Tyskie

Beer has been made in Tychy, in Polish Silesia, since 1629, and Tyskie — the name simply means "of Tychy" — is the golden lager that carries nearly four centuries of it. Led by the flagship Tyskie Gronie, it stands today among Poland's biggest beers.

Brewing in Tychy began as an estate operation and simply never stopped: through partitions, empires, two world wars, and nationalization, the kettles kept going, and the modern brewery still works in the same city that named the beer. Very few European lagers can point to a hometown run that long and mean it literally.

Today Tyskie is the banner brand of Kompania Piwowarska, Poland's brewing heavyweight, under Japan's Asahi Group. Its second home is Britain: Polish migration made Tyskie a fixture of UK supermarkets and corner shops, to the point where it may be many Britons' first word of Polish — even if most of them pronounce it wrong.

Clear deep gold with a creamy head, and a shade rounder than a German pils: bready, lightly honeyed malt up front, gentle noble-hop bitterness behind it, and a smooth, faintly sweet finish. It drinks easily by the half-liter — which is precisely the format Silesia intended for it.