Other than the fresh coat of paint in warm, coral tones, there isn't a thing that would tip off a passerby that Pivovar U Bulovky is anything special.

But this solidly neighborhood pub, situated not far from where Czech patriots trained in England carried out the most successful assassination of World War II — fatally injuring Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich with a bomb — is on the radar of the country's most discerning beer fans.

Experts aside, it's fair to say that brewmaster and inventor František Richter's beer has probably done more to lift spirits than the Heydrich bombing. And that's no idle boast.

"Things should never be more than one degree removed from nature," says Richter of his microbrewed beer, which at last count numbered 125 varieties.

The vast majority of beer consumed in the world has had the live yeast that formed it killed off through pasteurization, a process that's widespread in the industry for hygiene reasons. Bubbles are then reintroduced at the serving tap, usually through carbonation. Richter's beer, however, provides a taste of what beer used to be like before all this technology arrived to protect us from ourselves.

An influential industry group, the Society of the Friends of Beer, was so impressed with Richter's work last year they named him brewmaster of the year. Official recognition — and being put on the map after five years of building up his one-room beer hall and the microbrewery in the chambers behind it — is nice, of course. But it's clear Richter is in this for other reasons.

"I'm a very creative person," says the former punk rocker, one of a dozen other pursuits he has followed in his fortysomething years, spent mainly in the Czech lands and Germany.

Richter's trademark cloudy "yeast beer," more orange than gold and with a less firm head, has been described by a reviewer as having "a fragrant hops scent and warming malt notes to the nose, with a crisp citrus and slightly yeasty initial taste followed by perfectly balanced bittersweet flavors."

Whatever all that means, the process of perfecting the taste is a pursuit Richter confesses involved a certain amount of Zen. How does he know when he's achieved the Platonic perfection of pivo? "I know it's ready when I taste it."

In developing his famous brews, Richter has discovered a number of secrets and shortcuts, some of which he is patenting and which have the potential to speed up brewing radically without trading off quality.

As if to prove his breakthroughs, in the public space of his pub he has installed two working vats that impart a heady fug of malting hops that no other pub here quite manages. Though there are a dozen or more microbrew pubs in the country, the others do their brewing in areas separated, though sometimes visible, from where patrons sit.

At Pivovar U Bulovky, you literally breathe in the magic.

Richter, who built the shining copper vats himself, along with many of the furnishings in the pub, also makes much of the food here — traditional klobása, smoked meat and horseradish platters, even the vinegar in which traditional Bohemian sausage is pickled.

"I made the bar myself from five trees," he says. "These things weren't even lamps," he says, pointing toward wall lanterns featuring brass eagles and old trophies he found discarded.

The bar also includes, despite the distinct malting aroma, a vastly better ventilation system than you'd expect to find at a neighborhood pub in Prague 8.

To a small party of very possibly overinterested journalists on a recent visit, Richter served his house wheat beer, or kvasnicový Weissbier, for starters, along with hot mustard and smoked meats, a classic beer-food choice for centuries.

Just as his guests prepared to ask their questions, their subject disappeared, diffidently saying, "You're eating. We'll continue afterwards."

Traditional Czechs find it rude to speak while eating, but most are willing to waive the custom in the face of ignorant foreigners. Richter, however, is a man to whom tradition means something.

Adopting ancient brewing methods for his beer is just one aspect of his business and life philosophy. And, somehow, so is experimenting.

"I constantly battle with nature. Even if you follow the recipe perfectly, the water, the air, the malt is never the same. So you have to vary it constantly."

Nor does he appear much like a traditionalist. In fact, if you didn't know Richter, it might be tough to make him out among the regulars at U Bulovky. With a bushy mustache, old jeans, tattooed biceps and a fleece vest, it would be easy enough to mistake him for a biker who wandered in looking for a fight.

"It's a beer and music kind of place," complete with live blues jams every weekend, he explains. "Everyone knows each other."

If Richter's perspective is wider than most people's, that may have to do with his past, one spent divided between two worlds.

As a young man, Richter escaped the pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovak regime in 1985 to join his father and brother in Munich ("I said I was going to visit my grandfather," he recalls with a twinkle in his eye), where he later worked odd jobs until he found work delivering medical equipment.

Despite the hard times, he says, he did benefit from what he calls "the best of both worlds."

Munich was squarely in the West, but was close enough to home that a community of Czech dissidents there made for a kind of second home and maintained close ties and an active grapevine to goings on back east.

And Richter's years away ultimately brought a more global perspective to the Czech national treasure: beer.

"I started asking myself why different beers taste different, so then I had no choice but to try it," Richter reflects. His next question was why he should remain content with the same Pilsner-style bottom-fermented lager every other Czech brewer makes.

Instead, he says, "I try to bring in people from all over Europe because this is a very small market."