"Poland Brews the Best Baltic Porters, [but] We Don't Need to Call Them Polish Porters"

This Saturday, which happens to be my birthday, is the eighth annual Baltic Porter Day. Here in Portland, we’ll be celebrating it at Polish-owned Threshold Brewing, which is hosting a fest with ten local examples. Baltic Porter Day, you say; do we really need another style day? In this case, I’d argue the answer is yes. In all ways—historical, cultural, regional, and gastronomical—the beer is one of the most intriguing in the world. Moreover, it’s truly Poland’s national style (sorry grodziskie), and it deserves to be understood more broadly. So in celebration of Baltic Porter Day, let’s have a big ol’ long post about this lovely beer.

Martyn Cornell’s very long-awaited historical treatise on the dark ales, Porter and Stout, is finally slated to be released in May. I suspect he will weave quite a tale about how London’s porters moved out into the world, morphing for local tastes while influencing each other, creating quite a tangle of influence. Fortunately for us, he shared a section of his manuscript four years ago on Baltic porter—specifically, the porter made in Poland, so we have that strand of the story handy.

History

London Porter was the first truly international style, and it circled the globe—notably slaking the thirsts of colonists in the North America. The Baltic trade for porter was especially avid, though, and we are more familiar with the casks that ended up in St. Petersburg (Russian imperial stout and all that). Another stop on the Baltic Sea was the city of Gdansk, which was, depending on the moment, a part of the dying Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or Prussian, or a free city. Under whatever jurisdiction, Gdansk (or as it might have been called during some of those periods, Danzig) was receiving shipments by the 1790s.

Over the next forty years it was a common import in Poland and a special one, Cornell tells us, selling for a lot more than local beer. It might have remained an import because such was the reputation of London Porter that few believed it could be replicated locally, except that two multi-year interruptions forced local brewers to begin making it. Maybe they couldn’t make it as well as Barclay Perkins, one imagines them thinking, but damned if they could go without, either.

I suspect they did fine—and in any case, it became a regional specialty. Brewers continued to make what was called “local porter” throughout the 19th century, but as with all styles, their version evolved. The second great international beer style started converting Polish brewers, who shifted to the pale lagers sweeping the globe. Because they now had breweries set up to make lager beer, they started lagering their porter as well.

One of the points Cornell makes is that among the porters brewed in the Baltics following their introduction by the British, Poland’s version was quite distinctive:

“Several other countries around the Baltic produce beers that are descended from the double brown stouts once shipped from London, and very fine beers many of them are, but these are, genetically still pretty close to those original DBSs. In Poland, however, many (not all) brewers developed their own twist on DBS.”

The style we now call Baltic porter—an 8-10% almost-black lager—is the Polish variant. When we say Baltic porter we really mean Baltic porter as it’s made in Poland—or Polish porter. For a while, I was calling it Polish porter for this reason, shoe-horning the history into casual conversation whenever I could. It seemed like cultural theft not to give Poland the credit. But before you start doing that, too, read on.

A Living, Breathing Beer

In 2019, I traveled to Poland for the first time. I was excited to try grodziskie and get a handle on one of the old, but underrated European brewing countries. What I discovered was that grodziskie was a really obscure style, made by just a few breweries. It isn’t extinct anymore, but in the same way that lambic brewing casts a far greater shadow than the sale of lambic beer, grodziskie will remain a popular, feel-good story but a niche style.

Baltic porter, on the other hand? It’s not as popular as domestic pale lagers (which are sadly tasteless little wan beers in Poland), but it is definitely a major and successful style. Large industrial breweries still make it, but so do many of the little breweries that have popped up over the last decade and a half. I remember stepping into a beer store in Kraków with a scores of beers from local breweries, and a lot of them were Baltic porters.

Brewers can revive and even sustain a niche style, but broad acceptance is a matter of culture. People either embrace a kind of beer or they don’t. Breweries made hoppy American ales in Germany, but they just didn’t go anywhere. Americans won’t drink Belgian-style beer. But Poles appeared to be drinking a lot of Baltic porter in the organic manner that suggests cultural acceptance.

