Region & History

Among Poland's best-known breweries is Żywiec, and its roots lie with the Habsburgs. Archduke Albrecht Friedrich of Austria-Teschen, who held the Żywiec estate (German: Saybusch), had a brewery built there in 1856. The estate administration had already laid the foundation stone on 16 June 1852, with Karol Pietschka as architect. It was built on the site of a former distillery.

At the time, the land belonged to Galicia, the Crown land Austria had administered since the first partition of Poland in 1772. By 1857, the brewery was already considered the largest in Galicia. After Albrecht's death in 1895, his nephew Karl Stefan Habsburg inherited the estate. Since 1994, the Dutch company Heineken International has been the largest shareholder in Browary Żywiec.

The second great name is Okocim. Anyone wanting to know who founded the brewery in Brzesko arrives at Johann Evangelist Götz, a brewer from Württemberg known in Poland as Jan Ewangelista Goetz. His company was founded on 26 April 1845, and the first brew took place on 23 February 1846. His son Jan Albin Goetz-Okocimski led the brewery to its greatest prosperity, when it ranked among the five largest in the Habsburg Monarchy.

In Kraków itself, the Jenny family had been brewing on Ulica Lubicz since 1840. This Browar Lubicz was taken over in 1904 by Baron Goetz-Okocimski. When Okocim came under Carlsberg's ownership, production there ceased in 2001, but brewing resumed at Lubicz in 2015.

Today Żywiec belongs to Heineken and Okocim to Carlsberg Polska. There is no protected designation of origin: the EU register lists no Polish name for beer. So "beer from the Beskids" is not a protected term, but a matter of place and brewery.