I grew up drinking some pretty shoddy beer such as Carling or a pint of "Darling" please as we used to say. Other cheap beers such as Fosters and Stella made up some of my other regular tipples.
I liked my beer pure and fresh and was not so keen on contaminating it with for example cider and having a pint of snakebite. My favorite beers are pilsner but I do like the occasional ale and drank Guinness for a few years.
In more recent times I still drink Pilsner but often with the heat, I drink a Radler as it is very refreshing. This would be a shandy in England and you would not normally drink that unless you were driving. More popular would have been to have a larger top which would be a pint of beer with a dash of lime to sweeten it.
Here is a view from the beer isle of my nearest mini-supermarket:
It is usally well-stocked with a mixture of different beers.
This brings me on to my first beer today. I was traveling earlier in the week to Poland and like to grab a beer from my destinations to taste. Some of my favorite polish beers are Tyskie, Lech, and Warka. But today I grabbed a Letnik craft beer that I haven't tried before. It cost 5,99 Zloty which is around €1,25.
I had to ask my wife to translate it, as I only understand "Piwo" in Polish, which means beer. Letnik means something like "Summer guy". This brewery also has written on it 30 years that the brewery has been running.
My expectations were that it would be similar to those german "Naturrub" Radlers (cloudy shandy). They are usually very crisp and sweet, but very refreshing on a hot day like today.
On the back of the beer, it says loosely translated that "Legend has it that Radler was invented by a tavern owner in Bavaria". This could be a good question for our beer quizmaster to confirm.
To accompany my polish beer drinking experience, my wife prepared some polish style lunch to go with it. Here we have a homemade vegan version of the polish "Bigosh" dish. This is basically made from cabbage and is very filling but also light for eating during summer.
The beer washed down my lunch very well but it did not taste or look as I expected. This could be because of the Rheinheitsgebot not being applicable in Poland.
It was cloudy and surprisingly not so sweet and you could get a good taste of the beer. It was a pleasant drink but unfortunately, didn't make it onto my favorites list. Some of which I will present to you in a future post.
Thanks for reading.
Credits:
All photos are my own.
