Impressions of Gdańsk: piwo, pierogi, the past in the present

“We must go back to Poland some time soon,” we’ve been saying for about 20 years. In our late teens and early twenties we spent a lot of time there.

Jess learned Polish at university alongside her history degree – the last gasp of a Cold War scheme sponsored by the Foreign Office which nobody had yet got round to cancelling – and then taught English there for a year.

As our interest in beer grew, we got distracted by Germany, Belgium and Czechia. We also gave up flying which put Poland that little further out of reach.

This year, though, we decided the time had come and planned a trip via Berlin, whose shiny new Hauptbahnhof points conveniently eastward.

Specifically, we chose Gdańsk because Jess spent a month there in 1998, polishing her Polish in a local school. For 25 years she’d been saying “You really must see it…” Now, at last, we were returning together.

Things spread out and thin out as the train barrels through Brandenburg and rushes through what was once Prussia. It’s a big country, a neverending plain.

Into the borderlands the atmosphere changes: please have your passports ready, security officers may board the train. The German train crew disembarks and passes the incoming Polish crew on the bridge across the platforms, ships in the night.

Trucks are backed up on the bridge across the Oder, the wide river that now marks the Polish border, but really signals that you’re entering a zone where history has created places with two identities, no identity, repressed memories.

We kept saying to ourselves, “It’s not about the beer.” But the problem for us is that it’s always about the beer. When we were last in Poland, we had the stamina for recreational vodka drinking, but not these days. And with all that history swirling in our heads, with the ghosts of Prussia and of Danzig ever present, we thought we’d find something worth drinking.

When Jess was last in Gdańsk it was full of Germans – old people shipped west in 1945 and 1946 making a sentimental return, and their children. Back then, local businesses pandered to them with Danziger theme brewpubs and lidded mugs of German-style beer. While that post-Iron-Curtain moment seems to have passed there are still a couple of German-style breweries in town, both attached to international hotels, so that’s where we started.

Brovarnia Gdańsk is at the Hotel Gdańsk on the waterside. It was dressed for Oktoberfest when we visited, with staff in Dirndls and Lederhosen, blue and white bunting everywhere, and oompah music on loop. It still felt like a hotel bar, though, or perhaps a chain restaurant. “This is going to be one of those places with a hazy pale beer and a sticky dark beer,” said Ray, eyeing the copper brewing kit visible beyond the counter, “like you get in Hamburg or Stuttgart or Frankfurt.” And, yes, it was pretty much that. What saved the day was a Black IPA, of all things – a classy, interesting beer that combined chocolate, biscuit and pine with aplomb.

Gdańsk has too much history and not enough shops, that’s the problem. Trying to buy a tube of toothpaste is more of a mission than it ought to be, but you’ll stumble across fifteen national historical monuments on the way.

The local supermarket is that way, past the colossal concrete air raid shelter built in 1943, round the corner from the Polish Post Office where some of the first shots of World War II were fired, not far from the shipyard where the Cold War began to end.

The city itself is a war memorial. At the end of World War II it was 90% destroyed, an apocalyptic rubblescape. The new Soviet-controlled authorities debated what to do and, at one point, someone suggested leaving the city centre as a vast ruin, to remind the Germans of what they’d done. Except it wouldn’t be Germans who would have to live here but, rather, Poles from the east whose own cities had been absorbed in the USSR. So, instead, Gdańsk was rebuilt not as it was in 1939, but instead to recall the days before 1793 when it was part of the Kingdom of Poland.

PG4 Brewhouse, in the basement of the Central Hotel, was much more convincing as a beer hall. It is also one of the few places in Gdańsk where the shameful place name Danzig can be seen in writing. It’s set up for corporate hospitality and tourists dinners with English the default language, and the staff seemed confused that we didn’t immediately want to order pork knuckles or schnitzels. But it is suitably dark and cosy (basements are best) and we weren’t the only people there to focus on the beer.

There’s an impressive menu of house brews – eight in total, in a range of styles, including some we’ve never seen anywhere else. Starting with a Pils to calibrate, it was clear that, if not perfect, it was a cut above. It was hazy, of course, in true international brewpub style, but satisfying, and served with a decent head of foam.

Gdańsk Rubin was their take on a Dunkel and a highlight of the menu, being drier and more complex than some German examples. We picked up suggestions of rye bread and liquorice.

The wheat beer was on the dark, amber end of the spectrum, with some toffee notes to go with the banana. We found it extremely convincing and assumed it was a conscious attempt to clone Schneider Weisse.

Having tried all of the standard beers that were available, we got into the local and historical specialities.

Tafelbier was an homage to “a beer consumed every day in Gdańsk” in the mediaeval period. International brewpubs always have a yellow one and a brown one; the most enterprising will also find space for one in between. That was Tafel, which struck us as being similar to some modern takes on Vienna beer we’ve encountered, poised between light and dark. It also had some intriguing herbal notes.

