Beer in Warsaw

It’s easy to forget how far Warsaw has come on its beer journey. From having no multi-tap bars four years ago, there are now more than fifty of the things. They’re even popping up in the suburbs. Inspired by the map function on the utterly excellent  ontap.pl , we booked an Uber to the wilds of Wola with a route plotted out to deepest darkest Bemowo. Yes, it is easy to miss First stop was Beczka Chmielu Pub at Wolska 89. Behind the unassuming single-window shop front that’s all too easy to miss is this smallish place: just seven seats in the front room, along with a small fridge and a short, rather low bar that’s clearly intended for ordering at rather than propping up. But behind that bar are eleven taps, Polish and Lithuanian beers and a cider, all at prices a notch or two lower than city centre bars. The decor is also fairly simple and low key, lots of exposed brick work and retro orange lights, a theme continued into the larger back room which has seats for about 30 peo...

Lviv is an awesome city; even on a grey rainy Sunday in autumn, it’s utterly superb. Unfortunately, the beer scene is less wonderful, it’s mostly macro-lager that is very cheap (half a litre in a neighbourhood bar is about 20 hryvni, which is 3zl, £0.60) and, while not completely undrinkable like Polish macro rubbish, not really worth bothering with. In terms of good beer bars, your choices are basically Pradva Beer Theatre and this place. Not that that’s such a drawback: when a bar is as good as this one, you don’t need any other places to go.   Superb bar; rubbish photo. Anyway, here's your target. Two minutes from the Rynok, the old town location means that the seating is spread in four smallish rooms on the ground floor with more space upstairs, not sure how much space: I saw the stairs, then I saw the bar, you can guess which drew more attention. There are 16 taps to choose from, although two of those are given over exclusively to ciders (and those two seemed to hav...

Artezan The great and the good of the Warsaw beer scene assembled last night for the “beta-test launch” of an eagerly awaited (and long-awaited) new pub. It was a veritable who’s who of zythophiles, but one of the toilet windows was left unguarded and I was through it like a rat up a drainpipe for a couple of lightning pints before anybody realised they’d been infiltrated by somebody who can often only tell Red Bull apart from Russian Imperial Stout because one has more bubbles. And if opening night (and every night after) is anything like the soft launch, this is going to be a cracking addition to Warsaw’s craft beer line up. "One of each please barman!" Design-wise it’s all quite modern and very clean lines, rather Scandinavian, with lots of light-coloured wood and bright colours. It’s a refreshing break from the hipster-inspired shabby chic look that so many places are trying to get away with. Clearly more than a couple of quid has been spent and more than a l...

Yes, I do still need to write up my notes from a trip Plzen, but in some of the few moments not filled with work, the boss and I dropped into Jabeerwocky and Brewdog last weekend to see what was on offer. First up was a pint of Art+9 from Stu Mostow. After absolutely loving the Art+8 strawberry Berliner Weisse in Wroclaw, particularly at the Stu Mostow brewery bar, I had high hopes for this one, described as an Oatmeal HopTart, and it didn’t disappoint. Quite a full mouth for the strength (3.7%), presumably that would be the oats, it was packed full of tropical fruits with just enough sourness to keep it interesting and make it hugely refreshing. My only regret was not getting a photo, but that does provide a cracking excuse for another pint very soon. The boss went for a Przedunkelniczne by Bednary, as it was described on the board as a pszeniczne and she was in the mood for a pszeniczne. But, as the name suggests, it’s actually a dunkelweizen and so was rejected on the grounds that ...

The first stop on a three town visit to the Czech Republic, I had high hopes fo r this place, even though it does bill itself as  “ Chodovar Beer Wellness Land ” . It seemed like an absolute winner of an idea: unused buildings on a brewery with several hundred years of history being converted into a hotel, spa and restaurant complex, with part of the lagering caves being one of the restaurants. But the reality is rather different; while it does have a couple of nice bits, it’s certainly very low on the list of places I can’t wait to go back to. In through the portal and up the corridor At first the Ve Skále restaurant seemed to be ticking all of the right boxes. The entrance looks wonderful, a wall and a door into the hillside, and once inside you’re faced with a long upward sloping corridor with roof and walls hewn from the rock. The restaurant apparently seats 260 people but large sections of it had been block-booked by tour parties, so there was only a single tab...

This place came very highly recommended, although one of the key features that made it so excellent in my fellow drinker’s eyes (“And it’s right in the centre of all the essential Nazi sites in Lublin!”) might not be high on everybody’s list of must-have features for a bar. The first thing I discovered about the place was that the ontap.pl listing was pretty out of date, with only half of the beers listed on that site being chalked up on the wall. The second thing was that the list on the wall was also out of date, but apparently the staff had no chalk and so couldn’t update it. The third discovery was that the barman may well have been deaf: I ordered, in Polish, a 0.3l strawberry and rhubarb Berliner Weisse to take the edge off a raging thirst, but instead he gave me a pint of what smelt and tasted like a Roggenbier. That’s because it was a Roggenbier. Normally questionable service somewhat irritates me –  (to put it mildly), but the Razem na Zycie from Warsztat Piwowarski was...

Perlowa Pijalnia Piwa   I’ve always had something of soft spot for Perła. A few years ago I’d travel across Warsaw to drink the draught version of the stuff. On every trip to Lubelski we’d stop in Ryki on the way home and fill the boot (what little there is in a Mini Cooper) with bottles of Zwieryniec Pils, as it was only distributed in Lubelski so Ryki was the closest place to get it. The times certainly have changed. But even though Perła is now almost a beer of last resort, drunk mainly because a corner shop doesn’t have anything better, I was very much looking forward to checking out the bar at the site of the former brewery and the promise of small batch beers that aren’t available anywhere else.   Although there were no more than a dozen people in the place that Saturday afternoon, service could be most charitably described as relaxed, ten minutes to get a menu, and double that to actually get a badly needed Zwierzyniec Pils. But the barman was friendly and cl...