5,079
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
{{data|27 August 2018}}
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Warka 2003.jpg}}|thumb|upright|A 2003 label of Warka Jasne Pełne with the portrait of Warka’s best known native son, Casimir Pulaski (1745–1779), known as the father of U.S. cavalry.]]
The town of Warka (pronounced: {{pronczyt|vaR|kahWarka}}), 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
