My sincerest desire has come true here: Grodziskie by Dovetail Brewery

Tales of a Grodziskie by Chicago's Dovetail have long been told in these parts but I had never encountered it face to face until last month. I am guessing it's been my poor timing. Either I'd never make it down to Chicagoland when it was in season or the Binny's website proclaiming its availability had not been updated to reflect its absence. I also suspect that part of the problem is that Dovetail takes a very, um, European approach to seasonality. While most American microbrewers adhere to a strict release schedule for their seasonals, e.g. - their Oktoberfests hit shelves in late June, Dovetail seems to be the opposite and release their seasonals whenever they get around to it - within reason, of course.

Or maybe that's just my view from Madison.

Anyway, I was excited, perhaps a bit too excited, to find this Grodziskie. Being made with 100% smoked wheat, it was right up my uliczka as smoked beers are like manna from heaven for me. It is also perhaps the only native Polish beer style left these days and having some Polish blood in me means it's like drinking for the home team. Doubly so since Chicago is my hometown.

The Platonic ideal of Grodziskie was passed down to me from Ron Pattinson, if memory serves. It is to be light, smoky, hoppy, and fizzy. And I judge every Grodziskie style ale based on his description. Can one interpretation that doesn't exactly conform to this ideal still be tasty? You betcha! Tis but a starting point.

With a hazy yellow color and a very modest 3.8% A.B.V., this brew fit the light bill. A big, firm layer of foam rested atop the tantalizing liquid and, not being in a hurry to go anywhere, I was able to get a decent photograph. The aroma was of smoke along with a little bit of citrus.

My tongue was not surprised at the beer's light body which also had a very pleasant smoothness to it underneath a fairly mellow dose of fizz. The smokiness was delicious and not overwhelming which allowed for a tad of a grainy taste to come through. For their part, the hops tasted herbal-spicy and complemented the smoke well without overpowering it.

The smoky taste held fast for a bit on the finish before the herbal-spicy hop flavor came in to deliver moderate dryness and slightly more bitterness.

Since I don't know how to say "Oh mama, this stuff was good!" in Polish I'll just say oh mama, this stuff was good! While I am not sure, I do believe that the wheat used in the Grodziskie was traditionally smoked with oak. However, I am not sure what wood was used to smoke the wheat here. I don't think it was applewood or cherry, though. But, oh mama, it tastes great! And the smokiness is not particularly strong despite the whole grain bill having been given the treatment.

I'll never know how this stuff compares to the brew the inhabitants of Grodzisk Wielkopolski drank back in the day but I love Dovetail's take on the style. Maybe a touch more fizz but that's a very minor quibble. This is a fine brew and made the perfect companion on a few spring evenings.

Junk food pairing: Pair your Grodziskie with a bag of Old Dutch Onion 'N Garlic potato chips. They provide a nice contrast to the smoke taste yet somehow also complement the beer perfectly. 

Grodziskie: The Thirst Slaker

The lilacs are in bloom and the lawn has been mowed. This brew tastes wonderful! Light and smoky and refreshing and smoky. It has slaked my thirst with its smoky goodness.

I finally found some of Dovetail's heretofore elusive and smoky Grodziskie last weekend down in Geneva. Perhaps some will make its way up here. The gent at Harley's said they were to receive their Pilsner, however.

The Corona Diaries Vol. 88 - Postlude: Grodziskie

The Corona Diaries Vol. 88: The proof of the brownies is in the eating.

(Listen to the prelude.)

(mid-April 2023)

The third of April is a red letter day in our house as it’s our youngest cat, Piper's, birthday. And this year she turned the big 1-0.

Here she is as a wee kitten. I remember well going to the cat adoption lady's house and seeing her newest litter. Piper was so new and so small and zipping around the room like a madman. Or madcat, rather. She'd charge at me as I sat on the floor and then carom off my leg before launching an attack one of her siblings or maybe a defenseless pillow.

And here she is on her big day 2023 trying to relax in one of our plush cat houses and looking irritated that one of her humans is sticking some device in her face. "Go away, hoo-man!"

