How We Brewed Belarusian Beer from a 16th-Century Recipe
In August 2024, Onlíner journalist Sasha Manitu and photographer Maxim Malinovsky visited an island on Lake Selyava, where our team was recreating the historical Belarusian beer “Інфляцкі бір” from a recipe preserved in the manuscripts of Nikolai Mlechka, dated in the article to the period 1595–1632.
The feature explores my search for historical Belarusian beer recipes, collaboration with historians, scientists and traditional craftspeople, and the brewing process itself — using local hops, juniper, wild yeast, wooden vats and heated stones.
Archaeological excavations were taking place on the island alongside our brewing experiment, producing significant discoveries relating to the ancient history of Belarus.
I want to make you envious as soon as possible: right now, I'm being taken by boat across a vast lake to an island, where we're going to brew beer for the first time using the oldest known Belarusian recipe. Our great-great-grandparents (and add plenty more “greats” if you have a long enough family tree) drank exactly this kind of beer in the late 16th century. And while we're brewing, imagining ourselves to be Counts of Heisenberg at the very least, excavations of an ancient settlement will be taking place around us. I hope you're not already overwhelmed by the sheer historical grandeur of the occasion.
This article is not intended to promote beer consumption or home brewing. Our primary aim is to tell the history of this drink in our country.
Of course, we won't learn until a little later that archaeologists from the National Academy of Sciences will actually discover artefacts more than 11,000 years old on our island. Life really is remarkable: you can set out one morning to brew beer and end up in the history books.
But let's take things in order. This is the story of how Stanislav, an IT specialist from Gomel, became the country's leading explorer of its brewing heritage and invited us to make beer using the oldest known Belarusian recipe.
Lake water, wild yeast and beer-loving monks: the brewing begins
“Right, we need to find some juniper. The recipe calls for juniper water.”
Stanislav sends us looking for little coniferous bushes and describes what they look like. I haven't the faintest idea what juniper looks like, let alone what it tastes like — which makes the whole thing more interesting. Stanislav Pridibaila, in fact, is the person who lured us onto this island in the middle of Lake Selyava today.
Some people throw themselves headlong into every new hobby they discover, and this is one of those cases. Already a successful IT professional working in the transport sector, Stanislav took up brewing four years ago. Over time, it developed into an all-consuming ambition to find and reconstruct Belarus's brewing heritage. If you think you can simply Google these recipes, you're not even close.
“I just became curious about why there were no varieties or recipes for our old beer, and why nobody was developing them. I started digging deeper. Archaeologists I knew began sharing contacts for prominent scholars. And without giving it much thought, I'd write to them: ‘Hello, I'm so-and-so. Sorry for dropping in out of the blue. Would you help find and save our beer?’ Surprisingly, many scholars got excited about the idea and agreed to help for free. Some translated old manuscripts containing recipes, some helped with the research, and others helped reconstruct barrels. There were people who cared at every stage.”
We'll introduce you to the whole team working to save Belarus's traditional beer a little later. For now, let's just say that Stanislav and his “accomplices” have done such an enormous amount of work that it could already form the basis of academic publications and dissertations.
Time to start brewing. We'll do our best to immerse you in both the atmosphere and the process.
First, we collect water directly from the lake in a huge metal milk can that will serve as our kettle. In a few hours, this very water will become beer. And we didn't go to all the trouble of coming to Selyava just for the scenery.
“Today we're brewing ‘Інфляцкі бір’, beer from a recipe in the manuscripts of Nikolai Mlechka. He was the standard-bearer of Orsha and the owner of the Kholopenichi estate. That little village is quite close to here. So the original recipe also used water from Selyava (it must come from a lake or river, not cold water), and I brought hops from Selyava too — some local guys gathered them here last year. Mlechka's recipe was written down sometime between 1595 and 1632. So yes, as far as we know, it is the oldest recorded Belarusian beer recipe.”
Stanislav brings out a whole assortment of instruments to test the water quality, giving us a crash course in beer along the way.
