Region & History

In autumn, the air around Białystok carries the scent of wet rye straw. Less than twenty kilometers away begins the Białowieża Forest. Its undergrowth is home to a grass species that gave an entire landscape its name. Legend has it that noblemen in Podlachia were already flavoring their spirits with this grass in the fourteenth century. The practice is only documented from the sixteenth century onward. Until the eighteenth century, the aromatic drink belonged as much to court life as to the simple farmer. Both fetched the grass from the same forest, which also belonged to the nobility.

Podlachia itself changed hands many times over the centuries. As part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the region came under the Polish Crown in 1569 with the Union of Lublin. After the partitions of Poland, it fell to the Tsarist Empire. Under Russian rule, Białystok grew into a textile town. Poles, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Jews, and Tatar families, who had settled in the surrounding area since the seventeenth century, all lived here. This mix of peoples and borders still shapes the region today.

In 1928, the Polish state founded a spirits factory in Białystok. It was called Polmos, short for Polski Monopol Spirytusowy, the state spirits monopoly. This is where production began on the bison grass vodka that would go on to achieve world fame as Żubrówka. It takes its name from the żubr, the European bison found in the nearby forest.

World War II interrupted this young tradition. The factory was relocated to Brześć Litewski in 1936 and destroyed during the war. It wasn't until 1945 that it returned to Białystok as Białostocka Wytwórnia Wódek. Under the socialist state monopoly, production continued without much change to the recipe.

Only in 1991 did the company break free of state control. In 1998, it became a joint-stock company, and from 2005 it was listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Today, Żubrówka leaves Podlachia bound for more than eighty countries. The bison grass for every bottle is still hand-picked in the Białowieża Forest.