Of course I gave her plenty of extra treats to celebrate. I tried to get a photo but she nommed them down too quickly to get a decent picture with my very basic phone camera.

We hope to have her for many years to come and, with all of the money I pay the vet, I expect we shall.

********

Earlier this month I was poking around the websites of local bakeries to see what my rye bread options were when I discovered that one of them offered rye brownies. I pondered this miracle food and suspect that one of those cartoon clouds appeared above my head as I did some quick culinary ratiocination. I came up with:

rye flour + dark chocolate = manna from heaven

So I set out to conjure some of these magical treats in my kitchen. I began by assembling a double boiler and melting the chopped bittersweet chocolate cubes and extra dark chips.

As the chocolate melted, I mixed the eggs, butter, sugar, and whatnot.

Everything got thrown into the same bowl and mixed together. I poured the batter into a pan and it looked rather half-assed, truth be told. “But,” I reasoned, “appearance is no measure of taste. Never judge a book by its cover and whatnot.”

The old adage was right. The brownies may have come out of the oven looking like my cat's (not Piper) diarrhea, but they tasted incredibly delicious.

I sampled, of course, but took the rest to work. I am just not to be trusted with brownies.

The whole brownie thing threw me off of my original task which was to find rye bread. While rye is less common, it's certainly not impossible to find a loaf of it in these parts. I think it's more the case that you have to get to a bakery for a good variety as grocery stores don't stock a lot of quality Central/Eastern European breads. Can I go to my local supermarket and find a pukka loaf of rye bread that my German, Ruthenian, and Polish ancestors would recognize and be proud of?

Yes.

Is there more than 1 or 2 varieties that fit the bill?

Nope.

And so, in the end, I decided to just bake my own rather than running around town trying to find the perfect loaf. I began by retrieving the bread maker that a cousin had given us from the basement. I gave it a good cleaning and then set to work.

The recipe in the manual for rye bread is quite lame, in my opinion. It called for a mere ¾ cup of rye flour but a whopping 2¾ cups of wheat. How is anyone supposed to taste the rye with that ratio? So I tweaked it a little bit.

Things went well at first. The dough rose as expected.

It smelled great too. And then I took another peek some time later and saw that it had fallen. Soon the bake cycle kicked in and I ended up with this.

Not exactly Martha Stewart level aesthetics.

Besides needing to have the flour ratio adjusted further, it tasted fine. Hearty and a bit dense with a rich, nutty wheat sweetness. It simply needed more rye. No doubt there is some arcane wisdom out there on baking bread which describes the best rye to wheat ratio, which wheat varieties taste like what, the best yeast to use, how to get a certain texture, and so on and so forth. My bready experiments shall continue.

In addition to baked things, I found myself with an inexplicable craving for pozole earlier this month. Pozole is Mexican pork and hominy soup. While I do not recall how or when, I nonetheless acquired a taste for it and have tossed around the idea of hitting all of the Mexican restaurants in the area to find out who does the best pozole.

I bought some pork and hominy thinking that I had the rest of the ingredients already. The recipe calls for dried ancho chilies which are boiled and then pureed before being added to the soup. Now, I’ve made pozole before and would have sworn that I had some dried anchos in the cupboard. But, when I went and looked, I found that I instead had a lifetime’s supply of guajillo chilies and had no idea why.

I tried in vain to recall what motivated me to buy those but couldn’t. My best guess is that they were leftover from an attempt to make mole sauce at some point in the dim and distant past.

Another trip to the store and I was ready. I made my pork stock.

As that cooked, I boiled, rinsed, chopped, and pureed until everything was ready to be thrown into the pot.

No, that cup of coffee was for the chef, not the soup.

Once the pozole was cooking, I thought it looked nice and hearty with chunks of stuff everywhere. It smelled great too.

I cooked it long enough for the marriage of the flavors to be consummated and then served myself a bowl.

It turned out very well and I was happy that I hadn’t gotten lazy and simply bought a can at the store. That stuff isn’t bad but it doesn’t have all the onion and jalapeno in it. Plus, I think my version has a more piquant chili taste to it, if I do say so myself.

