2026 / Culture and everyday lifeCulture and everyday lifeПБПHow did people drink beer in the 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? Drawing on Jędrzej Kitowicz, we explore regional beer traditions, unusual drinking vessels, the game “piwo — dobre — nalej”, and the political role of alcohol at noble assemblies.
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2026 / Culture and everyday lifeCulture and everyday lifeПБПHow did coffee transform the morning habits of noblewomen in the eighteenth-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth? Historian Jędrzej Kitowicz recounts how coffee replaced a traditional beer-based breakfast soup known as gramatka and, in his view, helped curb excessive consumption of strong spirits.
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2025 / Beer History / ResearchBeer History / ResearchПБПWhat was beer like in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 17th and 18th centuries? Drawing on Gabriel Rzączyński’s 1721 work, this article explores beer varieties and prices, the grain trade, brewing centers in Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, the importance of water, and historical beliefs about beer’s properties.
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2025 / Culture and everyday lifeCulture and everyday lifeПБПA source from 1700 preserves a detailed description of a pagan spring ritual involving beer, also known from the chronicle of Maciej Stryjkowski. A priest drank beer from a vessel without using his hands and then threw it behind his back. The text explicitly mentions Lithuanians, Ruthenians and other peoples of the region.
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2025 / Beer History / ResearchBeer History / ResearchПБПThis article examines three seventeenth-century medical sources that describe beer and honey-based drinks, their properties, and their effects on health. Particular attention is given to references to Lithuania and the eastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as regions associated with brewing and traditional mead making.
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2025 / Beer History / ResearchBeer History / ResearchПБПIn 1659, Andreas Cellarius described an unusual noble hall in Danzig where distinguished townsmen could pay a fixed fee and drink beer until the evening while listening to instrumental music. What did this place look like, and how closely did it resemble a modern beer festival?
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2025 / Beer History / ResearchBeer History / ResearchПБПIn a German edition published in 1554, the physician Ioannes Placotomus discussed Polish and Lithuanian beers and referred to excellent “Lithuanian honey” gathered from linden blossoms. This article examines what the Latin source actually says, what “Lithuania” meant in the sixteenth century, and why the evidence is relevant to the history of beer and honey-based drinks in the lands of present-day Belarus.
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2025 / Beer History / ResearchBeer History / ResearchПБПThe story of “hare hop”, centaury and an unusual beer once brewed in Dubrovno. Travel accounts by William Coxe and Baron Campenhausen, Uladzimir Karatkevich’s poetry and vernacular plant names come together in a curious hypothesis about “hare beer”.
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2025 / Recipes and reconstructionsRecipes and reconstructionsПБПA historical study of gramatka, English Buttered Beere and European beer soups. Sixteenth- to nineteenth-century recipes, Sigismund I, Harry Potter, spices in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and an original reconstruction of a hot beer drink.
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2025 / Culture and everyday lifeCulture and everyday lifeПБПHow was beer used in the pagan rites of Lithuania, Samogitia and neighbouring Baltic lands in the sixteenth century? Maciej Stryjkowski’s chronicle records beer in offerings, seasonal festivals, funerals and commemorations of the dead.
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