Warka is a nice little town, but pretty hermetic. The residents create an enclave. In the early 1980s, my wife and I wanted to move to a more open community in the city. That's when I sent a letter to the director of Tyskie Browary Książęce, and he offered both me and my wife a job. I started as a Shift Manager. I worked in three shifts. I reported to the head brewer, i.e. Deputy Technical Director. The first shift had fewer tasks and involved more technological work. However, during the second and third shifts, the Shift Manager oversaw the entire brewery. The brewery also had a malt house, which was active back then. Malt house, brewing, fermentation, aging, and bottling. I had to assign work in the malt house, supervise the brewhouse and fermenting cellar, check the production quality in the brewery. Each batch had to be personally inspected - checking for quality, correct wort concentration, good taste, and quantity. It was also part of my duties to monitor the temperature and refrigeration settings in all fermentation tanks, and there were quite a lot of those.

When I started working there, they were brewing the Książęce beer, which returned to the market in 1983-1984. Why was it unavailable before? Because the labels and the name contained the word 'Książęce', translated as prince or duke, and during the times of the People's Republic of Poland (PRL), it was unacceptable to have anything 'princely' or with a crown on the label. However, right after the Solidarity movements in the early 1980s, both the crown and the name returned. Apart from Książęce, we also brewed Tyskie, Tyskie Full, Karolinka and Tyskie Pełne.

In 1987, at the oldest beer festival in Poland - Chmielaki Krasnostawskie - we won medals for our Tyskie beer. Upon our return, we sat down at our Production Director’s office with the Chief Technologist, Deputy Technical Director and Head of Quality, who lived on the Gronie Hills located between Tychy and Mikołów. A hundred years ago, the duke sourced water from there, as there were wells and water intakes called Gronie, which flowed directly from the hills to the brewery. A colleague suggested, 'What if we named our beer Gronie?' I liked that name. For some, it would evoke the idea of playing football, for others, maybe some hills. The associations could vary, and such names are catchy. Indeed, Tyskie Gronie was a catchy name, and the water sourced there is among the best for brewing. Today, those wells do not provide us with sufficient output. Currently, we have 13 wells located about 4 kilometers from Tyskie Browary Książęce, and the water is piped to the brewery. We have our own excellent water from deep wells. Tyskie Gronie was the first beer I felt connected to.

We were producing a lot of beer. Two-thirds of the volume was sold in barrels. Most of it in what we called 'dubels', which were 200-liter oak barrels. Later, tankers appeared. And that was the way it was until 1996.

Between 1989 and 1991, there were rapid and significant changes - political, economic, and social. The Brewing Industry Union dissolved, and we formed a state-owned company representing the employees' interests, comprising two Tychy-based breweries – Tyskie Browary Książęce and the Obywatelski brewery. It was no longer the Union that either provided or essentially took away funds; now, we managed the funds ourselves. Three employee representatives sat on the supervisory board. I participated in the first and third terms. We were seeking a strategic buyer, but there were few investors in those times, especially considering that Żywiec and Okocim were designated as export breweries during the People's Republic of Poland.

The brewery in Tychy was meant to produce beer for Silesia, catering specifically to miners. Practically, we could sell it within a 20 km radius. To distribute beer beyond Silesia, we needed permission from the Central Committee. It was interesting because mines owned numerous holiday homes by the sea, and the miners vacationing there wanted to drink Tyskie. The mines had to request permission from the Central Committee, and only then our beer was transported to a specific resort.

Back then, Tyskie Browary Książęce had the capacity to brew over 800,000 hectoliters of beer, but we were operating within the range of 600-650 thousand hectoliters. We could not sell the beer, even though there were kilometer-long queues of people at the brewery. I was involved in production, not distribution, and I simply could not understand why we were unable to sell it. When deliveries reached stores, the beer was sold out within an hour or two. You could not buy beer in stores; we could not sell it – quite a miracle. [laughs]

However, good times eventually came, and we were able to manage ourselves. This marked a rapid development of the brewery. Another interesting story contributed to this. Our director was at a trade fair in Berlin and met with the director of Ottakringer Brauerei from Vienna. They proposed that, under a license, we could brew Viennese beer called Gold Fassl in Tychy. Our director liked the idea, so we made it happen. I went to Vienna for a two-week training, and I was captivated by the brewery and the technology I found there. At that time, our technology was similar to what was used just after World War II or even before. The collaboration with the Austrians coincided with the purchase of our first modern Huppmann brewhouse. We bought the first cylindro-conical tanks, a beer filtration line, and the first bottling line from Simonazzi. This gave us such production capacity that by 1996, we were producing 1.5 million hectoliters of beer, mainly Tyskie Gronie and Tyskie Książęce. In addition, our portfolio included dark and strong, medicinal Porter beer, Jan III Sobieski, and many other brands. Then, an investor emerged - SABMiller, who ensured what we lacked: marketing and modern sales methods.

Thanks to marketing and our sales forces, Tyskie saw such a huge boom that we struggled to keep up with production and brewery development. In 2008, we reached our peak, nearly 7 million hectoliters of beer. Meanwhile, we added two more Huppmann brewhouses, expanded our fermentation and aging cellars, and even before 1996, we started building a bottling hall and warehouses across the street, opposite the brewery. You could say that SABMiller came in when everything was well set up, and then they just expanded upon that.