Lastly on the food front, I’ll note that I recently discovered that the Wisconsin Brewing Company out in Verona, a Madison suburb, had brewed a Grodziskie once again and had it available in their taproom. I managed to convince a friend of mine to head to the brewery with me for a couple so I’d have some company.

Grodziskie is a Polish style of beer that dates back centuries. It’s traditionally brewed with 100% smoked wheat and “should” be light in body and color with a good dose of fizz and a nice hop bite. Usually it’s low in alcohol but that can vary according to the brewer’s taste.

It was delectable! Light, smoky, fizzy – I wish they’d brew it more often than once every couple of years. My only gripe, which really isn’t much of a gripe, is that I wish it were just a tad hoppier. A minor quibble. I wonder what would happen if some of that wheat were to be swapped out for rye...

********

Bonus photo. It was Easter not too long ago so here’s a rabbit I saw in a backyard. I am used to seeing what I think are Eastern Cottontails so I have to wonder if this was someone's pet that that was set free or if it escaped like a scene from Watership Down.

(Raise a glass and watch the postlude.)

Na Zdrowie 2023 Edition

I stopped in at Wisconsin Brewing Company yesterday and sampled their latest batch of Grodziskie which they now call Smoke Show instead of Nostrovia.

It was light and smoky and very tasty. Sadly, there was nowhere to get kielbasa and pierogi nearby. This should be an annual. Or at least a seasonal that gets packaged.

A Real Smoke Show

Ooh!

Now brewed under the Lake Louie banner and called Smoke Show, a Grodziskie is once again on tap at Wisconsin Brewing Company in Verona.

While not available year-round, this beer can be found at the WBC/LL taproom maybe once every couple of years, which is frequent when you consider the style. Last time it was called Nostrovia Grodziskie. Grab some now or you'll have to wait until 2025.

It's nice to have a fan of Grodziskie down in Verona.

From the Depths of a Friend's Refrigerator

 

While this piwo from Working Draft Beer Company was probably a year and a half old or thereabouts, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to drink a Grodziskie. Despite its age, it was tasty. Light, fizzy, and smoky. With a dash of citrus taste in there too.

Grodziskie doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.: Grodziskie by Sketchbook Brewing Co.

 

 

My own view is that a dislike of smoke beer is a character flaw, an indication of a lack of virtue. Not lack of virtue as in smoke beer haters are just plain jerks, although they may be that too, but that they’ve forgotten what we all innately know deep down in our souls, i.e. – smoke beer is extremely tasty. For virtue is knowledge – knowledge acquired by education and praxis.

Back in the day, most malt was kilned in such a way as to expose it to smoke and so it was caressed by the spectral tendrils of burning wood, imparting the tastilicious flavors of guaiacol, syringol, phenol, et al. Then indirect kilning methods arose and the knowledge of the gustatory pleasure of smoke beer was lost to the intellects of most and with it, virtue.

And so now it is incumbent upon us all to drink smoke beers so that we may undergo anamnesis and recollect the knowledge that smoke beer is divine.

********

Back in August my Frau and I attended the Great Taste of the Midwest. As I noted in my post about it, I sought out the smoke beers which included a few Grodziskies, a Polish beer style which is traditionally brewed with 100% smoked wheat. One of those Grodziskies I sampled on that day was from Sketchbook Brewing in suburban Chicago. On a recent visit to the City of the Big Shoulders I acquired a 4-pack of the brew.

The genesis of this beer dates back to at least 2013 when a homebrewer named Cesar Marron brewed a Grodziskie that won Sam Adams’ Longshot homebrewer competition. Not long after his victory, Marron co-founded Sketchbook Brewing along with a trio of other craft beer lovers.

The Grodziskie apparently dates back to the 14th century and is named for the Polish city Grodzisk. It is thought that, back in the days of yore, it was brewed with 100% wheat that was smoked over oak but some modern recipes cut the smoked wheat with the unsmoked stuff. While it seems to have been a very popular style for a quite some time, the Grodziskie apparently fell out of favor in the 20th century and slowly disappeared. Finally, in the mid-1990s, it had gone extinct in its homeland. Since then, however, a Polish brewer here and and an American brewer there have brewed the style and so it has been resurrected. Beer historian Ron Pattinson once said that Grodziskie should be light, smoky, fizzy, and hoppy and I’ve gone with those expectations ever since.