“Monks used to brew beer just about everywhere. You couldn't safely drink all the water when travelling, but if you brewed beer, you certainly wouldn't get poisoned. Historically, there were huge numbers of Basilian monks in what is now Belarus. Many Orthodox monasteries, including the one in Zhirovichi, for example, once belonged to their order. And they certainly knew how to brew beer!”
It turns out that beer was considered a standard part of every monk's daily diet. Ordinary Belarusians then adopted the monks' beer-drinking culture. Taking a brief break from brewing preparations, Stanislav reads us an amusing passage from the mid-18th-century diary of Martin Matuszewicz, the castellan of Brest:
“There was no beer. We drank only water. As a result, I fell into depression and my health began to fail.”
Our photographer bursts out laughing.
Following the old records, we disinfect both wooden vats to be used for the brew: we stuff them with straw brought specially for the purpose and set it alight. A column of smoke rises into the air, probably visible even from the opposite shore.
Then, just to be on the safe side, we scald everything with boiling water too.
We pour barley malt into the barrel and add boiling water. The smell of Grandma's porridge drifts along the lakeshore. This is still very far from beer. There is no yeast or hops in it yet — they'll be added a little later. For now, it really is more like porridge.
“Our yeast is wild. I isolated it from wild hops that I picked right where the ruins of an old Basilian monastery stand. It's incredibly hungry, so I already need to put a note on the labels saying the beer contained 4.6% alcohol when it was bottled, but who knows how much it has now,” Stanislav laughs.
Our fragrant mixture is bubbling and cooking, while curious archaeologists hover around it, drawn all the way from the excavations of an ancient settlement deeper into the island by the smell. And while we have a little time, let's retrace how Stanislav went from IT specialist to seeker of Belarus's brewing heritage.
How a successful IT specialist made searching for ancient Belarusian beer his life's mission
Brewing beer at home is a classic male dream. It sounds like something that should long ago have taken its rightful place alongside “build a house”, “raise a son” and “plant a tree”. Four years ago, after watching a pile of video tutorials, Stanislav decided to give brewing a try for the first time.
“All I had was a large saucepan, a liquid thermometer and some kind of stirrer. No special equipment — everything was done by hand. Heat it to 62 degrees, wait, filter the wort (right there in the bathtub), cool it down (also in the bathtub) — the whole process took an entire day. It really is quite labour-intensive.”
Once the resulting beer had fermented, Stanislav bottled it and designed a label featuring his grandfathers. That's why he called it “Дзяды” (“Grandfathers”). The dark variety was called “Бабулі” (“Grandmothers”), also with its own label. Just for decoration, not for sale.
“We went with friends to taste the beer in the perfect place for it: Mir Castle. After a few sips, a friend said it was the best beer he'd ever tasted in his life. But I was disappointed that I'd never be able to reproduce the recipe: the temperature had fluctuated (because of my inexperience), and I hadn't kept a proper brewer's log.”
There, beside the castle walls, the conversation turned to whether authentic Belarusian beer even existed. Little did anyone know that searching for the answer would take Stanislav three years, dozens of books read and translated, and hours spent working alongside leading scholars.
“At first people told me: ‘We have nothing of our own, don't even bother looking.’ On the other hand, there's a theory that our cuisine and drinks have roots in Germany and were brought here by Jews. But I didn't give up. I worked through heaps of books and wrote IT scripts to search printed texts in different languages. Eventually I found a treatise in Kraków — something like a 1675 household-management manual. It explained everything: how to till the land, how to count servants, and how to brew beer.”
The old treatise contained three beer recipes: two unnamed ones and one for a beer intended for travel. Stanislav named the first, made with barley and wheat malt, “Шляхецкае” (“Nobleman's Beer”). The second was cheaper to make because it used unmalted wheat and oats, so it was originally going to be called “Засценкавае”: referring to people who were technically members of the petty nobility but worked their own land.
