer world, how she gathered all the knowledge and managed to get her way.”
Since its inception, Pivovar Mamut has brewed what it calls “honest, unfiltered, and unpasteurised lager”—ordinary beer made with care and quality ingredients. That ethos would resonate with many in the beer world, but Jitka was interested in a different kind of brewing. She had made repeat visits to Belgium for work, and while there, encountered lambic: a tradition and set of practices that she instinctively understood from her winemaking upbringing.
“It was my husband who came with the idea to have a brewery [...] and I knew that if we will have the brewery, I want this beer style,” Jitka says. “I just wanted that beer because I knew the flavour, and I was fascinated by the style of the production, by the spontaneous fermentation. That link was easily connected to my previous life, to my childhood, because I knew the spontaneous fermentation from the wine cellar.”
But Libor wasn’t swayed, convinced that spontaneously fermented beers would not work in the region. So while Mamut forged ahead with its lagers, Jitka commenced a separate period of study and experimentation, with lambic as her model. “For me, it’s a perfect beer because I can use the spontaneous fermentation I love—because we always produce the wine in a spontaneously fermented way—and I love also beer, because I’m living in Czech,” she says. “So these two things just perfectly find each other in the lambic style.”
She was also motivated by the desire to disprove the sceptics—to demonstrate that spontaneously fermented beers could just as easily be made in the warm, fertile climes of South Moravia as in the Pajottenland.
“I think she would be successful in every field she would decide to go to,” Ivana says of Jitka’s uncommon determination. “She has incredible endurance to overcome challenges. Challenges which seem to be fatal to others.”
After five years of experimentation and refinement—a period during which she also had her second child—Jitka’s spontaneously fermented beers were released in 2016. With that, Wild Creatures became the first brewing project of its kind in the Czech Republic.
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There is a vulpine quality to Jitka, not only visible in her russet hair and sharp features but in her quickness of gesture. She possesses an inner steeliness that underlies, but does not contradict, her natural warmth and enthusiasm.
After all, it takes a particular act of will to depart from comfortable precedent, to defy close counsel and draw the map as you first encounter the territory. “I’m a very stubborn person,” Jitka says. “When I set the target, I just want to achieve it—but the target was not the company, the target was the beer.”
For a while, Wild Creatures and Mamut shared the same facility and brew kit in Mikulov, with a separate rental space for barrel storage. But four years ago, Jitka—in search of more room and greater autonomy—moved Wild Creatures out. The brewery now occupies an expansive industrial unit just north of Mikulov, in the village of Dolní Dunajovice. The space itself is nondescript and utilitarian, all concrete surfaces that echo with the zap of electric fly killers.
Outside, its riches are more apparent. The land here is almost laughably lush, with its orchards and vineyards and fields of nodding sunflowers. At one point, we pass a plum tree whose fruits are still green and hard. But when they are ripe, Jitka says, they taste like honey.
“I bought the apricot orchard, the new one—it’s a huge field of maybe 80 trees of big apricots,” she says. “I love the feeling, because I remember what my grandfather said—that it is important, the land. Maybe it is because the property of the family was confiscated, but I feel this way, that it’s important.”
Wild Creatures today owns several vineyards, which contain multiple varieties of wine grapes, as well as two apricot orchards and part of a sour cherry orchard. The rest of the fruit comes from friends or partner suppliers.
It is July when I visit the brewery, the afternoons long and indolent, the temperatures in the mid 30s and the grass spun to gold by the heat. This is the season for fruit processing, not for brewing. True to lambic methodology, Jitka only produces wort during the cool months of the year, from autumn to spring. She has a coolship installed on caster wheels that she pushes into the barrel room when it comes time to inoculate that wort (tempting as it might be to roll it straight out into the orchards, Czech law prohibits her from producing beer anywhere but under her own roof.)
It would be an unforgivable cliché to claim that the resulting beers are a bottled expression of this terroir, this environment. But standing next to the open door, perfume of the sun-warmed earth and fruiting trees leaking in, the apt question seems to be: How could they be anything but a synthesis of this place? Of the microorganisms that inhabit it, of those laden and buzzing orchards, of those long summer afternoons, all pulled together into one symphonic knot?
“We rely on the environment to produce it,” Jitka says. “Every other beer is produced with standard, lab-derived yeast. This is a pure, natural way of production—and it means that you ferment it with the yeast which is in the time and in the place that you produce it.”
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Since its inception, Wild Creatures has produced two lines of beer.
“We have pure spontaneous—it means through the coolship, and the rest just like the lambic breweries—and next to this we have a wild line, which means I use yeast which is born in the lambics and I put it into the wild ales,” Jitka says.
