Can Poland make good beer?
Posted on 5 April 2009
The title’s answer is somewhat provocative, but it reflects my country’s situation until relatively recently. 50 years of Communist economy (which proved arguably more disastrous to agriculture than to any other sector) followed by a decade of wild capitalism (when huge multinationals took over all privatised breweries in Poland) resulted in a soringly unformised production almost entirely dominated by boring industrial lagers.
When you entered a Polish grocery or supermarket at the beginning of this decade, your choice was between a dozen lagers produced by three multi-million beer conglomerates. Each tasted exactly the same: watery and bland. Beer was reduced to a ubiquitous ‘reliable’ mass-produced commodity; it embodied the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) concept. (This description might sound familiar to readers from countries such as the US; this is a stage in a beer market development authors often refer to as pre-microbreweries).
Then as our market developed, buying power increased, and consumer horizons widened, a demand for something slightly more interesting grew, and with demand, supply. Importers started bringing in good beers from Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic and UK, and small local breweries appeared in various parts of Poland. Some cities such as Warsaw and Wrocław also saw a surge of micro-breweries brewing their own beer on the promises, although this has not developed quite as expected. Today we have a market dominated by the mass brands but with reasonable availability of higher-end beers too.
Other than structural, the major problem of Polish beer is stylistic. We have a long history of brewing but not so much of quality brewing, and there are few (if any) distinctive Polish varieties of beer. Pils, bock, wheat beer, red ale, stout are all styles that have been borrowed from other countries. While there is some traditional of darker stout-like beers produced (collectively called porter in Poland), the dominant style is either pils or a slightly stronger blonde.
Here I look at two beers from independent breweries. Both are available in deli stores and reasonably priced at around 5 PLN (1.1€ at the time of writing) per bottle.
Browary Ciechan is a medium-sized brewery in Ciechanów, north of Warsaw in the region of Mazovia. After many twists of history and having shortly belonged to BrauUnion it has been independent again since 2002.
Their website is in Polish only but really informative. The Wyborne beer is, as several Ciechan bottlings, unpasteurised. A pale and clear colour, the aroma is rather reserved, not very hoppy, a little spicy perhaps (coriander). Palate has a crystal-clear taste that is very mildly grainy, and reminiscent of some microbrew beers in freshness and directness. The surprisingly high 6.2% alcohol is not noticeable. Really uncomplex, and I would perhaps like more hoppy punch for a pils style, but this is surely not your average industrial lager.
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