Things really started to get interesting with Krollinger, a sour beer fermented with three different yeasts, including Brettanomyces. It was not boring, if not quite as intense and complex as the menu description implied. What it resembled most closely was Berliner Weisse, and there was even the option to have it with a shot of wormwood or raspberry syrup. In summer, perhaps, it would have gone down better.

Finally, there was Danziger Jopenbier – the main event. It’s a historic style associated with the city, brewed to some kind of original recipe, and selling at 16 Polish złoty  (£3) for a 50ml shot. In presentation, it was treated much like a liqueur or a sherry and reminded us of both Riga Balsam and Pedro Ximinez fortified wine. It was extremely sweet and sticky, completely flat, with a funky, leathery, pipe tobacco stink. A curiosity, then, rather than something to session on. But the menu says that “it was used to aromatise and enhance others beers” and we couldn’t resist trying that, using it to turn the wheat beer into a convincing Doppelbock.

The international brewpub style is so 1990s. Nowadays, it’s all about the international beanie hat tote bag pot plant horn-rimmed hygge lo-fi ambient craft beer street food scene.

There’s a hip pierogi restaurant for which you have to queue, and the queue is full of people posting videos to TikTok and Instagram. When you get inside, you can watch expensive cars pull up outside, their chiselled owners clutching tiny dogs against their designer sportswear. They sweep in and are seated at once. Sophisticated global citizens, of course, but they still need their potato dumplings. (And what dumplings… the pinnacle of the art.)

The Montownia Food Hall could easily be in Birmingham or Berlin except, this being Gdańsk, it’s housed in the vast concrete chamber of what used to be a U-Boat factory. There’s food in the styles of Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Mexico, India, Greece, Italy, Ukraine and Craftonia (avocado toast). Blinking devices summon diners when their food is ready, their piercing beeps overlapping and constant.

The main feature of the food hall is a long looping bar where stylish bartenders sling shots and cocktails at urban professionals and couples on date night. There is beer but it’s not why anyone is here. The separate craft beer stand by the main entrance looks the part with its keg taps in the back wall and fridges full of cans, as if it was shipped complete from Bermondsey in a freight container.

German-style brewpubs are one thing but we also wanted to visit some craft beer bars. Partly because we wanted to explore the full range of local beer, and partly because we knew if we didn’t someone online would ask us why not.

Pułapka calls itself the best craft beer bar in Gdańsk. On our visit, on Sunday evening, there were 13 different beers on tap and more in bottles and cans.

What excited us most, at first glance, was the presence on the menu of two different beers in the historic and revived Grodziskie style, from two different breweries. With our ongoing pondering about what a healthy beer culture looks like in mind, the presence of local or national speciality styles feels like a win.

Perhaps if we drank Grodziskie every week we could grow to love it. As it is, we found both of these examples rather challenging, with an overwhelming peaty, medicinal smokiness. Lapsus by Warsaw brewery Palatum was more balanced than Piwo w stylu Grodziskie by Trzech Kumpli, apparently a contract brewing outfit based in Tarnów.

The rest of the menu consisted of beer styles we did know, and could latch onto, which is how we know that something wasn’t quite right with, of all things, the gas. A dry Irish-style nitro stout with no head? A German-style lager with no foam?

As the bar filled up with arty, alternative youngsters we observed that what was really selling well was New England IPA and West Coast IPA. Everybody wants to drink what feels most foreign and exotic, we suppose.

“Langfuhr was now called Wrzeszcz, but who can pronounce that?” asks Oskar in The Tin Drum, Günter Grass’s great novel of Danzig-Gdańsk, referring to the suburban satellite where Grass himself grew up. A walk to Wrzeszcz is educational, taking you out of the sentimental and psychological safety of the reconstructed Old Town and into the real world of dual carriageways and retail parks.

On the schlep along Aleja Zwycięstwa (Victory Avenue) you’ll pass a Soviet-built T34 tank intended as a memorial to Polish troops who helped take Gdańsk at the end of World War II. There’s also a somewhat bleak park with a haunted feel that, yes, turns out to be the former site of a church and cemetery.

Push on, push on, and you’re in the neighbourhood – a bustling but unpretty town centre with trams and traffic, bakeries and junk shops, and a surviving example of a proper Polish milk bar.

Grab a tray, fall into line behind the students, the pensioners, the mechanic in his grubby hoody, and give your order fast and clear when the time comes. No pierogi today, love, but we’ve got a lovely chicken schnitzel. Soup? Russian salad? Chips? A big heap of bulgur wheat? Two bowls of soup and two plates of Naleśniki pancakes cost not much more than a single pint of beer in town.

There’s a plaque on the unassuming tenement block where Günter Grass grew up. The council workmen pouring tar on the road don’t seem especially interested. In the park nearby there’s a bronze statue of Oskar Matzerath, drum on his lap, hands raised to beat it with sticks that aren’t there.

