Loude drink ku ku!: A Ku Ku by Browar Błonie

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.

An ironic name?: Cuda Wianki by Browar Błonie

So here I am once more with a beer from Polish brewery Browar Błonie's Polish folklore series. This one was purchased in Chicago last month - Andy's Deli on Milwaukee Avenue, if I recall correctly.

A wianki is a Polish floral wreath. From my experience, they're worn on your head though I suppose you could hang one on your wall or wear it on another part of your anatomy. This beer's name, Cuda Wianki, translates to something like Miracles of the Wreaths or Miracles and Wreaths. I am not sure what this is supposed to mean so let me look it up...

I see that there's a restaurant in Poland with this name...Oh! Wiktionary says that it is a colloquial expression meaning "something unusual, unique, and overly fancy". Interesting.

The label indicated it was an unfiltered pale lager and I suppose the unfiltered part is uncommon, if not exactly unique or overly fancy. Perhaps the name is meant to be ironic. Speaking of the label, it is gorgeous, abounding with cerulean flowers. The English translations on the bottle don't give away much in the way of details about the ingredients. There's water, barley malt, hops, and yeast. What kind of malt? What kind of hops? Only The Cień knows.

My pour produced a small, white head that consisted of big bubbles like soda pop. It went away quickly and successfully eluded my camera as you can see. The piwo was a hazy gold hue but I was able to see some bubbles inside. It smelled wonderful with a goodly amount of bread along with moderate honeyed sweetness and a touch of hay from the hops. What I'd expect from a Euro pale lager. Maybe something more floral if Polish hops had been used but that didn't seem to be the case.

The first sip revealed a medium-light body without much fizziness. There was a little bit of bread that wasn't accompanied by much in the way of sweetness. The hops took on a herbal aspect on my tongue. Despite the mellow hops flavor and seeming lack of fizz, there was a firm astringency. On the swallow a mild grainy taste was quickly supplanted by the hops which took on a spicy flavor to complement the herbal taste. Not a bitterness bomb, by any means, but the finish had just enough of it to make for a crisp and fairly dry denouement.

Cuda Wianki was OK. I think it needed a more pronounced malt flavor though I did really enjoy the brisk hoppiness. It was a fine brew to refresh me after work and, at 5% A.B.V., it stimulated my appetite.

Junk food paring: Also purchased at Andy's was a bag of Polish snacks that paired perfectly with Cuda Wianki. They were like Gardetto's rye chips but loaded with artificial kielbasa flavor and shaped like biscotti. Ciesz się posiłkiem!