Beer Advocate says that Sketchbook has brewed this beer a few times over the years – you’ve gotta dance with the one that brung ya - but I can find neither hide nor hair of it at their website. Maybe mention of this brew is buried at one of their social media accounts.

My pour produced a smallish but brilliant white crown of foam that wasn’t keen on sticking around for long. The piwo was a bright yellow that had a touch of haze. There were some bubbles to be seen in the beer. As expected, the aroma was dominated by luscious smoke but it wasn’t especially pungent. There was also a hint of grain and a very faint and indistinct fruity smell too. I think my nose was stuffy on tasting day.

Upon taking my first tip, my mouth was greeted by a generous dose of fizz. This is a very light-bodied brew and I was treated to a fair amount of smoke but it was rather mellow in contrast to, say, Schlenkerla’s Rauchbiers. I also tasted a little wheat and some spicy hops underneath – they were listed as being Saaz at the Great Taste – but those Czech hops didn’t come to the fore until the finish where they added a gentle black pepper taste & bitterness. The wheat taste came out more on the finish while that nebulous fruity aroma emerged as a lovely, delicate pear-like flavor.

Oh mama, this is tasty stuff! It’s got a great smoke smell and taste but it’s fairly mellow. A little wheat, a dash of fruitiness, and some spicy hops tie it all together. With its very light body, this makes for perfect summer drinking, as proven at the Great Taste back in August. But I am slow on the draw and didn’t get my hands on the stuff until the autumn. Better that than never.

Junk food pairing: A bag of Jay’s Hot Stuff potato chips is a must for this Grodziskie. The piwo will cut through the fat and heat of the chips and let the smoke and paprika mingle on your tongue in gustatory grace.

Polskee Peevo: Nostrovia Grodziskie by Wisconsin Brewing Company

As a fan of smoke beers, I implore local brewers on this very blog to make more of them because they're almost as rare as hen's teeth in these parts. Generally speaking, though, my pleading is, as the Poles say, like throwing peas onto a wall. But brewers have better things to do than read my ramblings and who can blame them?

The Poles have another saying: hope is the mother of the stupid. And so rather than sitting around with my fingers crossed as the craft beer world became overwhelmed with IPAs back in 2012, I pestered Vintage Brewing Company's brewmaster, Scott Manning, because I wanted something special to drink when the Mayan calendar ended and the world turned into a Roland Emmerich film. He eventually surrendered and brewed his Grätzer Ale. "Grätzer" is the German word for Grodziskie, a Polish beer brewed with smoked wheat. The name comes from the Polish town Grodzisk Mazowiecki which used to belong to the Prussian Empire who called it Grätz, hence Grätzer.

I emailed noted punk rock aesthete and beer historian Ron Pattinson one time asking what the Grodziskie should taste like and he kindly replied, "smoky and hoppy, very well carbonated, too." "Smoky" and "hoppy" are two words I do not usually associate with Polish beers as pale lagers and Baltic porters seem to dominate the Polish brewing enterprise. And so, my interest in the Grodziskie was piqued by Pattinson's description. While certainly allowing for variation and interpretation, I generally expect any beer labeled "Grodziskie" (or "Grätzer", for that matter) to be smoky, hoppy, and fizzy.

Scott's take on the style was, to the best of my knowledge, the last one brewed here in the Madison area until earlier this year when I heard tell of a Grodziskie made by Madison's Working Draft Brewing. Unsurprisingly, I found that it was to have limited availability and I never got myself down to the brewery to try it. Bummer. The moral here is, as the Poles like to say, when bast can be torn, then tear it. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw that Wisconsin Brewing Company was offering one called "Nostrovia Grodziskie" as a limited release only in their taproom. Not wanting to miss out on the Precious again, I heeded the words of Steve Winwood who had a saying of his own - And little Sir John and the nut-brown bowl when you see a chance, take it.

It was a rainy afternoon as I drove to the brewery where I was to meet a couple of my co-workers. I was feeling a bit giddy cruising down the road because I had noticed a Trachte shed that I'd never seen before a few seconds previously when suddenly

THUMP!