I worked at Tyskie Browary Książęce for 37 years, and over that time there have been no major changes in the recipes. Back then and now, beer was made from the same ingredients - light Pilsner malt, hops, water, and yeast. What has changed? The 'toys' changed, meaning the equipment we use for brewing. We used to have an old-style brewhouse, directly heated by steam. Now, modern boilers have what's called a 'kocher' - a heat exchanger inside. Thanks to this technology, all unwanted aromas evaporate nicely from the wort. When walking down the street, and there's a breeze, we can smell something like cooked potatoes or pea soup - that's the brewery smell. We remove these odors more efficiently than before. This unwanted smell is DMS [dimethyl sulfide – editor’s note], resembling canned corn. It is undesirable in beer and needs to be eliminated during brewing. In the past, there used to be much more of it. Today, it is below the detectable level for tasters. Hops used to arrive in huge sacks, 2 meters high, with a diameter that was challenging for a tall man to embrace. The contents were loose, weighting about 60 kg, and dried in cones, then poured into the kettle. But then, in the early 1990s, hops started coming in compressed into a cube a meter by a meter. This type of hops preserved aromas longer, but it needed to be chopped with an axe. Nowadays, hops are stored in pellet form, in sealed, metallized bags, in a nitrogen or CO2 atmosphere to prevent oxidation. Hops in this form retain all their properties for at least a year, while the hops that were in cones smelled nice for a month or two, but by spring, they lost a lot of their properties. You could feel this in the taste; beer with fresh hops had a nicer aroma. At that time, we used to add much more hops than today; beers were more bitter. Beer enthusiasts liked intense bitterness, but we had to attract new customers, and the new generations, raised on sweet carbonated drinks, did not want such beers. We had to reduce the bitterness. Currently, Tyskie Gronie has less bitterness than in the late 1980s and 1990s. There's also a lot of talk about aging, that beer used to be aged longer. That's not true because in the past, in winter, beer would mature for a month, sometimes two, simply due to lower sales. However, in summer, when we could not keep up with production, it sometimes happened that beer aged for just one or two days. From fermentation to aging and from aging to filtration and bottling practically within two days. In the past, beer tasted different from different tanks. We did everything manually; sometimes a brewer would add a bit more or less hops because he was on the night shift and dozed off. Today's technology makes beer so standardized that its taste is repeatable. And it is meticulously analyzed. Thousands of analyses are conducted; we have special computerized machines for beer analysis. In one such device, we test 60 samples per hour! Previously, a lab technician would perform 2-3 tests per shift, but now we have several of these machines, so we conduct thousands of tests - from the raw materials arriving to the ready product leaving. In addition to the multiple verifications of beer parameters at every stage, it is also organoleptically assessed by a special panel of certified tasters. We search for them among all crew members because finding a good taster is a challenge. Many people think they have an excellent taste, but it turns out they are taste-blind. The first test is to check the 4 A's, because what matters most is the four flavors – sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Nothing else. There's no raspberry taste. Everything else is aroma. It is easy to check: take raspberry and orange yogurts, block your nose, and eat. You will not distinguish the taste. Only when you sniff, you notice the smell of raspberries, oranges. In beer, we have four flavors, but over a thousand aromas! A taster must have an extremely sensitive nose. First, they get the four flavors, and we test their taste threshold. Interestingly, many people cannot differentiate them, especially bitter from sour. After passing this test, specialized, deeper analysis commences to find people who genuinely can evaluate beer taste. Modestly speaking, I participated in such a panel. The tasting panel assesses all the beers leaving the brewery. Every single batch undergoes evaluation by the panel, which gathers once or twice a day, and each taster must sample at least eight beers.

Middle-of-the-road beer. Tyskie’s success

Tyskie is a typical Euro lager. Many years ago, we proposed that Tyskie Gronie should be the standard for Polish lagers because for many years, until it was surpassed by Żubr, it was the absolute number one in Poland. What contributes to that? On the one hand, history – a four-century-old tradition. This is a middle-of-the-road beer. It is not too bitter but also not too mild. It has a balanced alcohol content and taste. The sweetness is balanced with bitterness. Nice color, elegant foam that sparkles. Very clean in taste, no aftertastes like 2-cetyl, DMS [dimethyl sulfide – editor’s note]. Our beer does not cause a headache unless someone drinks too much. Finally, we launched a good marketing strategy and started conquering Poland just at the right moment. And not only Poland. I had this dream that when I go on vacation to Italy or France, Tyskie will be there. The dream came true. We export Tyskie to 100 countries. One thing did not work out – for Tyskie to become an international beer in SAB, and now in Asahi. Our Czech brothers managed it; their Kozel is now everywhere. Although in the Czech Republic it is considered an economical beer, in Poland it is a premium beer. Tyskie Gronie was the largest brand in the company at that time, but we failed to win that race.

I had this dream that when I go on vacation to Italy or France, Tyskie will be there. The dream came true.