Capital idea

A beautiful country with a thriving beer scene, Poland is one of my favourite places to go drinking. I was delighted when the European Beer Consumers Union, to which I am a delegate, chose Warsaw as the venue for its regular autumn meeting this year. I had never been to the capital city and here was an opportunity to get that ticked off. On the downside, I didn't get to see much of it, for reasons I'll get into, but it's high on my list for a return visit and some proper exploration.

PINTA, the giant of Polish craft brewing, has a couple of pubs in the city, and we started in one of them. Unsurprisingly, it's in that global-Brooklyn style, all bare brick and tacos. My opener was one from local client brewer Magic Road, called Only Dry Stout. It's a sessionable 4.5% ABV and nicely roasty to begin, but this builds as it goes to become ash-dry with a kind of instant-coffee staleness added in. Its problems are compounded by a mis-step on the sweet side, which is somewhat harshly saccharine. Taking a broader view, it's not a bad beer, and I'm being overly-critical because it's a style I'm very familiar with, and know what I like. They've made (or commissioned) an OK stout but I think it's over-engineered and trying to do too much. That's craft beer for you, I guess.

I noticed approvingly that Poland still has the slightly daft, playful notions of the early craft era. There is still, for example, plenty of pumpkin beers this time of year. Dyniamit! is PINTA's: 6% ABV and the appropriate shade of pumpkin-skin amber. It's light-bodied and has a fully appropriate brown-sugar centre. But the cloves. It is absolutely saturated in clove, to the point of tasting medicinal. That hits hard right at the front of the flavour and builds to create the anesthetising sensation of rubbing raw cloves on one's gums. There's no point even asking if there's any real pumpkin in here: there could be scorpion peppers and coconut essence, and you still wouldn't taste anything past the clove. It's... Christmassy, and quite silly, but I still enjoyed it, even if nobody else in the room did.

For the next round, Reuben and I went all-traditional. For me, Forever Young, a grodziski. I tend to associate this light and smoky type of wheat beer with summer drinking, but I don't think that's the reason I didn't enjoy this one much. For one thing, it's weak and watery, which is maybe forgivable at only 2.6% ABV, but plenty of other examples do it better. And for another, any smoky subtleties are drowned out by an inappropriately loud blast of hops. I don't know which varieties were used, but definitely something in the Sabro or Sorachi Ace school. Normally that's not a problem either, but the beer doesn't have the density to carry off strong hopping and ends up tasting plasticky as a result. I got more used to it towards the end, though any enjoyment was as a hop-forward table beer rather than the grodziskie I wanted.

It seems you're allowed take liberties with grodziskie in Poland; I suspect less so with the other national style: Baltic porter. Reuben's Porter Bay has only been around since last year but feels like something of a flagship. The flavour profile is absolutely classic, a tightly-woven tapestry of cocoa, cola spices and herbal liqueur bitterness on a clean lager base. This is still a sipper, and you can tell it's all of 9% ABV, but nothing about it is sticky or sickly or any of the other traps that strong dark beers can fall into. This is one for drinkers who demand complexity from their beers but have no truck with any of the mad-ingredient shortcuts that breweries (including PINTA, in fairness) indulge in.

Mid-October put us on the cusp of pumpkin beer season and Oktoberfest season, and there was still a festbier from PINTA pouring, called Prost! It was my last beer of the night and I don't have a whole lot to say about it. It is to-style, being a weighty golden lager of 5.8% ABV. There's little to no hop character and a grainy, white-bread base. Extra malt and possibly some quirk of fermentation has given it a kind of marzipan enrichment which didn't quite sit well with me, and that's as complex as this one got. It tastes like it was designed and brewed without enthusiasm, to fill a seasonal niche on the pub blackboard.

The following morning, the first day's meeting convened at Browar Warszawski. This is a large brewpub-restaurant in what I'm guessing was once the cellar vaults of an old brick building but is now in a lower courtyard of a modern office and entertainment complex. Heineken Poland has its offices above, though I don't believe it has any business connection to the brewery. Presumably the execs or their minions drink here, however.

The main bar had tap badges in place for about 20 different beers, and there are fermenters enough in the onsite brewery to support production of them all simultaneously, but only a handful were available on the day. As is my wont, I started on the Pils. It is a very pale example, looking watery, with a medium level of haze. That's presumably the reason for the soft texture and resulting lack of crispness, so it's very much on the kellerbier end of the Mittleuropa lager spectrum, rather than pils-proper. Where it excels is the hopping: snappily fresh noble varieties with a restrained bitterness make it more of a celery and lettuce job than spinach and cabbage. Despite this, the finish is long so you have plenty of time to enjoy it. Had I spent longer here I could very much see myself drinking more of it, and as such it's bang on the money for a brewpub house lager. It might not get people in the door, but it's quite likely to keep them there.

