Zywiec Original beer

by Dallas Reimer
(Beer Delegate, MB, Canada)

Zywiec Original beer: Polish macro, but at least it's not Dos Equis XX

Zywiec Original Beer (5.5% ABV)
Poland

The beer I'm drinking is apparently named "Original Beer" since I see no other monikers on the bottle. There is a Coors-esque "Beer Thermometer" on the back of the label. When the logo appears, it's ready to drink.

Zywiec Original Beer comes in a 500ml bottle, and for the sake of this World Tour of Beer and the worry that I may drink too much before I can complete it, I poured half of it into a pint glass and tried it out.

It is a lager (surprise), rated at 5.5% ABV, and pours with a thick head that dissipates slowly into a white film floating over a lucid golden pool. It tastes like any other mass-market pilsner sold in the USA or Canada, but the "Beer Thermometer" sure is nifty. Perhaps it's the four beers I've had so far talking, but I see nothing special about this particular brew aside from its packaging. Poland, you disappoint me.

Nevertheless, it is still beer, and I am on my World Tour of Beer, so I decide that a boring beer is much, much better than a terrible beer (I'm looking at you, Dos Equis XX Amber) and decide that I will take in the rich Polish history and be glad that I'm not in Winnipeg, drinking cold domestic mediocrity and freezing my stones off.

Comments for
Zywiec Original beer

Average Rating

Click here to add your own comments

Jun 11, 2010
Rating

Zyviec - you are the Best!
by: Sue

Visited Poland a few years back and loved the Zywiec while on the beach at the Baltic Sea. Want to find it in America (Kentucky) so can enjoy the cool, refreshing drink again. I love that most of Europe charges the same price for soda or beer.

May 04, 2010
Rating

Zywiec
by: Anonymous

Zywiec is one of the best beers I have ever tasted, Proved by the fact that sales in the UK have increased some 300 percent over the last year or so!
Zywiec tastes like a German beer, because the town of Zywiec was, before WWII part of the Austria-Hungarian empire.

Sep 29, 2009
Rating

Beer thermmeter
by: Anonymous

Zywiec has that Beer thermometer since 1996 Coors haas it for about less then a year

Sep 02, 2009
Rating

Tastes like German beers
by: Anonymous

I have been introduced to Zywiec, oddly enough by someone who was more interested in getting the 500ml bottles for home brewing.
I have been to Germany 6 times, including 5 weeks spent in Bayern in 1968 where 16 year olds can drink the local beers, and 15 dyas in June 1991 travelling around the former East.
Zywiec tastes exactly like many German beers; the first botttle was like a Trip to Bavaria (Bayern). Not comparable to the stuff that gets imported by the major exporters, much of which I think has to be Pasteurized (which changes the composition; local German beers rarely get Pasteurized); wastes like Heineken (the Dutch Budweiser as in a hyped" (promoted) beer, "Lowenbrow" brewed in the USA, or the Czech Budweiser that I've had and which tastes exactly like the US variety since Eberhard Anheuser bought the rights to the process in America in 1876 or so.
There are probably other neat beers around locally. Haven't discovered yet whether Zywiec is actually a German beer as large parts of western Poland (Silesia, Vorpommern, Ost Preussen, etc.) had been German for centuries until the Poles kicked them out in 1945.
Late Lamented: Moy Bier (Moy beer) (since 1160!) of Freising, Bavaria was taken over and the name retired about 1999. I had drunk a lot of it in 1968. Great stuff, but with a problem: an infamous picture showing the NSDAP troops getting off a Moy Bier truck during Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. (Graefen von Moyisches Brauerei Freising it says on the trucks, but that's MoyBier!)

Click here to add your own comments

Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. How?
Simply click here to return to Beer Ratings