The first time I drank a Polish-brewed grodziskie was on the balcony of a hotel room in Kraków in the fall of 2019. The experience is vivid in my memory, including the setting, the time of day, and even the heaviness of the post-rain air—all because of that unexpected, delightful little ale that fixed the moment in my memory.
I was tasting the flagship version by Browar Grodzisk—more on that brewery shortly—and it came gushing out of the bottle; there was as much foam as there was beer. Vigorous sparkle fed a cumulonimbus head, and the beer—lightly smoky, hoppy, tinged with a hint of minerality—featured a combination of flavors I’d never encountered.
I had tasted American-brewed grodziskies over the years, and they were fine. But they also had an unfortunate quality that historically inspired beers sometimes have—they were interesting but challenging to enjoy.
But this Polish one from Grodzisk was pure pleasure. I managed to pause long enough to appreciate that it was complex and elegant, and that it worked because the elements were precisely calibrated and balanced. Then it went down my gullet in minutes.
The flavors of grodziskie aren’t what you’d call modern—it’s an acquired taste even in its homeland. But neither is the style on life support. Grodziskie has found an audience of people who appreciate its clever use of flavor and easy drinkability. That’s good news: It’s a wonderful style and deserves any audience that can find it.
A Very Old Beer
The small town of Grodzisk Wielkopolski in western Poland has been a center of brewing for hundreds of years.
Records of malting date to 1426, and in 1601 local leaders passed laws to protect the quality of their beer. Like so many places in Europe, great powers took turns controlling this part of Poland, which was part of Prussia and later the German Empire from 1793 until the end of World War I. The town’s Germanized name then was Grätz, and the local beer was known as grätzer rather than grodziskie.
Throughout the centuries, the town was renowned for its beer—but it hasn’t always been made the same way. Marek Kamiński, founder of Browar Kingpin and president of the Polish Craft Brewers Association, has researched the history and lectured about the style. “It’s always been light beer,” he says about the long tradition in Grodzisk. “But actually, the malt varied over time. It’s been wheat with some addition of barley. There [was] a moment in time when it was all barley, but for a short period.”
By the turn of the 20th century, however, the classic formulation had become firmly established: It was a low-alcohol bitter ale made with 100 percent smoked wheat malt.
Rail lines passing through Grodzisk gave the beer a broader audience, and production grew at the end of the 19th century. Yet it was never a national beer. Even during its peak, local breweries made only 100,000 hectoliters of grodziskie. Instead, it was a regional specialty with a remarkably long run. Unfortunately, that changed toward the end of the 20th century, as production dwindled. The last producer from that time went out of business in 1994.
The era of global brands and mass commercialization can be rough on small, regional beers, and there was every reason to believe grodziskie had become just another extinct style. In a heartening development, however, local homebrewers didn’t let that happen.
In 2007, Polish homebrewers staged a grodziskie competition. Interest started to build, and Pinta, a commercial brewery from southern Poland, released a grodziskie in 2010. The homebrewers organized and began collecting all the information they could about the style. Proponents started a local Grodzisk beer festival in 2015; that’s the same year that Browar Grodzisk began brewing again, revived by the owners of Browar Fortuna.
It took a couple of decades, but grodziskie was back.
Unusual Elements, in Harmony
The effort to restore grodziskie benefited from the presence of a lot of the old infrastructure.
In the case of Browar Grodzisk, which restarted in the same building that had been shuttered in 1994, the infrastructure was literal and physical. Brewers also had access to old brewing logs and understood the full details about how the beer should be made. The ingredients were a little harder to source, but in time the brewery found a floor maltings to produce their smoked malt. They also eventually revived an old Polish hop, Tomyski, which traditionally had been used in grodziskie.
One of Poland’s biggest evangelists for grodziskie is Marcin Ostajewski, the current head brewer at both Fortuna and Grodzisk. In the decade since the Grodzisk brewery’s relaunch, the style has achieved some remarkable success—especially when we consider that it’s always been a regional style.
