Once upon a time, beer in Poland used to be very dull. Bland, boring lager used to be the beer of choice, with the odd exception such as Zywiec Porter.
Then, sometime around 2013, a beer revolution started. I visited in November and found a multitude of beer bars serving beers from a growing range of breweries – some good, some not so good.
A great help in hunting down beers in Poland is ratebeer.com along with beerpubs.pl(English language version: beerpubs.com). The latter is geared to beer in Poland and is run by an ex-pat, James Eastwood. It contains listings of anywhere worth drinking in Poland and those that aren’t. One of the latest sites that has sprung up is ontap.pl – this site lists pubs and the beers they currently have available with all sorts of useful information such as pricing, how long the beer’s been on for and where else might be stocking it.
One big grumble is pricing. Quite often bars price smaller measures of beers at not much less than the larger ones – it’s common to see 0.5l at say 12zl and 0.3l at 10 or 11zl (1zl is currently about 20p). I know it’s not a huge amount to start with but it’s the principle. I’d rather try a few smaller beers than be lumbered with one big one. Quite often too, beer is only available in bottles. Normally, this is no great hardship in the rest of Europe as they tend to be 250ml or 330ml bottles, but in Poland, 500ml is the norm.
I’n my blog articles, I’ve made a note whether the pricing for smaller beers is daft (maybe only 1 or 2zl less for a small one), so-so (lower in price but still not proportionate) or fab (no ‘tax’ for trying smaller measures) . Pretty much all of them have free wi-fi.
Have a look at the following posts for further details with more to follow soon.