“I happened upon a Facebook post by Belarusian historian and Candidate of Historical Sciences Denis Liseychikov, in which he urged our breweries to make ‘Basilian beer’, drawing on the story about the monks we've already discussed. I thought: that's a great name, I'll take it! I wrote to Denis: ‘Thanks for the inspiration — here's a bottle to try.’ He was pleased and made a separate post about it.”
A few months later, Liseychikov wrote to Stanislav himself: colleagues in Lithuania had discovered an authentic recipe for Basilian beer in the archives, written by an actual Belarusian Basilian monk. The answer to “Shall we reconstruct it?” was obvious.
“Denis translated the recipe for me, and then I went into battle trying to convert the pre-metric measurements into metric units. That's a special kind of pain when reconstructing old recipes. Hop bitterness units were another problem: modern hops are much more bitter, and adding as much as the recipe says would make the beer far too harsh.”
This is where Ivan Grintsevich, a Candidate of Chemical Sciences, came in.
They found the necessary equipment, testing procedures and reagents. Stanislav stressed that analysing one sample tells you next to nothing: you need a huge range of samples even to begin estimating and approaching the characteristics of the historical hops. But it was enough for the first steps. Once the bitterness of those very hops from the Basilian monastery ruins had been measured and all the calculations completed, the reconstruction could begin.
“It's important to note that every scholar I worked with got excited about the idea of reviving our original beer and helped entirely free of charge — from university rectors to researchers with academic degrees and professors.”
Over time, Stanislav's home brewery grew from a saucepan and a stirrer into something resembling a small factory.
“I ‘requisitioned’ my wife's refrigerator for brewing, and I bought a good microscope. My wife even started complaining: ‘Have you gone mad? Four hundred rubles for a microscope?’ But what can I do if that's the only way to tell lactobacilli from yeast colonies? All for the sake of history,” Stanislav jokes.
In just four years, Stanislav had found and brewed 11 varieties of old Belarusian beer from 16th–19th-century recipes, ranging from styles quite familiar to modern palates to utterly unusual ones.
I was especially surprised by the “Самоходскае” (“Samakhodskaye”) recipe. This beer was brewed by Belarusian samakhody, people who travelled to Siberia on foot in search of a better life. Have you ever tried beer made with beetroot and carrots?
“Finding that recipe was an adventure too. I wrote a script that searched for any information about descendants of the Belarusian samakhody, then used specialised software to search through photographs. Using a screenshot from a documentary about the samakhody, the software led me to a picture of one of the women featured in the film in a regional newspaper. She lived in a little village beyond the Urals. I phoned the local village council and they gave me her phone number. She dictated the recipe to me, complete with precise instructions.”
As for today's “Інфляцкі бір”, it is the oldest reconstruction in Stanislav's brewing career and probably the most painstaking. Yuri Gordeev, a Doctor of Historical Sciences from Grodno, helped translate Nikolai Mlechka's manuscripts (pictured above) from historical archives in Kyiv. Vasily Arger, a former teacher at the only cooperage school in the country, helped reconstruct a traditional Belarusian beer barrel.
But it's time to get back to the brewing — a lot of interesting things are happening there.
Red-hot stones, a straw and an alto horn solo: Belarus's oldest beer is ready
Three men are dropping red-hot stones into a barrel using enormous wooden tongs. I don't think I'd witness anything like this under any other circumstances than our beer reconstruction. Hops from Kholopenichi, in keeping with the instructions of the Orsha standard-bearer, also went into the vat.
Stanislav uses a special instrument to check the gravity — roughly speaking, the “sweetness” of our future beer. A reading of 13 is more than satisfactory to the brewer.
“But back when there were no instruments, they tested the beer's gravity like this.”
Stanislav bends a piece of straw into a triangle and dips it into the wort. Then he lifts it out, and we see a thin, soap-like film forming inside the triangle. You can only perform this trick with really concentrated beer. It looks as if you could even blow beer bubbles from it. In reality, though, the film is extremely fragile, and we were lucky to get a photograph of it at all.
