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The town of Warka (pronounced: {{pron|vaR|kah}}), about 50 km south of Warsaw, is best known for its brewery and the beer that is made there. The modern brewery, opened in 1975, currently belongs to Grupa Żywiec, which is majority-owned by Heineken International. It brews a run-of-the-mill pale lager branded as Warka Jasne Pełne, as well as its stronger, maltier version called Warka Strong.
There were times, however, when the beer brewed in Warka was considered the best in the region of Masovia and even all across Poland. Warka’s beer-brewing traditions date back to the Middle Ages; even the town’s very name comes from Polish beer terminology and refers to the amount of wort brewed from a single batch of malt. The oldest known mention of the Warka brewery comes from 1478, the year when Duke Boleslav V of Masovia granted the town a monopoly for supplying beer to his own court and to the Warsaw town hall. Warsovians must have really liked the brew, as even two hundred years later Jakub Teodor Trembecki wrote in his poem (about how much alcohol is better than tobacco) that Warsaw lived on Warka beer. And at the beginning of the 19th century, Samuel Bogumił Linde, who compiled the first Polish-language dictionary, could provide only one example of how to use the adjective "``''wareckie''" ("``of Warka") in a sentence: "``''dobre piwo wareckie''", "``good Warka beer".<ref>{{Cyt
| nazwisko = Linde
| imię = Samuel Bogumił
}}
Now, Piva may not mean much to you; unless, that is, you’ve ever had a beer in a Slavic country, in which case you know that "``''piva''", "``''pivo''" or "``''piwo''" is the word for "``beer" in every Slavic language. It comes from the verb "``to drink", which shows that, for Slavs, beer is, by definition, the thing that you drink. Also notice the "``saint's" alternative name, Biera, which bears resemblance to "``''Bier''", the German word for "``beer".
Now back to the story. As is typical for Polish Wikipedia, the legend is quoted uncritically and without any citation of a reliable source. Oh, but it’s just a legend, so who cares if there are any historical sources to back it up? The legend, in the same or slightly modified wording, has spread across the Internet. You can find it, for example, on the official [https://warka.pl/pad/p,63,santa-biera-di-warka website of the town of Warka] (where at least a source is cited – as Wikipedia). The anecdote predates the Internet, though, and can be found in printed sources as well. Tadeusz Żakiej, a musicologist who used to write about food under a double ''nom de plume'' as Maria Lemnis and Henryk Vitry, included the following version in his tale of Old Polish cuisine:
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As you can see, the author has neglected to inform us what illness the pope was suffering from or whether he came out of it alive. Is it because this final fragment seems least credible? After all (I’m not a doctor, but) "``ruptured ulcer" sounds more like a serious complication than a prognostic of imminent recovery.
And if we’ve got two versions of the same legend, then maybe there are more? Let’s keep on looking. On the Virtual Warka website we can read the following:
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Curiouser and curiouser! Firstly, the description of Warka beer as "``excellent, whitish, piquant, reminiscent in flavor and color of wine" looks familiar, doesn’t it? Ah yes, it was Polish Wikipedia that attributed these words to Clement. Now it turns out it was Caetani’s opinion after all. And secondly, it was neither Clement nor Caetani who suffered from the throat ulcer, but Cardinal Ferdinando Maria Saluzzo, who lived a century later and served as the last papal nuncio to pre-partition Poland. So there, puzzle solved!
[[File:Saluzzo.png|thumb|upright|Cardinal Ferdinando Maria Saluzzo (1744–1816)]]
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The oldest version of the legend I was able to find makes no mention of the alleged saint whatsoever. It talks only of la sainte bière de Varka, "``the holy beer of Warka". The following excerpt comes from François-Paulin Dalairac’s account of his travels in Poland, originally published in 1698.
{{cytat