Pourmiscuous?

Enjoy local beer from our Lukr side pull faucets from the Czech Republic. Each café has Lukr taps, 7 of about 100 in the Chicagoland area. Our Beeristas are professional tapsters, try one of these pours next time you might be swinging though either of our Lakeview or Highwood cafés.

Smooth (Hladinka, standard)
Crisp (Na dvakrát, bubbly)
Slow (“5 min Pour”)
Šnyt (small beer, large glass)
Milk (Mlíko, all wet foam)
Neat (Čochtan, bitter, no foam)

Marketing tradition and promotion aside, these different styles of pour service have been pioneered by tapsters in a century old tradition of pub service, defined by the glasses they are served in, and the equipment used to dispense them. There are small variants in technique between the categories, but the physics behind each pour help alter the experience.

 

Smooth (Hladinka, standard)

The Smooth pour is our default side pull. Hladinka mostly translates to “Level” where the top of a three finger foam cap aligns to the brim of the glass. Hladinka is also linguistically related to “Smooth” as the surface of a good pour will not have any rough bubbles.

We start by letting out a little dense wet foam first, then opening up the ball valve fully to pour underneath the foam cap from a submerged nozzle. This protects the liquid beer underneath, so when you drink through the foam you’re tasting draft beer that has experienced the near minimum amount of air contact.

This speedy one-step pour is exceptionally versatile given many drinking situations, and lets the balance of the beer shine. Unless you call a different pour style, this will be the default service (it’s just an excellent pour).

Crisp (Na dvakrát, bubbly)

 depA little bit of the conventional pour style from taps around the world, this will leave more carbonation in the beer to keep it bubbly for longer, while maintaining some bitterness. Described as “twice” poured in Czech, there’s two distinct motions to complete the Crisp pour.

First we’ll sacrifice a bit of beer and foam by opening at full blast, and once clear beer starts pouring the glass is scooped in at the conventional 45° angle. Good timing on this scoop equals less beer waste, but we’re aiming to keep carbonation in solution by minimizing the points where it could break out.

Just before the fill line we’ll close the handle, let the beer settle for a moment, then open the handle a little to drop some dense, wet foam on top of the beer. This’ll fill up the glass and help protect the beer through the drinking session.

A longer lasting style of pour makes it perfect for longer sessions. Order a Crisp for enjoying during a meal, especially for cutting fatty foods with the increased carbonation. The Crisp style is useful in large glasses like the full liter Maßkrug, to help the beer keep fizziness over a longer session. 

Or pair it with long stories with friends in the café.

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There are slight variations on this pour style, but the shared objective is preserving a crisp bite in the beer.

Some variations will do away with the sacrifice, allowing the little bit of foam created at the start to be included in the end pour. With the glass at the conventional 45° angle and the nozzle in the glass, the handle is opened fully. The glass is uprighted as it fills to get a conventional foam cap.

This nozzle-in approach works well for small, taster size pours often found in flights. Depending on draft system performance, turning down the compensator to slow the flow, placing the nozzle in the glass, and full open of the handle tends to be the only controllable way to throttle the high flow rate of the Lukr.

The foam generated from the action of pouring in the glass isn’t as dense as foam generated from a slightly open tap handle, and risks of foam over are higher, though not unavoidable. The high flow rate Lukr doesn’t really handle this variation well without adjusting the compensator for decreased pour speed, so we have found it best to cut off and use the fine control on the ball valve to drop some dense foam on top.

Slow ("5 min Pils")

This is a three step pour; two mechanical, one for spectacle. Leave it to American Ingenuity to take something designed to pour the perfect beer in 5 seconds, and extend it 5 minutes.

Think of the slow pour as expanding on the foam centric principles of the Smooth style pour. Breaking out the carbonation changes the beer, effortlessly light and aromatic and just a real treat from start to finish.

It took more than a couple tries to get a good technique down, but getting the first two steps right can turn the foam cap into a fluffy, pillowy whip. Local breweries like Goldfinger and Miskatonic have refined thier own Pils designed for the slow pour from a Lukr faucet.

There are two main variations of Slow Pour that differ at the first step: Colorado Style and Viennese style.

In the Colorado style of Slow Pour utilized stateside by Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver, the first pour is full open straight down the middle of the glass, filling roughly 2/3rd full. We’re creating a lot of turbulence to help break carbonation out of solution.

In the Viennese pour, the Schweizerhaus in Vienna serves Budvar to hundreds of beer garden patrons in an assembly line of three steps. The first pour utilizes a faucet with a micromesh screen, pouring wet foam which settles as the mugs move down the assembly line. This dense wet foam is about 50% beer.

Meanwhile, that foam will settle over a couple two-three minutes until we’re ready to top it off with another full open pour in the second step.

The last step is spectacle. Submerge the faucet into the beer and pop in a quick open-close swing of the handle, and slowly pull the faucet out to whip up some foam. There’s a couple variations on this step, we found submerging tightens up the foam cap and helps draw up a whip as the dense foam pulls on the rising nozzle. If needed we’ll rinse off the glass (as well as the nozzle).

