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400-year-old brew offers Polish monks secret of making real ale
Episcopal News Service
Issue:
Section:
2003-104-8
Posted: Tuesday, May 13, 2003
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Cistercian monks in southern Poland hope to become the country's first distributors of real ale, brewed according to a recipe said to date from the 17th century.
'This beer is dark and distinctive - it has a great bitter taste,' said Eugeniusz Wlodarczyk, abbot of the monastery at Szczyrzyc in the Beskidy Mountains. 'We won't be producing a huge amount so as not to compete with the big breweries. But it'll be quite different from other beers now on the market.'
The first of up to 5 million litres per year would hit bars this month in the southern Polish city of Krakow, said Wlodarczyk. Yearly beer production stands at around 3 billion litres, or 50 litres per person in Poland.
In a recent interview with the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, the abbot said he hoped the Szczyrzyc beer, which has a 4.5 per cent alcoholic content, would become available nationwide within two years.
The Cistercians had already received sample barrels, ordered specially from beer-making Trappist monks in Belgium, he added. The Cistercians are also hoping to break into the US market through an affiliated Polish-run monastery in Chicago.
Wlodarczyk said he had come across the 400-year-old recipe during a search through monastery archives in the mid-1990s. 'Of course, the recipe has had to be updated to current production standards,' noted Wlodarczyk. 'We can't divulge it, since our competitors on the brewery network never sleep. All I can say is that the secret lies in a certain very special kind of yeast.'
About 70 per cent of Polish breweries are foreign-owned. The country's biggest producer, Zywiec, a subsidiary of the Dutch Heineken giant, claims a third of the market, with an annual turnover of US$650 million.
The Cistercians are planning to open a hotel and beer-hall on their 1800-hectare estate, said the manager of the Szczyrzyc monastery, Elzbieta Adamek, and the monks also hope to obtain grants from the European Union to launch their own cheese and honey manufacturing operations.
Church-run businesses have mushroomed over the past decade in Poland, 95 per cent of whose 38 million inhabitants are Roman Catholics. Ventures run by parishes include transport and construction companies.
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