Saturday 6 February 2016

Discovering a new beer style; Grodziskie


Grodziskie is a traditional Polish style wheat beer known to feature oak-smoked wheat. The style is highly carbonated, not overly cloudy and brewed with sulphate-heavy water and moderate hop bitterness. Combined with a low abv (3.1% in this case) this style is dry and flinty.

This take on it, Piwoz Grodziska from Polish micro brewery Browar w Grodzisku pours with no more yeast than your standard bottled conditioned beer. The aroma is faintly smokey, peaty, seaweed. The taste is dry and spritzy. There's a subtle clean, but fresh, noble hop pilsner esque feel about it that doesn't distract from a soft smokeyness. Note, no banana or crazy phenolics and light on the palate (tho I certainly doesn't come across watery for 3.1%).

Obviously this is a fairly rare traditional European beer style and it would be interesting to see if this ever caught on with the UK craft beer scene one day.