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Poland

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.

A Polish intercity train in strong sunlight at Frankfurt an der Oder station.
Frankfurt an der Oder.

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.

A beer hall decked out with Oktoberfest tat. Copper brewing equipment is in the background.
Brovarnia Gdańsk.

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.

A giant concrete cube with no windows on a street corner. There are cars parked all around and a woman is walking her dog.
An air raid shelter from 1943 when Gdańsk was Danzig.

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.

A shot glass of dark liquid on top of a paper menu describing Jopenbier in Polish.
A shot of Jopenbier.

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.

A plate of boiled salmon pierogi with a pot of dill dip.
Pierogi at Mandu.

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.

A blackboard listing lots of different Polish craft beers.
The menu at Pułapka.

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.

A cafe with stock photos of smiling people on the walls, looking a little dated. There are plain tables and chairs in front.
A milk bar in Wrzeszcz.

“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.

A flight of grey steps leading down to a basement. A sign on the bars by the door reads "Dobre Piwo! Good Beer!"
The entrance to Labeerynt.
A bar with illuminated signs for Svijany Czech beer and Delirium Tremens from Belgium.
Inside Labeerynt.

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.

An old red brick tenement block on a cobbled street with shipyard cranes at the end.
Ulica Stefana Jaracza.

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.

A view of a beach through a plastic gazebo. There is tall grass in the foreground and a pier behind.

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.

A statue made of large chunks of stone or concrete. In the background are the masts of tall ships.
Joseph Conrad in Gdynia.

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.

Reconstructed red brick baroque buildings along the waterfront in Gdansk.

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.

Categories
Franconia Germany

Impressions of Nuremberg: red beer, grey stone

A proper dodgy station, like all proper cities have, its plaza reeking of urine and scattered with beer bottles. Old hands rummaging in its bins, searching for treasure. Have fun in our city, the gateway says – have a drink or two, by all means – but don’t let it take you. Under the ring road, through the old city wall, and into a party on the move. Is it the last night of the year for a T-shirt, or the first for scarves and gloves? Wegbiers there and here. Döners here and there. Cream-coloured taxis nosing through crowds forced out into the street from hot bars with hot red lights. Cut back, cut in, head upward by alleyway and rat run, until you reach fresh air and hear the running of the river.

The front of the Altstadthof in grey stone.

The Altstadthof is important to us. It’s where we first got really excited about beer. Where we first thought we might be learning something, and testing our limits. This Rotbier, we said, is exciting. But why? It didn’t smell of pine or peach. It wasn’t funky, sour, or smoky. There was some completeness, some understated complexity, that shook us. Maybe it was just the magic of being on holiday, we thought, and so made a point of going back a little later, in 2008, when we imagined ourselves to be more worldly and critically astute. It still thrilled. Now, 14 years on… well, we liked it, we suppose. It’s chewy and round in the mouth but a little mucky, too. More Hamburg brewpub amber than we remember from before. Lesson learned: never look up your first love.

Wild hops

Hang on – is the river called the Rednitz, the Pegnitz or the Regnitz? All three are right. The Pegnitz joins the Rednitz to form the Regnitz at Fürth. You can walk to Fürth along the Pegnitz, past bike lanes, flood plains and barbecue bins; past football training grounds and surfers on the weir; past wild hops having their way with industrial ruins. River path becomes suburban park, with beer gardens, bandstands and hangry geese. Somewhere in the distance, a brass ensemble is playing the kind of strident striding-out march that you might have thought had gone out of fashion in Germany. Everyone is drifting towards the sound, into town, following the smell of smoke and candyfloss.

Crowds against a funfair with smoke in the air.

