Cider in Poland, where "drinking is a national duty."

Why has it been 13 years since I've visited Poland?

When last there in 2002 for the ostensible purpose of drinking Polish-brewed Porters, my tour group often became sidetracked by the excellence of Polish mead.

Why not cider?

Cider in Poland: Apples, apples everywhere ... When drinking is a national duty (The Economist)

TOMASZ SOLIS dreams of the day when the countryside round Lublin, on the eastern edge of Poland, turns into another Tuscany: a place where motorists or cyclists make leisurely tours, stopping to refine their palates by sipping a delicate drink which only the local terroir could produce. But the beverage would be cider, not wine.

"I would like to ask you to send me some beer items."

If you own a brewery or work for one, you probably know the drill. E-mails constantly arrive from overseas (oddly, with the exception of Nigeria), asking you to send beer labels, crown caps and the like to become the cherished keepsakes of private collectors who've heard of your beer, even in far-off Vladivostok or the Amazon Basin.

The return mailing's on your dime, of course. The cynical way to view these requests is to imagine that they're just a way for traders to build up swap stocks. I suppose many are. Apart from cynicism, and absent the money for postage, no one's getting a snail mail freebie; sorry. The images can be freely cribbed on-line, anyway.

Fewer Americans seeking labels go fishing on e-mail. They generally will send a stamped, self-addressed envelope via the US Mail. At NABC, we try to oblige them, irrespective of what they plan on doing with whatever items they're given.

But there's something that nags me about the foreign requests, which tend to come from Central/Eastern European locales, these being of longtime interest to me historically and geographically. Lately, I've been pasting the addresses into Google Map and seeing what their houses look like. For some reason, I find it a melancholy exercise, and I'm unsure why.

Transferral, perhaps?

The home of Tomas from Czech Republic is above. Katarzyna lives in Poland (below). Actually, Tomas's request was to publicize a beer app he'd created. 

These look like nice places to live, and I hope no protocols are being violated by my depicting their homes, seeing as there's a drone outside my front door as I type.

I just can't help wondering: What's the rest of the story?

Grätzer/Grodziskie ... oak-smoked wheat session ale, coming soon to NABC.

David Pierce, NABC's Director of Brewing Operations clues us into a new NABC small batch brew:

Ben Minton will be brewing another new historical re-creation session beer this week. We recently acquired a small quantity of oak (eiche) smoked wheat malt for this beer. The beer will be 100% wheat, something we've never done here, and it will be a very hard beer to brew. If you see Ben pulling out his hair, this is why.

Here is an overview of the style.

Grätzer/Grodziskie

Grätzer is actually indigenous to Poland, where it was known as grodziskie. Grätz was the German name for the town Grodzisk, which was, for a little over a hundred years, part of Prussia. But the beer style both pre- and post-dated Prussia, and was in fact still brewed in Poland until the 1990s. Grodzisk was a major center of brewing, and at the end of the 18th Century, boasted 53 brewers.

One of the famous local products in that old-school Beervana was a beer made entirely of smoked wheat malt. The indispensable scholar (and Grätz enthusiast) Ron Pattinson retrieved this information for our edification:

"Grätzer Bier, a rough, bitter beer, brewed from 100% wheat malt with an intense smoke and hop flavour. The green malt undergoes smoking during virtually the whole drying process, is highly dried and has a strong aroma in addition to the smoked flavour. An infusion mash is employed. Hopping rate: for 1 Zentner (100 kg) of malt, 3 kg hops. Gravity just 7º [Plato]. Fermentation is carried out in tuns at a temperature of 15 to 20º C."
--“Bierbrauerei" by M. Krandauer, 1914, page 301.

In brief, the passage highlights a few key points: in addition to being brewed entirely of smoked wheat, the beer is small (1.028; less than 3% ABV) and aggressively hoppy. Although it was fermented cool (60-68 degrees), it was an ale. Also interesting: the beer is hopped during the mash.

Stan Hieronymus, writing in Brewing With Wheat, tracked down homebrewer Kristen England who, after chatting with Pattinson, brewed his own Grätzer. It became one of his favorites. England told Hieronymus, "The amount of smoke and hop in this very low-gravity beer is absolutely massive."