Marcowe is Polish for Märzen, and Warszawski's is another murky one, though amber this time. It's strong at 5.7% ABV, and very sweet with it, becoming difficult to drink after the first few sips. The sheer chewiness of it could be considered a plus point, for those who like their lagers big, but it didn't suit me. There's also a dried fruit complexity, all sweet sultana and citrus peel, giving it a certain fruitcake character. This is unrefined and wholesome material, but too sticky and too much work to drink for my taste.

On a quick tour through the brewing side, we got a taste from the tank of one beer which wasn't on the bar but frankly should have been. Chiemny Lager is a dark lager which they describe as closest to Munich dunkel in style but I found it more Czech in character. Although it has the dark brown colour of either, it's only 4.5% ABV. The aroma is espresso and molasses and, despite the heapings of coffee flavour, isn't particularly bitter, but has a porter-like richness and smoothness instead. I'm sure the natural carbonation had plenty to do with how good it tasted, and it's a shame that the brewery kegs rather than tanks its beers, even though production and serving happen on opposite sides of the same wall.

The final beer here was Pszeniczne: don't ask me to pronounce it, but I do know it's Polish for "wheat". You see it on menus a lot. This one is presented as a weissbier and is on the murkier bright-orange side of that scale, with any Bavarian-style credentials ruined by its lack of a proper head. It's also only 4.5% ABV, which is weak for weiss, and there's not much banana character, which suited me fine. Instead, peach and lychee notes come through: a fruitiness which isn't to style but is lots of refreshing fun. Like the lager I started on, this is an accessible easy-drinker; unfussy but with plenty of interest. Good weissbier is rare; good brewpub weissbier is exceptionally rare; and I think that by tweaking the format sufficiently, Browar Warszawski has created one that's much more enjoyable than most.

The second day's meeting was in the back room of a bar called The Taps. The taps at The Taps were pouring fifteen beers, of which I had time to try two. Zierna Obiecana's Faza is a milkshake IPA -- not a style I choose with any regularity, but once in a while is OK. This 6.5%-er turned out to be a particularly good one. I'm not at all sure if they put any lactose in it, and that may be why. It's hazy but clean with it, lacking both heat and dessertish viscosity. Instead it's all juicy and tropical, and I picked out pineapple and passionfruit as hop effects before discovering that the recipe includes pineapple and pear. There's real coconut too, and this comes across subtly yet definite. I enjoyed its cleansing sparkle, as much for the pleasant surprise as the sensation itself. If we're now in a world where milkshake IPA is largely gloop-free, I may need to reconsider my stance on it.

I hadn't noticed that my second one, Černý Kalcifer by Křikloun was an import, but later discovered it to be Czech. The brewery doesn't have much to say about it, other than it's a dark ale of 5.2% ABV (12°) and uses six different malts. Turns out I don't have much to say about it either. It goes big on the roast, with a serious porter-like dryness being dominant. Sweeter dark malt effects don't really feature much, and there's an almost spicy herbal bitter side to add some complexity. Mostly it's full and filling, and I guess is designed for session drinking in winter. It's no kind of improvement on good Czech dark lager, though. Perhaps the brewery only made it this way as a novelty.

Across from where we stayed was a theme pub called The British Bulldog. One glance told me it wasn't the sort of place that would be worth going to. A second glance, however, on day two, revealed a sign on the exterior for "Tyskie z Tanka". Tyskie is the local flagship of Asahi, who also make Pilsner Urquell and promote it heavily in tank form. This was the exact same system of horizontal copper tanks, and even though the beer had been tapped a week and a day previous, it was still pretty good, if lacking in the complexity of Urquell.

Always on the lookout for a tick, I noticed the bar was also selling Książęce IPA, also by Tyskie -- I'm actually not sure that the Bulldog had any British beer at all. It was obvious that this came from a brewery more used to lager, from the clear golden colour to the precisely clean flavour. It's not lacking in hop character, though it's sweet and perfumey, with a zesty citric aspect that doesn't exactly spark with freshness, but isn't unpleasant either. There's an old-fashioned and resinous character to this which means it's unlikely to be mistaken for the work of a young and thrusting microbrewery, but it works, and doesn't taste like corners have been cut.

That's all the pub action you're getting. As it happened, the Warsaw Beer Festival was taking place, down at the Legia Warsaw football stadium, and most of my drinking time was spent there. I'll tell you about it next.