We didn’t plan to go to Fürth during Michaelis-Kirchweih, St Michael’s Fair, but we’re glad we did. It’s not a beer festival except insofar as any festival in Bavaria is bound to be. Between fairground rides and shooting galleries there were temporary bars and beer halls selling every local brand. It was all wonderfully tacky but, crucially, not insincere or exploitative. We ate fried potato pancakes to line our stomachs and then found a corner of a table in an Olde Rusticke hut that wasn’t there a week before. We were impressed by Grüner Vollbier Hell, a local brand now brewed by Tucher (Radeberger). Pale and grainy, flowery and fresh, wholesome and just clean enough to wash away the smoke from the grill that made the town centre feel like a Napoleonic battlefield.

An underground station in Nuremberg with orange and white tiles.

Nuremberg is, in some ways, an American city. As in, you’re never more than six feet from an American, or a party of them. Loud Americans Facetiming over their lunch, checking in with the folks back home: “We just got in from Vienna!” Quiet Americans with neat hair muttering heck and gosh and leaving most of their dinner on the plate. Something something Bible school. When they ask the waiters “What light beers do you have?” the waiters are ready, and bring glasses of Helles, along with menus in English. These feel like the very final traces of a very long war.

The brown and rustic interior of Hutt'n

We’d spotted Wirtshaus Hutt’n from the Altstadthof across the road and decided to visit even before Twitter started telling us to go. It’s one of those German catering machines – a beer hall with multiple rooms decorated to resemble an Alpine lodge. We were intercepted at the door and not-so-gently steered into the international dining section, away from the locals in their boozer. It looked like fun in there. Hutt’n’s own Rotbier was good: sweeter and less herbal than Altstadthof’s. The Helles was rustic, characterful, and other synonyms for rough. The real draw here, though, is a list of Franconian beers on draught. Brauerei Neder’s Schwarze Anna was a highlight of the trip: rustic, characterful, and other synonyms for mysteriously brilliant. Franconian best mild. Altes Peculier.

A mural on the side of a school featuring a mug of beer.

German cities have two lives. There’s the Old Town, its limits preserved in stone, where the coach parties and refrigeration conference delegates mingle under ancient (rebuilt) church spires. And there’s the world outside the walls, beyond the ring road, where the illusion ends. Tram tracks. Apartment blocks half a mile long. Pushchairs, cargo bikes, walking frames and removals vans. There are more pizza takeaways than pubs. The churches are just as big but are built in concrete, red brick and clean glass, with Aldi on one side and a Getränkemarkt on the other. There, in the car park, disloyal locals load their cars with crates of foreign beer from alien nations such as Saxony and the Rhineland – after a bit of strange.

The beer garden at Landbierparadies with a block of flats behind.

We struggled to understand Landbierparadies when we visited a branch more than a decade ago. What is Landbier? Back then, we wondered if it had a status a little like ‘real ale’ in the UK. Some way out of town, among the flats and playgrounds of Leipziger Straße, we found a beer hall that felt more like a working men’s club, or a rural community centre. Plain dark wood. Plain tables. No music. One beer on draught. “Zwei Landbier,” we said. “Zwei Landbier,” replied the barman-waiter-manager. As we drank Hetzelsdorfer Vollbier (clean, crisp, metallic, grassy, grainy) the tables around us filled up with older men. Some shuffled cards and started playing with surprising aggression. Others debated, teased each other and laughed. Almost everyone drank the draught beer, one mug after another – keep ‘em coming, son.

A pork knuckle with crackling and dumpling.

Nürnberger Rostbratwurst, three in a bed. Buttered pretzels. Pink cuboids of liver sausage in elliptical bread rolls. Pork knuckle, Schnitzel, meat and two dumplings, help yourself to Senf, don’t spill your gravy. Lads in lederhosen trampling Sauerkraut on the carnival cart. Noch zwei! That’s one way. And there are falafels and kebabs, of course, in brightly lit restaurants where men who don’t drink gather to binge on sandwiches instead. “Is it good?” Shrug. “Döner ist Döner ist Döner.” Hunch and bite, chips into dips, shreds of cabbage falling like autumn leaves. One sandwich down… noch zwei!

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