My fight or flight instinct kicked in and then I noticed a streak of red had formed on the left side of my windshield. What had I hit? Investigating a bit more closely, it appeared to be rather viscous. Ketchup. Someone in a passing car had thrown their dinner at me. As Voltaire once wrote, "We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly" and so I did and laughed it off.

I arrived at the brewery and met up with my fellow IT drones. We had a couple as we commiserated and used one another as an audience for jeremiads lamenting the capricious dictates of our tyrannical boss. I ended up going home with a crowler of the Grodziskie.

Nostrovia Grodziskie is a lovely straw color that reminded me of summer rather than the falling leaves and temperatures around us now here in Wisconsin. It was hazy too which is something I expect from wheat beers. My pour produced a lovely, frothy, white head that stuck around for a little while. There were few bubbles to be seen inside my glass. "Where is all the fizz?" I quietly asked my cat, Grabby, who was sitting on the table next to me. She had no answer beyond a big yawn of indifference to the plight of humankind so I plowed on and found that the beer had a lovely smoky aroma that wasn't quite as big as you get from a Schlenkerla beer.

The beer's paucity of bubbles belied a good, firm fizzy taste. While not to be mistaken with something from Schlenkerla, there was a nice smokiness to be had. Not overwhelming but not a token flavor relegated to a supporting role either. The beer's light body had a little wheat/grain flavor that brought with it a slight sweetness while a bit of lemony citrus held everything in check.

The smoke did a long fade on the finish while some grainy sweetness lingered. That lemony tang mixed with the fizz and a bit of herbal hoppiness to produce a mild, pleasant dryness.

Why this beer didn't see a tap until autumn is a shame. It's light body, relatively gentle smoke, and a citrus/fizz combo would have made this an ideal summer brew. Plus it's easy on the alcohol at 3.6% A.B.V. Still, I am glad that it reached my lips eventually. The server at WBC said that it was brewed by Kirby himself which was nice to hear. This doesn't seem to have been a thoroughly traditional take on the style as it did not have a big hop taste. Still, I greatly enjoyed the smokiness and its overall light touch.

Junk food pairing: Poles love their honey so grab a tube of Pringles Honey Mustard crisps to go with your Nostrovia Grodziskie.

Smoke from South of the Border: 15 Feet by Off Color Brewing

I am returning to my hometown of Chicago and Off Color Brewing here after having had a fine pilsner of theirs. Chicago has a large Polish/Polish-American population which once included my babcia. I have fond memories of eating her Polish cooking as well as other gustatory memories such as making a stop at a pierogi restaurant before seeing Son Volt at The Vic and nearly falling asleep behind the wheel after eating at a Polish all you can eat joint. It is only fitting then that Chicago's Off Color brews a Grodziskie. Native to Poland, the Grodziskie (a.k.a. - Grätzer) is a piwo that's light, smoky, and hoppy made from 100% smoked wheat. Or so the theory goes, anyway. Quite a ways away from the pilsners and Baltic porters that the country is known for.
15 Feet is one of Off Color's seasonal piwos and I bought a six pack back in the spring after stopping at a pierogi wholesaler in Portage Park. It has one foot in tradition with the other in today. While brewed with 100% applewood smoked wheat, the brewers either couldn't get their hands on any Polish hops or were keen on tweaking things to reflect the current microbrew ethos. Regardless, 15 Feet features Sorachi Ace hops, a Japanese variety that boasts lemon and lime scents and flavors. An odd-sounding pairing on paper, to be sure. But smoked beer is a passion of mine and I couldn't resist no matter how incongruent the ingredients.


Grodziskies as conceived today are not big beers – the Poles leave that to Baltic porters – and 15 Feet comes in at a mild 3.5% A.B.V. which, I have read, was standard, for at time at least. And so 15 Feet is a very light yellow color. It's got that wheat haze which made it only slightly difficult to see a fair number of bubbles inside. My glass was adorned only with a small white head and it didn't stick around very long.

