A New Beer Intrudes
The German influence can be seen in the beers first brewed at Zywiec: lagerbier, Märzenbier (March beer) and Winterlager. But in 1881 the brewery had to accommodate a quite different type of beer, when an employee developed a recipe for porter, which was warm-fermented. He was called Julius Wagner and Zywiec claims he was a Pole, which seems fanciful. Whatever his ethnicity, he was sufficiently impressed by the impact of English Baltic porter to encourage Zywiec to brew its own version of the style.
In the 19th century, several London brewers who dominated the production of porter and stout started to export strong versions of the dark beer to Scandinavia, Russia and the Baltic states. Just as Arthur Guinness in Dublin switched to porter and stout production in a bid to break the English stranglehold over the Irish market, brewers in Scandinavia and eastern Europe also fashioned their interpretations of the London style.
The archduke and his managers were sufficiently impressed with Wagner’s plans to install a separate production line for his porter. The beer was fermented in large open vessels and then matured in smaller wooden barrels. For a time, Zywiec even brewed a warm-fermented ale when English pale ale made a brief appearance in Poland.
Polish Porter
Baltic porter and its stronger brother Imperial Russian stout are an endangered species. Carlsberg’s Baltika, the biggest brewing group by far in Russia, has phased out its imperial stout and there were unconfirmed rumors in the summer of 2008 that Okocim, one of Poland’s big three brewing groups, might be planning to axe its porter. The opportunity to see Zywiec Porter brewed at source was therefore not to be missed.
But the source had moved. Since1994, Zywiec has been owned by Heineken and the small volumes of porter did not suit the new plant the Dutch giant has built to churn out millions of hectolitres of pale lager. Porter has been transferred to Archduke Albrecht’s original brewery at Cieszyn.
On the map, Cieszyn looks a short drive from Krakow, but the highways are poor and under repair, causing endless delays. We drove for three hours on rutted roads that curved through dense woods at the foothills of the Tatras. At one point I was given the chilling information that I might catch a glimpse of the towers of the Auschwitz concentration camp through the trees. I couldn’t make out the towers but I needed a calming beer when at last we drove up the twisting road from the town of Cieszyn to the brewery with its mellow brick buildings, cobbled courtyard and a brewery cat on rat patrol.
A Visit to Cieszyn
Cieszyn is a fascinating example of a traditional 19th century lager brewery. It uses a double decoction mashing regime, followed by filtration in a lauter tun and then a brew kettle for the boil with hops. Porter accounts for half the annual modest production of 100,000 hectos/60,000 barrels and shares the brewhouse and lager cellars with a pilsner-style beer called Brackie and a lighter lager.
Zywiec Porter is now a cold-fermented black lager, but at 9.5% ABV it has all the richness and complexity of the warm-fermented original. It’s made with pilsner, caramalt, Munich and roasted grains, and hopped with Magnum, Nugget and Taurus varieties. As Poland grows hops of excellent quality in the Lublin area, I was surprised to find the brewery importing most of its supplies from Germany.
The porter has an astonishing four-hour boil in the kettle as a result of the high level of grain used. It then has 15 days primary fermentation in open square tanks before it’s transferred to the lager cellar, 15 meters below ground. The cold cellars, with the temperature held just above freezing, holds 100 small lager tanks with a total capacity of 20,000 hectos.
Porter is held in the tanks for a maximum of 60 days to ripen. The beer that emerges has a deep coffee color, with powerful hints of espresso, licorice, molasses and burnt grain on the palate. Dark fruit and hops build in the mouth and a long and intense finish is packed with rich fruit, burnt grain, silky coffee and bitter hops.