The other craft beer bar on our list was Labeerynt on a backstreet in the old town. Though the basement entrance looks like a test, or a trap, it was the pubbiest place we found during our visit. With low, red-tinted light, greebling on the walls, and a selection of private corners and cubbyholes, it felt like somewhere you could settle in. Bar service rather than hovering waiters completed the effect.

A huge hanging sign advertising Czech brewery Svijany boded well for the quality of the beer, if not its localness. As the cheapest and apparently biggest selling item among the 14 beers on the tap list, we figured this would be a good place to start. Watching the bartender carefully manipulate the multiple taps and levers on the font to create the right amount of foam, with the right texture, increased our confidence further. And it did, indeed, taste great.

After that, as we dotted through the menu at random, we didn’t have a bad beer. Some were more to our taste than others, but all seemed well made and well kept, and were served with appropriate care.

The standout beer of the visit – of the entire week in Gdańsk, in fact – was Coffeelicous Special by Piwo Podziemie, a 6.3% chocolate coffee vanilla milk stout. It might sound like a bit of a novelty beer but it was surprisingly easy drinking with all of those flavours in perfect balance. What might have helped, of course, was that it was served from a “pumpa” – that is, an English style beer engine. If it wasn’t cask conditioned, it was a good imitation.

Lost under the flyover, trapped between railway lines, penned in by redevelopment work in progress, you turn a corner and find a ghost town. A block, a few cobbled streets, of old Gdańsk, of old Danzig, how it must have looked before the war. Not reconstructed, the real thing, with soot staining the brickwork and bullet holes in the apartment block walls.

An elderly woman in a red coat passes, battling a lazy dog, and for a moment you wonder if she’s slipped through from another time.

The old Imperial Shipyard grew up in the 19th century and is now mostly deserted, its colossal brick and concrete sheds derelict. In Britain, there would be barriers and keep out signs. In Poland, where the Wild East begins, you’re invited to wander among the ruins, with a gentle warning that if you fall over and hurt yourself, you’re not to go running to them.

Broken windows, spilled oil, chunks of metal and stone embedded in the ground… It feels like the set of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker.

Who’s that, over there, that shadow? Someone other ruinophile with a camera and hiking boots admiring a rusting fire escape. Well, what about that shadow? The tall one, with the skeletal shape? That’s an art installation, made from rusting cogs and pipes – a battle droid frozen in place.

The water that runs beside it is the Martwa Wisła – literally the Dead Vistula.

After a day or two, the marketing began to get to us: maybe we did want a Żywiec (Heineken) after all. It had never struck us a great beer in the past but everyone else was drinking it. And the craft beer revolution has changed Żywiec, too: as well as the standard pale lager there’s also a dark lager, a wheat beer, a pale ale, and an IPA.

Getting a glass of Żywiec was easier said than done, however. The first place we tried to order one had run out. The second place we found it was in a seaside bar in Gdynia at 9:30am when, even applying holiday rules, we didn’t quite feel up to it. We finally got our Żywiec at the other end of a coastal walk, in Sopot, to go with a seafood lunch.

It was exactly as we remembered it – sweet, bland, a little fizzy, like a less impressive version of Carling. That was that itch scratched.

We do like to be beside the seaside, tiddly-om-pom-pom, even when the sea in question is the Baltic, littered with cargo ships and tankers, with colossal Gdańsk shipyard cranes on the horizon.

Gdynia feels quite familiar if you’re British: fish and chips, ice cream parlours, amusement arcades, novelty knickers for a pound from a vending machine near the prom.

At first glance, given the context, there’s what appears to be a typical Eastern Block statue of Lenin guarding the entrance to the harbour. Except it’s not Lenin – it’s Joseph Conrad, the seafaring Polish lad who became one of the greatest writers in the English language. Suffering no loss of dignity from the seagull standing and shitting on his head, he stares sternly towards Sopot, the next resort along.

Promenading towards Sopot you pass a vast concrete, chrome and plate glass box stuffed with shiny brewing equipment – the Gdynia Port Brewery. It looks out over the beach like a bunker or fortification.

Sopot itself is quainter and cuter and a little snootier than Gdynia: think Lytham St Annes or St Ives. You have to pay to use the bog in Sopot and there are patissiers selling dainty Parisian tarts instead of the typical hefty wedges of pale yellow cheesecake. There’s a craft brewery on the high street, of course.

What we failed to find in Gdańsk was a proper boozer. In Berlin, now, under the guidance of the Krennmairs, we know our way around some Eckkneipen. In Brussels, we know how to sniff out neighbourhood cafes. And in Cologne, we’re enjoying exploring the Veedels.

But in Gdańsk we simply didn’t see any ‘normal’ bars or pubs. It might be that they’re hidden on backstreets away from respectable eyes. But based on Jess’s experience 20+ years ago, it’s more likely that they simply never existed.

Next time, finding one or two, if they are there, will be our mission. If you have any tips, comment below.