Beer in Poland, etc.

[bunnyjadwiga]

More info from Unger, on beer and related items.

In areas of Slavic speech, pivo was the word for hopped beer. The word seems to be related to the verb which means to drink . . . Using a noun for that higher quality beer (which meant little more than just a drink) leaves the impression of fairly common and widespread consumption. All other evidence, however, would seem to suggest the opposite. It is the case that people in Poland may have also known the drink in the early Middle Ages since hops turn up on some quantity in archaeological sites from the period. Hopped beer may have been made first in Russia in the thirteenth century, supplementing lower strength and lower quality drinks like mead and kvas. Mead was certainly known and drunk in Poland around 1000 but it was not in the same category by any means as kvas Despite its being better than the most common and easily made drink mead was still considered to be inferior to hopped beer. That higher-quality drink no doubt appeared in Poland at just about the same time as brewers in north German port towns perfected the skill of making a hopped beer consistently good enough for export. The word braga even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant home-brewed beer, that is made without hops. . .

Kvas on the other hand . . . the word appears in a number of Slavic languages to describe anything that had soured. The word could be and was applied to any item that was pickled. Kvas got its taste from infection by airborne lactic-acid bacteria, which would cause the beverage to sour, and infection by yeast, which would cause the beverage to have alcohol. A Lithuanian barley beer called alus appears to have been similar, though it may have had a higher alcohol content. The alcohol content of kvas was always low. It may, in fact, have been similar to the beer produced in ancient Mesopotamia. Flavoring with various roots and herbs might give it both a distincive taste and a somewhat greater life expectancy. BBarley was the traditional raw material for kvas but it was made from almost anything that would produce the sugars needed for fermentation. Kvas was always produced in rural homes for domestic consumption. It was a peasant drink. The same was true of askola, a beverage made in Poland flavored with sap from birch trees and other fermentable matter. Enough carbohydrates were used to get a relatively high alcohol content. Especially in towns along the Baltic it was hopped beer, rather than root beer, which enjoyed growing popularity at least from the thirteenth century on. Pivo, as the hopped beer was called, lasted longer and had a more consistent taste. Hopped beer drove domestically produced drinks, whether kvas or braga or mead, farther and farther East in the Baltic, Bohemia, and probably in the Danube Valley in the later years of the Middle Ages. Even so the weaker beers flavored, if they were flavored at all, with various roots retained their place as day-to-day drinks in the Russian Empire and perhaps elsewhere long after the Middle Ages. Hopped beer may have dominated many urban markets, but its inroads in the countryside in eastern Europe were less extensive than in the west. (p.103-104)

The preference in Poland in the high Middle Ages was apparently for beer made with wheat since in 1303 a prominent cleric declined the Archepiscopal see of Salzburg when he was told he could not get wheat beer in Austria. Later, in 1470, an observer said that Poland's native drink was made from water, hops, and wheat, so tastes were apparently slow to change. (p.161)

Comments:
Hm.. On several occasions in this book Unger claims that that mead would have been of lower strength than beer, but I don't think his argument holds water:

Mead, made from honey and yeast, probably had a lower alcohol content than beer. It was the drink of the poor and of slaves on the south shore of the eastern Baltic according to one ninth-century [British] traveller who was surprised that there was no ale made among those people. His claim may have been exaggerated since early medieval Documentation in Poland suggests that mead was the drink of the rich and noble, and typically the drink for weddings and feasts. It was even considered worth of being a charitable gift.(p. 23)

Modern mead runs 12-18% alcohol, modern beer 10% or less. From most of what I've read, modern barley-wine, aka 'old ale' or 'strong ale' runs about 8-15% alcohol; modern strong beers also generally come in under the 15% mark.

Unger cites Dembinska (Food and Drink in Medieval Poland) here about the relative values of mead and beer, and I don't believe she says that mead was considered inferior to beer, but that beer was drunk more often than mead (well, given the relative price of the ingredients, that would not be surprising).

Pivo wasn't all imported, either, though all of it may not have been made at home, and Unger in other places supports that with references to brewing in Gdansk and Lublin, and (see below) Polish taverners brewing their own.

Mead could be hopped; Dembinska quotes a 16th century recipe for a hopped mead.

Kvas is a small beer, like other kinds of small beer which Unger talks about. Modern kvas is made with bread, but it may have been made with oats, barley or rye grains. Several excerpts from various sources about Russian kvas are available in the Stefan's Florilegium file on kvas: http://www.florilegium.org/files/BEVERAGES/kvass-msg.html

(It's possible that the root of the confusion here were small meads, like those made by Digby, that may have been made in the millenial period in Slavic countries, instead of grain-based brews. There's reason to believe that flatbreads were the common form of bread at that time, and that grains were consumed more as a pottage than a bread-- which might slow the development of a grain-based brewing industry. Beer and raised bread seem to go together in the history of foodstuffs; consider the Egyptians. So, grain based kvas and small meads might have been more common drinks, along with strong mead, than beer made by long-term grain brewing. But all that is merely conjecture. We don't really have any way of telling how strong the meads of period Eastern Europe were.)

Unger also comments (p. 215) that the brewer's guild in Elblag in Poland "owned brewing equipment including kettles." Also, "By the twelfth century, monasteries in Poland even operated taverns in the countryside, outlets for their own production and sources of profit" (p. 36)

Since taverns were continuing institutions and often in convenient locations, next to markets or on harbors, they became places to meet and to do business. Tavern keepers were generally legally free businessment and businesswomen, often invested with certain public functions including the collection of tolls and taxes, and not just on beer. In Poland, law courts and even moneyers operated, on occasion, in taverns. Polish tavern keepers enjoyed higher status as a result of the varied functions of their institution. Tavern keepers usually operated on what amounted to a licence from a lord who let the tavern oerate on payment of a fee . . . By the thirteenth century, Polish taverns, as their numbers increased and the economy developed, became more like tavers in England and the Low Countries, existing less as centers of business and administration and more as meeting places for the amusement of farmers and peasants. (p. 51) . . .
In addition to selling beer Polish tavern keepers usually brewed it, increasing the variety of activity in the tavern and expanding the scale. (p.262)

This information fits with that given about taverns in Richard C. Hoffman, Land, Liberties, and Lordship in a Late Medieval Countryside: Agrarian Structures and Change in the Duchy of Wroclaw and Piotr Górecki, Economy, society, and lordship in medieval Poland, 1100-1250

Source: Richard Unger Beer in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Phila: UPenn, 2004)