The aroma was succulently smoky with a touch of fruity sweetness. It was applewood smoked, after all. I will admit to not being intimately familiar with Sorachi Ace hops but I found that they gave a pleasant citrus scent here.

I was in heaven as the first wave of smoke wafted over my tongue. It had that same fruity sweetness to it as I had smelled. Not mega-potent but rather a glorious golden mean. Those hops gave a definite lemon-lime flavor which, I have to say, reminded me of 7-Up but not in a sickly sweet cloying kind of way. A little wheat came through and the carbonation gave a little bite that made the piwo a tad dry.

On the finish the smoke lingered as did some citrus. But then a dash of Nugget hops brought forth a moderate dose of resiny bitterness which elevated the dryness.

My glass was left with lots of foamy spots.

This is really effin' good. As a lover of smoke I was entranced by the luscious smoke wrapped in its semi-sweet fruitiness. Kilometers away from the hackneyed "bacon" descriptor. The citrus taste went splendidly with the smoke which, if you think about it, isn't all that odd considering we put citrus juice on grilled meats. On top of all this was a gentle earthiness. Light, refreshing, and with just the right amount of smoke. Perfect refreshment for a summer day.

Junk food pairing: Root vegetables are a staple of the Polish diet and so I heartily recommend busting open a bag of potato chips to go along with your 15 Feet. Smoked gouda are highly recommended but Kettle Chips' Backyard BBQ variety go well too.

The Grätzer, er, Grodziskie That May Really Be a Lichtenhainer: Grätzer by New Belgium and 3 Floyds Brewing Cos.

Last year New Belgium and 3 Floyds collaborated on a brew and thusly Grätzer was born. Grätzer – the style, not the beer shown above - is made from oak smoked wheat malt exclusively. It was rather light on the palate and hopped enough to have been at least moderately bitter. At some point and some places willow bark was also part of the recipe.

While new Belgium and 3 Floyds concede that it's "a long-buried style from Poland", they use the German name for their beer. These Polish brewers make a good case for using the Polish appellation, Grodziskie.

The supposed “easiness” that German names carry over the Polish ones is an echo of anti-Polish propaganda, which was never examined in the West after World War II. Indeed, Polish language may appear strange and difficult to some, yet it is important to recognize the harm in the claim that such difficulties are somehow “universal” or “natural” and to learn about the history of such thinking and the continued harm it brings.

Now that I've wasted a bit of your time arguing that the beer at hand should properly be called a Grodziskie, it's a bit ironic that this concoction doesn't seem to be a Grodziskie at all but rather some kind of Lichtenhainer since, as Ron Pattinson points out, the Grodziskie was not a sour beer whereas the brew here is.

Regardless of nomenclature, I carry on…

A word of warning before I continue: the beer was released last spring or summer and the bottle says that the contents were best enjoyed by May 2015. So I'm a bit late. Hopefully three months or so didn't diminish the beer significantly.

Grätzer pours a deep, deep reddish brown that was nearly black. My glass was opaque and the beer defied any attempt to get light to penetrate it. I held the glass up to a light on my ceiling and then to a window but neither could penetrate the Stygian gloom held therein. From what I could tell the beer was clear. It was nicely effervescent too with a big foamy tan head that proved in no hurry to dissipate.

Smoky goodness caught my nose first. Curiously enough, I also smelled some sweetness that was tropically fruity. There were also some wonderful toasty-chocolate/coffee roasted grain tones. A fine start, if you ask me. The taste was similar. There was a moderate smokiness hand-in-hand with more of those chocolatey grainy flavors. The malt also provided some sweetness here which I found to be like stone fruit as opposed to mangoes or papayas. These flavors were tempered by a bit of dryness from the carbonation. Lactobacillus was added to the beer but in a small quantity. I caught a hint of sour immediately but the tartness came mostly in the finish which saw the nearly ubiquitous smoke come to a diminuendo and be superseded by some herbal hop bitterness and the more pronounced lacto sour.

