Sources: people I’ve met on G+ Community and various Beer Brewing Communities and Web sites.
Piwo = Beer.
In Polish the letters X, V, Q don’t exist and some additional letters are also present that are missing from English. For example VODKA is really spelled Wódka – the ó letter is more related to the U letter, because of how it is pronounced.
This article takes special meaning for me specifically since I am Polish, so am planning to invest extra time into figuring out all these recipes and how to best recreate them outside of Poland. I will write about a few things and then later I will post my own recipes after of course trying it out and confirming their result – and not just blind posting.
The „Grodziskie redivivus” Project – this is a famous mid-16th century Polish beer Recipe project, its maintained by a polish brewing community and here is the English version.
http://www.pspd.org.pl/uploads/grodziskie/grodziskie-redivivus-raport-1-eng.pdf
In Europe the metric system is observed, so you will have to translate if needed to US units for weigh/liquids and pressures.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/why-us-not-on-metric-system.htm
It goes into great details about every step to first document how it used to be done and how over time brewing has changed; and how it is done today and why. Some key differences to take note:
- Artesian sources (especially the water)
- low temp fermentation
- a lot of older breweries and even ones that exist today open-ferment all their beers (this allows for a no stress/no pressure environment that brings out a unique and natural flower bouquet of flavors, tastes and is even apparent in the final color of the beer).
- top and bottom fermenting yeasts are mixed together for a combination
- Regional hops are used
- some recipes use only single malt, like the smoked oak wheat malt and most breweries malt and smoke their own grains using their traditional methods
- these beers are typically carbonated to 3.5 volume – so make sure to use strong bottles, don’t reuse any weak bottles that don’t qualify – the bottles might crack
Here is some links to some Polish brewing forums and Breweries:
http://www.wiki.piwo.org – in Polish, but you can use Google translate
Here is a fairly good video (albeit a little long) – they dedicated their entire show to one of the polish beers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTpoJ2vL60g
Here is an active brewery that still employs a lot of the traditional ways of brewing beer, the videos are in Polish, but they do have an English version of their website:
http://www.browarfortuna.pl/en/open_fermentation/
http://www.europeanbeerguide.net/polbrew.htm
a nice Wiki Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Beer_and_breweries_in_Poland
a BBC article about the beer scene in Krakow – http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20121130-krakow-brews-a-beer-scene-of-its-own
If you would like to include something, leave a Comment, thanks!