This, sadly, is my final review of the Polish folklore series from the Polish brewery Browar Błonie. While this is my fourth tasting, the series has 7 beers and I don't believe I've ever seen the remaining 3 entries which are a hemp lager, a mead, and a dark lager with raspberry. All sound tasty to me. Perhaps I'll run into them in Chicago on my coming visits.
Honey is, to my mind, a staple of the Polish kitchen. While granulated white sugar is certainly common, honey has the connotation of tradition with countless generations of Poles having tended to apiaries through the centuries. Strolling through a Polish grocery store, I find honey advertised on many products. There's cookies and cakes and other sweets, but I also see it in the liquor aisle. Last time I found myself in one, I spotted more than one honey liqueur as well as multiple varieties of honey beer, including this one.
While I've had American beers brewed with honey, brewers here don't advertise it prominently like they do with fruity hops. Polish brewers, on the other hand, give it pride of place as I presume it evokes a sense of pride and tradition. Plus I gather it's a flavor that Poles enjoy greatly.
Me, I have found beers with honey to be hit or miss. All too often the honey flavor has a skunkiness to it, perhaps an oxidized flavor. More like hemp than a flower. With the right flavor in the right amount, a honey beer can be a thing of great joy.
I have never seen a Polish honey beer with an English label slapped on it that used the word "braggot" or "brackett". Still, I would imagine that these beers fall under that category since those are just beers that have honey added to them in time to be fermented, right? If you add honey and its sugars get eaten by the yeast it = braggot = brackett = honey beer. That's my take, anyway.
Google Translate failed epically on the beer's name. It was worse than "All your base are belong to us". Translating the brewery's site yields "And to the Ku" while Wiktionary explains that it's an interjection akin to "peekaboo!".
Pictures of beer taken at my desk make every pale brew a deep gold/amber and no exception here. This stuff is actually of a medium yellow hue. It was hazy though I caught some bubbles inside. The small head was a lovely white color but lasted only a short time. Nonetheless I managed to get a snap of it. I smelled a wonderful biscuit scent along with some straw and the honey. Here the sticky stuff had a very pronounced floral thing going on that was...I want to say creamy but that's not right. It wasn't bright but more rounded - kind of waxy.
Taking a sip I found that the brew had a medium-light body and a real paucity of fizz. Man, and could I taste the honey - a big, bright floral flavor. I liked this taste quite a bit as it had the floral thing going and not the skunky one. But man oh man, it was overpowering. As in I could barely taste any malt. While not sweet, I think the flavor tricked my brain into initially perceiving the beer as such and heavier/more cloying than it was. This stuff must have been barely hopped too because it seemed there was just a tad of herbal something in there with only the faintest of traces of bitterness.
The earthy sweetness of the honey lingers a long while after swallowing and then fades quite slowly to a very gentle bitterness and the barest hint of dryness.
This stuff did not sit with me well. The lack of grainy flavor and the waxy aroma of the honey put me off. Perhaps some more hops for balance and definitely more fizziness were needed to bring it closer to a dry mead. The floral element of the flavor was wonderful, though.
Junk food pairing: Pair A Ku Ku with something solidly savory. I recommend a paprika flavored potato chips such as Jays Hot Stuff. Alternatively, try a bag of Snyder's Sour Cream and Caramelized Onion Pretzel Pieces.
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