I wanted to confirm that this wasn’t just a quirk of timing, so I reached out to Marek Kamiński, founder of Kingpin Brewing and an international envoy for Polish beer I met a year ago at the Central European Beer Conference.

“Yes, the style is still quite popular in Poland and I have the impression that it has even gained in popularity in the last years. Everyone is brewing Baltic porter in Poland—the big guys owned by multinationals, the middle-sized breweries and craft brewers too. There are plenty of Baltic porters on the market and of course most of them from small and independent, as this segment is the most numerous.”

Another indicator of a style’s health is whether brewers use it as a template for variation. IPA isn’t a style so much as a category, for example. The same is true of Polish Baltic porters. Marek continues:

“Yes, there are many classic examples being brewed and also a lot of variations. Drinkers like it—to the point that BP is practically the synonym of a dark beer in Poland. Most common variation would be:

Imperial BP (above 22 Plato as we consider 18-22 Plato a classic with most examples in the 20-22 Plato range),
rye BP to have that thick, oily texture,
smoked BP (peated versions included, not only wood smoked),
BP with fruit - smoked plum and prune being most popular, but also some other fruit like cranberries, blueberries etc.
BP with vanilla and/or cocoa, - BP with coffee,
and of course the whole range of barrel aged BP with all kinds of barrels (spirits and wine).

Baltic porter is no more a “niche” style in Poland than Helles is in Germany. It may not have the same market share of other styles, but it has a large fan base, is readily available, and is so popular brewers are now turning it into a category more than a style. Whether you want to say Baltic porter is really Polish porter or not (more on that, I promise), it is definitely an indigenous style with more coherence in Poland than anywhere else.

The Nature of Baltic Porter

Another element of this beer’s solidity in Poland: it has definite style parameters that brewers all know and acknowledge. The alcohol content isn’t set—versions may be drier or sweeter depending on the brewer’s preference—but the original gravity is: it must fall between 18 and 22 Plato to be considered authentic. Of course, it must also be lagered, and this is the central difference compared to porters from other Baltic counties. They may be lagered, but in Poland they must be. Finally, brewers recommend hard water to achieve the right acid balance in these beers, though that’s more recommendation than law.

One thing that’s not mandatory is final gravity, which is all over the map. Żywiec Porter, my favorite of the big breweries, is a 21 Plato beer that finishes below 4 P. For a 9.5% beer, that makes it fairly sleek and lean on the palate. In Poland, I found versions that were far higher, so they were not just full, but a little sticky. Brewers seem to differ on how much roast is allowable as well. In a recent Craft Beer & Brewing podcast, Baltic Porter Day founder Marcin Chmielarz asserted that they shouldn’t be too roasty. Yet I’ve found plenty of examples that were, however—sometimes assertively, almost acidity so. Your mileage may vary.

I will add a final note that my favorite versions were the ones with a bit of smoked malt. Not a ton, just enough to punch up the malts and roast, giving the beer a toothsome savory note. Their flavors dance in my memory still.

The Name

At long last we return to the name. Should we call these very Polish Baltic Porters Polish? Well, not if you ask actual Poles. I discovered this last year when I was asking about it at the CEBC, and Marek confirmed they prefer “Baltic porter” (porter bałtycki, I think). I’ll give him the final word.

“Yes, it is true: in Poland we mostly call it Baltic porter or simply porter. (Here Porter has to be Baltic Porter; it is practically impossible to sell other porters.) And yes, most brewers are quite reluctant to call it Polish porter, although they are quite different than BP from other Baltic countries. In Poland it has to be lager while in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and other Baltic countries they also brew a lot of ale versions. In Germany you can find beers brewed to lower strengths declared as Baltic porters. Not here.

“We like to think that in Poland we brew best Baltic porters, but at the same time we are quite reluctant to claim the style as genuinely Polish. There is also a marketing factor to it: most of the brewers think Baltic porter has more potential to be brewed around the world than Polish porter would.”

Modest and canny. You gotta love it.