Transfer from Prague to Plzen
Plzen is ninety kilometres west of Prague, about an hour on the motorway. It is a working industrial city with a very large medieval square in the middle of it, and it is the reason that half the beer sold on earth is called pilsner.
100 €per car, one way
- Pick-up at your hotel or address in Prague, at the time you choose
- Drive to Plzen — about an hour
- Drop-off at your hotel, the brewery gate, or anywhere else in the city
- Fixed fare agreed when you book
The price is per car, not per person — one passenger or four, it does not change. Minibuses for larger groups and the return leg are quoted on request.
The honest case for a car
Unlike some Czech destinations, Plzen is easy to reach on your own. Fast trains run from Prague roughly every hour and take about an hour and a half; coaches take about an hour and cost very little. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
There are three situations where a car is genuinely the better answer, and one of them is decisive.
You cannot drive after a brewery tour. The Czech Republic enforces a zero blood-alcohol limit for drivers — not 0.2, not 0.5, zero. If you are going to Plzen for the thing Plzen is famous for, hiring a car and driving yourself is not an option, and this is the single most common reason people book us for this route.
The other two are ordinary: luggage, if Plzen is a stop on the way somewhere rather than a day out; and groups of three or four, where the per-car price stops looking expensive as soon as you divide it.
Pilsner Urquell
In the 1830s the beer brewed in Plzen was so bad that the townspeople famously poured thirty-six barrels of it into the gutter in front of the town hall. Their response was to build a new brewery and hire a Bavarian, Josef Groll, who in October 1842 combined local pale malt, soft Plzen water, Saaz hops and cold cellar fermentation and produced something nobody had seen before: a beer that was golden and clear.
It was the right invention at the right moment, because glassware had just become cheap enough for ordinary people to drink out of it rather than pottery. Within a few decades brewers everywhere were imitating the style and calling it after the city.
The tour goes through the modern brewhouse and then down into the historic cellars — nine kilometres of tunnels cut into sandstone, kept a few degrees above freezing. At the end you are given unfiltered, unpasteurised beer straight from an oak lager barrel, which is not sold anywhere else and is the point of the whole exercise.
Tours run in English several times a day and should be booked in advance, especially at weekends.
What else is in town
St Bartholomew’s Cathedral stands in the middle of the square and has the tallest church tower in the country at just over 102 metres. Around three hundred steps get you to the gallery and a view across the whole city.
The Great Synagogue is the second largest in Europe and the third largest in the world, built in the 1890s in a Moorish-Romanesque style that looks like nothing else in Bohemia. It survived the war because it was used as a warehouse.
The historical underground is a second, older set of tunnels — medieval cellars dug under the houses for storing beer and hiding in, of which about eight hundred metres are open on a guided tour.
Republic Square itself is one of the largest medieval squares in Bohemia, and unusually the cathedral sits right in the centre of it rather than to one side.
The drive
Prague to Plzen is a straight run west on the D5 motorway, about ninety kilometres through the low hills of central Bohemia. It is an easy hour, and the road continues to the German border at Rozvadov if you are heading on to Nuremberg or Munich.
If you want to break the journey, Karlstejn Castle and the Koneprusy Caves are both a short detour from the same road. Mention it when you book and we will build it in.
What is included
A private car with an English-speaking driver for your group only. Pick-up from any hotel or address in Prague. Fuel, motorway tolls and the Czech vignette. Help with luggage. Child seats on request at no charge — tell us the age and weight when you book.
The fare is fixed at booking: no meter, no surcharge for luggage, no recalculation on arrival.
Booking
Write to cz@cztransfer.com or message +420 773 477 799 (Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram) with your hotel, the date and the time you want to leave, and whether you need the return leg or a driver waiting while you tour the brewery. We confirm the car and the price the same day.
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