Similar effects can be applied using aggressive pouring from different faucets, ball valve or piston style. But the magic behind the Lukr is the diffusion screen in the nozzle. The wet foam created through this screen creates a denser, more satisfying pillow and a fun wiggle.

Milk (Mlíko, sweet wet foam)

The Milk pour is served as 100% straight wet foam from our beloved Lukr taps. We open the handle only slightly, but the degrees do differ from beer to beer. We’re looking to get the most dense wet foam before it turns into clear beer and sometimes the handle position differs based on the carbonation level of the beer.

Mlíko is a pour for celebrating, a quick chug of a pour that highlights the sweetness and aromatics in the beer. Despite being mostly foam with only a sliver of beer at the bottom, this pour isn’t filling. Just the magic of the Lukr (and it’s micromesh screen) breaking out the carbonation.

We offer Milk pours in two sizes. A quick Stange glass equaling 4oz/118ml, a Mlíkotube if you please. Traditional service will use the same Czech mug used in all the other pours, and is treated as about 250ml/8.45oz of beer.

As the dense wet foam from a Lukr side pull is about 50% beer, this foam will eventually settle out to a half pour in the glass. However, the point of the Milk pour is to enjoy the sweet, wet foam, so it is encouraged to consume the pour before it settles.

There’s a bit of food tradition in eastern European countries, and we think the Milk pour helps contribute to that. Served at the end of the session at the completion of the tab, and when drank in quick fashion, a little bit of foam is left in the glass. Just like leaving a little bit of food on your plate to signify you’re full, leaving a little bit of foam in the glass will let us know you’ve enjoyed your session.

Neat (Čochtan, bitter, no foam)

The Čochtan is a “neat” pour that is poured with no added foam, like as in the Crisp pour. Undilluted with a foam cap, it leaves all the bitterness in, so isn’t something enjoyed on the regular.

The háček here is pronounced like “Ch” in Chocolate. But if you order Neat we’ll pull it this way for you:

The handle is pulled full open and the glass is scooped in when clear beer starts flowing from the tap. We’ll carefully pour down the side of the glass, which will minimize the points where carbonation could break out. We’ll stop when we get to the pour mark.

A 16.9oz/500ml pour mark may be an glass mug that has a capacity of 24oz/720ml. The pour mark tends to be where the handle meets the glass, so in this pour isn’t poured to the rim. Like all our pours, you pay for the beer in the glass, not the capacity of the glass.

The Čochtan is pretty neat, since it has a extra aggressive flavor from the preserved carbonation. Bitterness from that carbonation and puffs of hop aromatics make it interesting to sip on even though the pour style fills you up quick.

Šnyt (small beer, large glass, half pour)

One of our favorite pours when we’re enjoying a pull off our Lukr side pull taps, and one of best ways to try each offering from the Lukr side by side.

The Šnyt (monosyllabic Schnitt) is the traditional small pour we use to test the lines and dial in the Kompensator to the tapster’s personal speed preference at the start of the shift. It’s also a spectacular way to get the best of both worlds – wet foam and smooth beer.

In our [English] style dimple mugs this pour works out to 2 fingers beer, 3 fingers foam, and 1 finger of air at the top. It’ll settle down to 7oz so is a half pour given the usual serving size of 14oz. The Sahm Praha mugs settle out to 250ml, but the Tübinger settles to 300ml. The anatomy of the Tübinger is the historical basis of the Šnyt levels in Czech tapster tradition: liquid line to the facets, wet foam in the dimple section, and air above the ring where the pour mark falls.

If you’re looking to have another beer with everyone but don’t want a full pour, this will still look like you’re getting a full beer, or halfway through your beer by the time you get back to the table.

Crisp, Nozzle in

@beermiscuous nixing the sacrifice at the beginning will save on waste, but this is slightly less carb than a Scoop In Crisp Pour. Still more bubbly than a Smooth. #CrispPour #sidepull #beertok #sidepulltok @beermiscuous ♬ original sound - Beermiscuous

WE HAVE POUR SERVICE

Highwood installed two faucets 2021-03-19 and Lakeview installed their two on 2021-08-13.

In nearly two years of side pull service, Highwood has kicked 86 kegs across a number of styles, with just a few repeats, and nearly all from local breweries.

The fastest selling keg of all time was a sixtel of Maplewood In Dark Trees, a Czech Dark Lager (Tmavé 12°) that was served over a very hot couple days: May 12 and 13 of 2022. Side Pull features have dominated the all time fastest selling drafts which was once reserved for Hazy IPAs.

7 of the top 15 have been served on the Lukr, 14 in the top 30.

11 of the top 15 half barrel kegs (15.5 gal) have been served on the Lukr, 21 of the top 30 fastest selling half bbls.

Since install in March 2021, the average period on the board for a side pulled keg was 17.94 days, 12.38 days faster than the whole average of 30.32 days. Side pulled sixtels averaged 8.24 days on the board, 7.02 days faster than the whole average of 15.25 days.

© 2025. This work is authored by Zigmas Maloni and openly licensed via CC BY 4.0. Give us a credit if you found this useful!