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A Barrel of Beer for the Benedictine Brothers

86 bytes added, 22:43, 14 June 2019
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| adres rozdziału = https://regionwielkopolska.pl/kultura-ludowa/legendy/wabrzezno-grodzisk-wlkp-podanie-o-bernardzie-z-wabrzezna.html
| wydawca = Wojewódzka Biblioteka Publiczna i Centrum Animacji Kultury w Poznaniu
}} , own translation}}
As with every legend, so does this one bring about so many questions: who was this Bernard? Was the town of Grodzisk (pronounced ''{{small|GRAW}}-jeesk'') really ravaged by an epidemic? Did the town well really fill with water thanks to Bernard's prayers and was the water really perfect for brewing beer? Is it true that the inhabitants of Grodzisk brought a keg of the beer each year as a votive offering to Bernard's grave in Lubiń? And was the beer really famous for its health-promoting properties?
| wydawca = Polskie Stowarzyszenie Piwowarów Domowych
| rok = 2012
}} , own translation}}
== From Plague, Pestilence and Shortage of Beer ==
| rok = 1881
| strony = 40–42
}} , own translation}}
Well then, what about the well? Did Bernard miraculously fill it with water or not? Even if he did, it couldn't have happened in 1620, as this would have been 17 years after his death. According to the hagiographic account, Bernard helped deliver the town dwellers from pestilence only as a ghost. The only detail that checks out is the keg of beer given to the monastery each year. Where, then, does the story about the well come from? The oldest version of that legend I found is the one told by Count Edward Raczyński, who thus described his visit at the Lubiń Benedictine church in his ''Memories of Greater Poland'':
| tom = I
| strony = 246–247
}} , own translation}}
Again, the amount of beer offered to the monks checks out – but that's it. There's no mention of any epidemic in Raczyński's story. The calamity that Father Bernard miraculously resolved (in this version, during his lifetime) was the lack of water for brewing beer. It seems that it was only much later that someone combined these two legends into one; perhaps they thought that a story about the dried-up well should be made more dramatic by adding pestilence into it. As if shortage of beer weren't a disaster terrible enough!
| rok = 1840
| strony = 214–215
}} , own translation}}
A beer style so famous commanded an adequately high price, set by the guild of maltsters and brewers together with the Grodzisk town council. In the 17th–18th centuries, the beer was not only offered to the Lubiń monastery, but it was used a kind of virtual currency; mayors of Poznań received part of their payment in the beer and the hatters' guild in a nearby town specified a barrel of the beer as a penalty for price undercutting.<ref>{{Cyt

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