The brewing process and all the accompanying procedures have already been going on for a good six hours. The last ingredient to go into the vessel, after cooling and filtration, will be that very hungry wild yeast isolated from hops growing among the monastery ruins. Brewing beer, it turns out, is genuinely hard work. It's difficult even to say who is more tired: the archaeologists from the neighbouring camp or Stanislav. Either way, the two camps will come together in the evening to open a barrel specially prepared by Stanislav as the sun goes down.
The brew is coming to an end — it's time to filter everything. The same straw serves as the filter. Using a large ladle, the contents of one barrel are transferred into a smaller barrel with a tiny hole in its base. What runs out of that hole is our proto-beer, the liquid we've been working for all day. For now it is cloudy brown, but Stanislav says fermentation will turn it the familiar pale colour. It still needs another 10–12 days to ferment.
“Looks as though we'll get about 35 litres after all,” Stanislav says, sealing the nearly full metal can.
Meanwhile, archaeologists and volunteers are making their way to the shore, mugs in hand. They know what's coming, because they've known Stanislav for years. Our brewer brings out a large barrel filled with another variety of Belarusian beer, brewed especially for this expedition.
“The recipe says you can drink it after just four days of fermentation — let's find out. Look, I ordered this 19th-century copper tap specially from Germany. We're going to drive it into the barrel now.”
All day, besides the beer, one inexplicable thing has been bothering me: why is there an enormous alto horn hanging from a birch tree near the shore? It's practically Chekhov's gun on the wall.
“It's mine! When I was a child, I played in a funeral brass band in my hometown. Want me to play something? I've brought sheet music, too,” says Anton, who has been helping us with the arduous brewing process all day. Of course, everyone agrees.
A few moments later, “Город, которого нет” (“The City That Does Not Exist”) rings out over Selyava. Given that we are beside the excavations of an ancient settlement, where the oldest burial had been discovered literally 30 metres from us, hearing Igor Kornelyuk's music unexpectedly feels rather appropriate.
We wrap up the day with Stanislav. Perhaps Kornelyuk's music has got to me, but for some reason I start trying to persuade him to open his own bar in Gomel, serving his historical craft beers. The man would immediately become a living city landmark.
“I don't make any money from any of this brewing. I do it out of love for Belarusian history and for beer itself. It's an entirely non-commercial pursuit. Given how complex the production is, one bottle would need to cost something like 35 rubles. Right now I can't even imagine how to organise production in a way that would bring down the price while keeping the quality the same. But I'd be delighted to open a little museum of Belarusian brewing someday.”
How we went to brew beer and ended up in a history textbook
Twelve days after our trip, a message arrives in my Telegram: “Our beer is ready. I'm sending you a bottle to try.”
Clearly, Mr Mlechka knew a thing or two back in his 16th century about what beer should be like. Along with that message, Stanislav sends me several fascinating reports from Belarusian TV channels, which he has filmed on his mobile phone from his own sofa. It turns out that the excavations on Selyava, of which we'd unwittingly become a part, have made history. The TV headlines shout: “11,000 years! The oldest burial on the territory of Belarus has been discovered.” So it seems we travelled to brew beer and ended up on a page of a new history textbook.
The expedition leader, Alexander Vashanov, a researcher in the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, comments on the new discoveries:
“Last year, during excavations on the island, we uncovered a feature we provisionally interpreted as the remains of a dwelling built by representatives of the Kunda culture. That dates to 10,000–7,000 BC. During this expedition, we continued studying it and discovered many interesting finds: tools made from flint and other kinds of stone, calcined animal bones, a bone harpoon point and a bone pendant.
“Exactly the same kind of pendants were found at an archaeological site that had been excavated for 20 years. That was where the oldest burial in Belarus was discovered. The age of the burial was established through radiocarbon dating. DNA analysis of the bones confirmed that the burial was associated with the Mesolithic Kunda culture.”