Beer in Warsaw

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 The first thing I discovered about the place was that the ontap.pl listing was pretty out of date, with only half of the beers listed on that site being chalked up on the wall. The second thing was that the list on the wall was also out of date, but apparently the staff had no chalk and so couldn’t update it.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...