Judging purely by Grätzer's Cimmerian appearance, you'd think this was a heavy beer but that's not the case. Grätzer has a light body and is rather small at 4.5% A.B.V. yet it is a tasty gallimaufry of malt pleasures with the grains offering smoky, chocolatey, and sweet flavors. While the malt is front and center on the palate, the carbonation and the lactic acid bacteria help keep everything balanced. As for the finish, I thoroughly enjoyed how the taste changed from being malt-centric to one that was slightly dry with some hop bitterness and acidulous to boot. Grätzer is a rather nimble beer as it managed to be rather hearty yet also light & refreshing at the same time.

Junk food pairing: If you still have some Grätzer and don't want to give it to me, then drink it now and pair it with Jay's Barbeque potato chips. Unless Jay's has changed the recipe, these chips have a prominent paprika flavor as opposed to a sweet BBQ sauce one. The earthy spice complements the smoke well. If you can get your hands on Polish junk food then I'd bet Lay's Papryka chips would be the perfect companion.

Grätzer Ale from Vintage Brewing

In a moment of weakness Scott Manning, the brewmaster at Vintage Brewing, read my plea on Google+ and brewed a grätzer/grodziskie (depending on whether you want the German or Polish name) ale. This is a Polish/Prussian smoked wheat ale and is believed to have been first brewed around the time the Great Plague was ravaging Europe. Its popularity declined after World War I and it eventually disappeared but was briefly resurrected in the 1990s in Poland before going the way of the dodo again. So what is this archaic brew supposed to taste like? I emailed Ron Pattinson and he told me that a grodziskie should taste “smoky and hoppy, very well carbonated, too.”

Yeah, my photo sucks. I wish I could be like some beer bloggers who make their snaps look like Ansel Adams but mine always turn out like something by Dorothea Lange, no offense to her legacy intended. Anyway, as you may or may not see, Scott's gräter is a nice clear yellow. It had a nice head on it so the carbonation is there but it disappeared fairly quickly. Schaumhaftvermoegen? Nein.

The aroma was smoky. This is to be expected since the grain bill was oak smoked wheat and more oak smoked wheat. Now, I'm no expert when it comes to rauchbiers with my experience coming in the form of having had three or four varieties of Schlenkerla and the occasional craft porter with some smoked malt thrown in for good measure. Having said this, rauchbiers usually smell like bacon to me. This beer had that but there was also some sweetness present which leaned towards the honey-glazed ham side of things.

Taking a sip I tasted that bacony/ham-like flavor and it was heaven. But then those hops kicked in and penetrated through the smoky goodness. They were spicy and herbal. Scott said that he was unable to procure Polish hops such as Lomik or Lubelski and so he worked with Gorst Valley Hops to concoct a replacement combo. I've had several varieties of Polish pale lagers but don't know what hop varieties were used in them so I'm not sure what hop flavor I should or could have tasted here. Regardless, it tasted like Noble hops – herbal but not piney. This is not a super-mega-maxi hopped beer but you need a goodly amount to compete with the smoke flavor.

Schlenkerla's rauchbiers tend to be pretty heavy on the tongue whereas this brew had a much lighter mouthfeel. It was weird because when I drink smoke beers, I expect a sturm und drang of smoke but this stuff was agile and nimble – as if you're bouncing flavor balls around in your mouth. Like comparing helium to lead. It had a nice, moderately bitter finish.

The brew weighed in at 4.5% ABV which I gather is a bit high for the style but by no means off the chart. (Can an imperial barrel aged grodziskie be far off?) As it stands, I would consider this a session beer and, indeed, I had two during my session at Vintage last night before bringing a growler of the stuff home with me. This is truly a smoke beer I could drink all night long.

Junk food pairing: Pair with kielbasa-flavored potato chips. If, like me, you're not in Poland, try Jay's Hot Stuff potato chips as they're heavy on the paprika.

Grodziskie Coming Up

Take one off-hand Google+ comment, add in a few months wait, and you get Grodziskie at the Vintage in July. Look for me there yelling "O' zapft ist!" What's the proper glassware for grodziskie? I'll be embarrassed drinking it from an American conical pint glass.

Next month I'll be in beervana. In addition to the grodziskie, there will be homebrew Kölsch courtesy of friend to Hopalicious drinkers everywhere, Joe Walts. My stangen are on standby. Still no Kölsch-Kranz, unfortunately.