Poland has a cruel nickname: “The country on wheels.” For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was ruled by Austro-Hungary, Russia and Germany, and then became a satrapy of the Soviet Union for 50 grim years. Its modern borders bear little relation to the ones it enjoyed a century and a half ago. Is it any wonder that its brewing traditions have been fashioned more by foreign intervention than by indigenous styles?
Just as golden lager began to transform brewing practice in central and eastern Europe, a beer that broke all the new rules by using warm fermentation and dark, roasted malts also put down deep roots in those countries.
(Roger Protz)
Germanic wheat beers were once widespread and survive today. But the greatest influence from the mid-19th century came not from an invader but from neighboring Bohemia, now the modern Czech Republic. The brewing revolution that started in Pilsen and produced the first golden lager beer was soon manifest in Poland. Breweries that had been built on hills in the mountainous Tatra region were found to be ideal for digging deep, cold cellars in which the new-style pilsner beer could be stored or lagered for several months.
But Poland also had a Monty Python moment. At the same time as pilsner beer was changing the methods of brewing, something completely different was making an appearance in the Baltic states. The British were no slouches where empire was concerned, but their only involvement in the east was to export substantial quantities of a potent black beer called Baltic porter. It is a wonderful irony of brewing history that, just as golden lager began to transform brewing practice in central and eastern Europe, a beer that broke all the new rules by using warm fermentation and dark, roasted malts also put down deep roots in those countries.
A Brewing Aristocrat
For centuries, brewing in Poland had been a small-scale operation run either by farmers or town councils and strictly controlled by the church or local dukes. In the 19th century, a definable commercial brewing industry began to develop due in the main to the enormous power of the ruling Habsburg dynasty that ran the Austro-Hungarian empire.
One of the key participants in the new brewing industry of that period was Archduke Albrecht Friedrich von Habsburg. He inherited vast swathes of land in Galicia and Silesia and was encouraged by his father to go into brewing on the grounds that “if you own land and make beer, my son, you can’t go wrong.” The archduke’s first brewery was built in 1846 high above the small town of Cieszyn in the Silesia region, a stone’s throw from the Czech border. It was a fortuitous choice. for Cieszyn had a steelworks and there were many thirsty throats to refresh.
In the manner of aristocrats in the German-speaking countries of Bavaria and Austria, the archduke at first made wheat beer at Cieszyn, but he switched to cold fermentation when pilsen burst on the brewing scene in the 1840s. As a result of the brewery’s dominant position above the town, it was a comparatively simple matter to dig deep lager cellars for cold-fermented beer.
The archduke’s brewery prospered and within five years he summoned the best engineers and water experts to join him for an expedition into the forests of the Zywiec [zhiv-y-etz] region of Galicia to find a spring that could supply pure water for a bigger brewery than Cieszyn. A suitable site was found and a local priest blessed the plot. Within weeks, the plant was under construction and in 1856 the new Archducal Brewery of Zywiec was registered with the Austrian authorities. It used all the new technologies of the industrial age, with lager beer stored for between three and eight months in deep cellars cooled by rooms above that were packed with ice cut from rivers and lakes in winter.
