Big Brewers, Little Beers
As a result of its split personality, you will have to trace the history of Zywiec Porter at its place of origin in Zywiec, a two-hour drive from Cieszyn. The large brewery complex houses an impressive museum that was built to mark the 150th anniversary of the brewery. It has many artifacts about Porter and other Zywiec products.
Outside, the grounds of the brewery are dotted with old wooden lagering vessels, but they must seem quaint to visitors who tour the vast new brewhouse built by Heineken. Each brew produces 1,000 hectos and total annual production is in excess of six million hectos. The brewery is fed with pure water from the Tatras mountains that loom in the distance. The bulk of production is accounted for by Zywiec, a 5.6% pale lager. The other main product is Heineken’s ubiquitous 5% beer. The beers have a rapid 21-day production cycle, with an infusion mash system, 10 days primary fermentation and just 10 days lagering.
With the stress on speed and volumes, there are fears Heineken may at some stage move production from Cieszyn to its main facility, which could spell the end for the porter.
Does Polish Porter Have a Future?
The Poles are used to change and uncertainty. The commercial brewing industry of the late 19th century was smashed to pieces in World War One. It was painfully rebuilt by Poles following the departure of the Habsburgs but was buffeted by the Great Depression of the 1930s and then takeover by Germans during the Nazi invasion of World War Two.
When the Nazis retreated they took much valuable brewing equipment with them. As a result, the breweries that emerged blinking nervously into the new era of state-owned communism were in desperate need of investment. Unlike neighboring Czechoslovakia, where the communists left most of the country’s breweries to quietly molder in 19th-century faded glory, the Polish regime had to invest massively.
Zywiec, in particular, received large amounts of government largesse as its beers were earmarked for export in order to earn much-needed hard currency from the west. For a period in the 1960s and 70s, using the brand name Krakus, Zywiec beers were widely available on both sides of the “Iron Curtain.”
Porter survived, but in general the nationalized Polish breweries concentrated on unremarkable pale lagers, the occasional pilsner type and malty beers known as “mocny,” high in alcohol but decidedly under-hopped. Following the fall of communism, Poland has followed the same course as most former Eastern bloc countries: privatization has been followed by a rush by global groups to snap up breweries and dominate the industry.
The big three in Poland today are Zywiec, Carlsberg’s Okocim, and Kompania Piwowarska (Brewing Company), owned by SABMiller.
Okocim has similarly elevated origins to Zywiec’s. It was founded in 1846 in Brzesko in south-east Poland by Johann Evangelist Gotz whose son Jan married an aristocrat and changed his name to Goetz-Okocimski, a neat merger of German and Polish interests. Its brands include two of the best-selling lagers, Lech and Tyskie, and the under-threat Okocim Porter.
The 8.3% porter is matured for five months and has a satin-smooth aroma and palate, with creamy malt, coffee, chocolate and light hop notes. Carlsberg has invested heavily in the breweries in the group, which produces around 2.5 million hectolitres a year.
SABMiller’s Tyskie brewery in Tychy is close to Krakow and has a fine museum that includes some of old copper brewing vessels from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Tyskie dates from 1629 and has grown from a minute agricultural brewery to a large conglomerate producing some of the biggest-selling lager beers in the country. Its Doljidy subsidiary produces a 9.5 % porter, which is hard to find. Tyskie’s main claim to fame is that it brews Pilsner Urquell, the iconic, original Czech golden lager under license.
There is a remarkable synergy between the methods of communism and global capitalism where brewing is concerned. The communists focused on pale lagers and the western giants have followed suit. Their commitment to darker beers, porter in particular, is very much in doubt. The open market has encouraged a number of small craft breweries to spring up. But, in general, they offer little alternative to the mass-produced brands and tend to disappear like the snows of winter, unable to compete with the big three with their power to undercut the opposition.
Baltic porter clings on by its fingertips in Poland and other eastern Europe countries. It’s a style that is an important part of our brewing heritage and it deserves to survive. Only beer lovers can ensure it doesn’t fall off the cliff.