“Since the brewery was revived, we’ve had more than 150 new grodziskie interpretations brewed by Polish craft brewers, [with] more brewed each year,” Ostajewski.
Kamiński also has been tracking the style’s revival, and he cites nine Polish examples now made year-round. He’s created a chart showing new examples brewed by year, and the number keeps rising.
That interest is growing steadily despite the fact that the style is tricky to brew. Browar Grodzisk posted its recipe online—and we’ve adapted that here, with some additional notes from Ostajewski—but I wanted to understand why that brewery’s version was so good.
Ostajewski points to the overall composition before touching on each element. “We always say that the balance of all qualities is the key,” he says. “Since the beer is low-ABV, it’s quite easy to overpower something. Malt backbone should be light, also because of the 100 percent wheat grist. The beer is quite dry, but it’s backed by the layers of bonfire smoke and delicate hop aroma. The bitterness is quite high for the ABV, but it should not cover the smoky touch in the aftertaste. Clean fermentation is quite crucial because fruity esters easily dominate malty and hoppy accents.” Although the style is traditionally an ale, it’s fermented cold and can be made with lager yeast, Ostajewski says.
Getting the hop and smoke to play well together is a big reason Grodzisk’s beer works—and the harmony comes from the hop variety and the type of smoke. The hops should be an herbal Noble variety. A Polish hop-growing family resurrected the Tomyski variety that Grodzisk uses, but the more common variety Lubelski (or Lublin) also works as well. Both are herbal and spicy, qualities that bridge nicely with the tangy oak-smoked wheat malt.
Ostajewski says he often encounters foreign-brewed grodziskies that lean more toward Bamberg-style rauchbier, but that’s not how grodziskie should taste.
“In the heyday of original grodziskie,” he says, “when it was brewed in one small Polish town, the maltsters wanted to have only a little addition of smoke in their beers because kilning with smoke was already a thing of the past.” Even 100 years ago, people viewed the lighter smoke as more modern, and it harmonizes with the Noble hops. It doesn’t seem like it would work, but it does.
From a sensory standpoint, the carbonation is as important as the smoke or hops in defining the beer. Ostajewski says grodziskie’s nickname is “Polish champagne,” and that’s also why bottle conditioning is so important.
“All of those elements are tied together by very high carbonation levels,” he says. “We are aware that only a few grodziskies out there utilize this method, but without it we could not get the desired levels of CO2.” For breweries aiming for the right levels, Ostajewski suggests targeting 3.5 to 4 volumes of CO2, or seven to eight grams per liter.
Some beers are “process” beers—they depend on particular methods to achieve their character. Despite its idiosyncratic character, grodziskie isn’t one of those. The goal is a particular presentation of distinct elements, but brewers can decide how they get there.
You could use the wheat malt from Sladovna Bruntál, as Browar Grodzisk does, or source it elsewhere; you could use the original yeast culture, now banked and sold by White Labs (WLP548), or another relatively neutral blend or strain; you could use Tomyski or Lubelski hops or a different Noble variety. You can decoct the mash, or not; you can bottle condition or force carbonate. But whatever you do, the beer should taste like a grodziskie—refreshing, bitterish, and smoky, yet elegant and delicate, with the elements in harmony.
Americans like to experiment and riff on styles, and Polish grodziskie brewers and fans will even encourage this. Before experimenting, though, you might want to sample a more traditional Polish example first.
Even at its most buttoned-up, grodziskie is an unusual and startling beer that requires no additional bells and whistles. More importantly, you’ll taste the strange alchemy that happens when the elements work together.
There’s a reason this beer has been brewed pretty much the same way for more than a century, give or take a missing decade or two: Because it’s just about perfect as it is.
Addendum: Say It, “Grodziskie”
Poles aren’t too bothered by foreign mispronunciations, but here’s a tip if you want to sound like a native: The d is almost completely unvoiced, and the z sounds more like a j, with the terminal i-e actually forming two syllables—so, it’s something like grow-jees-kee-ya.