But while lambic is her inspiration, none of her beers would likely be mistaken for it.
Collectively, Wild Creatures’ beers have a purring softness. There is no astringency, and little bitterness. Instead, there is an abiding plushness—a rounded quality, a ripeness. That’s the case even in non-fruited releases like Meditation, her answer to gueuze, a blend of base beers aged for between one and three years. Wild ales like Grapes of Moravia (made with local wine grapes) and Femme Fanale (sour cherries), meanwhile, are vividly aromatic, and while lightly tart, they never approach the puckeringly sour.
In other words, it is no accident that Jitka Ilčíková’s beers taste a lot like wine.
Following laboratory tests, she discovered that a Brettanomyces strain that’s closely associated with lambic production was found in her beer—but it wasn’t alone. “They confirmed that we have Brettanomyces bruxellensis. That was a 100% match, that was fun for my Belgian friends,” she says. “And also, two-thirds of the confirmed yeasts were wine yeasts, so it was a higher percentage than I thought originally. And that’s the reason that all our beers are coming close to the wine.”
As the brewery has matured, it has also deepened—its beers becoming more themselves, ever more linear and precise. For Jitka, learning to blend, and blending to her palate, has been the greatest ongoing challenge she’s experienced since founding Wild Creatures. It’s also where the expression of her taste, and her creativity, is most evident.
“You really need to be self-confident,” she says. “Because no one will ever tell you that this is good, that is the way how he would produce it. If you will go now and try to do your blend, we will not have the same flavours inside. Because you simply like it in your way. This is my [...] style, and this is something you cannot learn. This is something you need to find in yourself.”
Her objective, as she describes it, is blending “in a milder way,” producing beer that is accessible and easy to enjoy. She dislikes excessive Brettanomyces character, preferring to use it as a supporting base note, and avoids overbearing oak (“barrique beer,” as she calls it). As such, she doesn’t use fresh barrels. The brewery currently maintains a collection of around 200 repurposed oak barrels, many of them sourced from Czech wineries, which together contain some 45,000 litres of beer.
“We rotate the barrels, we use them year after year, because that’s the main treasure we have here,” Jitka says.
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Eight years since Wild Creatures’ beers were first released—and 13 years since she began experimenting with spontaneously fermented, blended beers—Jitka Ilčíková’s path remains a solitary one. Unlike the lambic brewers in Belgium whom she turns to for counsel, she has no comparable community of producers in South Moravia. There remains little popular understanding of the beer style across the rest of the country.
“It’s great how she tries to bring a little system and order into everything, and she managed to catch up in a few years with what is passed down between generations abroad,” says Pavel Palouš, a friend of Jitka’s and a brewer at Pivovar Ládví Cobolis in Prague. “What she does is not very common in the Czech Republic, so she has to try a lot of blind roads by herself.”
Building a loyal local audience hasn’t been easy. “You need to understand that generally speaking, Czech people are so focused on lager that it’s impossible,” Jitka says. She’s found that many drinkers reject Wild Creatures’ beers outright. They are so far from lager as to be practically incomprehensible, although they have found more purchase among the country’s natural wine drinkers. Her focus has necessarily turned outwards in response. Today, 80% of Wild Creatures’ beer is exported.
However, there are small, favourable signs of an impending shift. Jitka is selling greater quantities of beer to domestic bars and restaurants, and has noticed more drinkers approaching Wild Creatures with curiosity rather than outright apprehension.
“In the Czech Republic, quick-soured beers have recently grown in popularity,” Pavel says. “Jitka’s beers can be a natural continuation to find greater complexity and taste experience.”
““You cannot replace this beer with anything.””
Perhaps the surest sign of change is the brewery’s recent expansion. Earlier this year, Wild Creatures opened its first satellite tasting room in Prague, more than 150 miles from the orchards and vineyards of Mikulov. It is a much-needed place to receive the overseas visitors who land in Prague seeking Jitka’s beer, but who fail to realise that Wild Creatures is located at the other end of the country. Its presence in the capital may help attract more Czech drinkers, too.
Reflecting on her unrelenting work, its solitude and rough edges, there seem so many good reasons to give up the hard-fought path. To choose ease over labour, security over the unknown, companionship over isolation. Perhaps, for Jitka, it helps that her motivation to continue flows not just from sheer will or personal ambition but from something deeper-rooted, something generational: the desire to channel her land’s fecund potential in a new direction. The opportunity to create something from it that is irreplicable.
“I explain how hard it is to produce [this beer], so the question is why we should produce it at all,” Jitka says. “But there are flavours you cannot replace with anything else. You cannot replace this beer with anything.”
