“I’d rather have it on meat,” I laughed as I put my glass down under the inquiring gaze of the brewer. The liquid in the taster was thick and viscous, laced with smoky notes, featuring an interplay between sweet and savory flavors. That was no surprise: The beer, made by Hoppy Hog Family Brewery, was the aptly named BBQ Sauce, brewed with molasses, tomatoes, mango, pepper, salt, and smoked paprika. It tasted great, though there was no way I could have finished the bottle. If you’d have given me a medium-rare steak, however, it would have been another story.
This was the fourth condiment-inspired beer I stumbled upon during my short trip back home to Kyiv in January. Three weeks after that visit, my home country of Ukraine was invaded by Russia in a full-fledged war. One result has been the inevitable downturn of a lot of industries, beer included. For people losing their families, homes, jobs, and simple comforts of life, the luxury of craft beer obviously won’t be a priority for a long time.
Before all that had come to pass, one of the trends prophesied at the end of the last year was the rise of pickle-style beers in the United States, including favorites like Martin House Brewing Company’s Best Maid Sour Pickle Beer. During that visit to Kyiv, I remember thinking, “At last, we’ve been enjoying something for a while before the rest of the global beer community caught on.” Because Ukrainians love their pickles—and their pickle beers.
We have been adding cucumbers and tomatoes to our beers since at least 2017. Pickle-style beer has an immediate and inherent connection to deeply rooted and cherished memories of home cooking, comfort food, and Grandma’s cellar full of jars; these beers evoke images of family gatherings like birthday celebrations, jubilees, weddings, and Easter. All those events are typically accompanied by an array of pickled vegetables and fruits—cucumbers, tomatoes, squashes, bell peppers, apples, watermelon rinds, you name it—among a cornucopia of other dishes, served and shared by friends and dear ones. Our palates are primed for these flavors.
“Pickling and salt preserves have a very long history in Ukraine,” says Marianna Dushar, a food anthropologist, writer, and curator of the Seeds and Roots Ukrainian Culinary Heritage Project. “Pickled foods are everywhere, and what exactly is pickled depends on the local produce and climate [...] Regionality is reflected in the herbs and vegetables used, but you can find pickled apples, watermelons, melons, onions, bell peppers, plums, grapes, wild garlic, and so on.” And now, pickled beers.
First came Varvar Brew’s Tomato Gose.
Varvar regularly solicits its staff for new brewing ideas; I had nagged then-brewer Igor Dmytrenko to brew a cucumber Gose, following a cucumber beer I had recently sampled. After thinking about it, he said, “I love pickled tomatoes more, so let’s try that first.”
Even a regular Gose was unusual six years ago; tomato was something else. But when local drinkers took a cautious sip, the beer sparked immediate recognition. “It tastes exactly like my grandma’s pickled tomato brine!” many said. The beer in question wasn’t even red, since it was a cold infusion of ripe chopped (not pureed) tomatoes, making its flavor all the more unexpected.
Later, Varvar attempted to emulate “grandma’s 3-liter jar of pickled tomatoes,” resulting in a Gose infused with tomato, garlic, and dill. The result was a love-it-or-hate-it beer, but I thought it was a brave and exciting release, in many ways years ahead of its time. A cucumber version followed shortly afterwards.
(Varvar continues limited-scale beer production, doing volunteer jobs in its home city of Kyiv. Two members of the team enlisted in the Ukrainian Army. Early in June, one of them, Yaroslav Prokopenko, was killed in action.)
There’s another local connection at play here besides comfort food: Some say that the best hangover cure is drinking pickle brine in the morning. This actually makes sense, since brine is basically water with salt and sugar, plus some flavor—electrolytes, in other words. Fueled by that belief, pickle-inspired beers soon became a staple of the second day of beer festivals.
One of the most recent contenders for those queues was a Gose by Tsypa Brewery made with cabbage (think sauerkraut). “We’ve noticed a rise in interest in gastronomical beers and decided to do our twist,” says brewer Yuri Gafiyak, affectionately known as Yuro Yurovych. “And this twist is what we do the best: promoting our regional cuisine, which is quite often obscure to the rest of Ukraine, and featuring local producers. So a collection of Gose-based beers was born. One of them features Turiansky garlic, grown in the valley of the Carpathian Mountains. It was a risky move, but we went for this collab to support the local farmer growing this unique crop.”
(Located in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine, this destination brewery has been welcoming and sheltering people who had to flee their homes since day one of the war, other brewers’ families included.)
“We are surrounded by sheep here in the mountains, so the next beer featured zhyntytsia (sheep whey), which is a traditional drink of shepherds,” Gafiyak continues. “A perfect fit for a Gose, it’s tart and mineral, and almost forgotten, so we wanted more people to know about it. And yes, the cabbage version was mostly inspired by the belief that sauerkraut brine helps with a hangover, so why not.”
At a beer festival in Sweden in 2018, I witnessed firsthand how much the perception of beer flavors can vary depending on your heritage.
Varvar had two Ukrainian Goses on tap, one made with cucumber, O’Gurke, and one with tomato, Captain Rozsil. The cucumber beer was an instant hit, in part because it was likely perceived as a familiar flavor by most attendees. But the tomato version was a tough sell. I saw people struggling, and stealthily emptying their glasses. I don’t blame them; beer is meant to be enjoyed, not choked down. My favorite comment is still: “What the hell. Tomato salt beer. Part of me hates the taste, but another part is fascinated.” Swedes don’t pickle tomatoes, and lots of locals were befuddled by the foreignness of their glasses’ contents.
“Oh, I remember that beer all right!” says Dan-Magnus Svensson, CEO and founder at Brygghus 19, a brewery based on the southern Swedish coast. He concedes that the tomato beer was a tough sell. But “O’Gurke Cucumber Gose was my favorite beer of that festival, though there were at least three other cucumber-flavored contenders.”
You might think that beers like these are designed as provocations, as a challenge to be met by only the most fervent of beer drinkers. But these pickle beers also have an unusual ability to connect with those who don’t otherwise drink beer, perhaps because their flavors are often recognizable, and in some cases push the “nostalgia” button.
I remember seeing that effect myself at Beermaster Day, a festival held annually in Kyiv. A girl with a plate of oysters approached timidly and said: “I don’t drink beer, but a friend told me that you have something with cucumber and it goes very well with oysters. Can I have a taste?” She came back for that beer five more times.
After seeing that local drinkers were not taken aback by tomatoes, Ukrainian brewers ventured deeper into unchartered waters.
Take the Sangrita or Gazpacho releases by Volta Brewery. All 25 of the beers in that series are based on Tomato Gose, but their ingredients lists read more like a modern-day Bloody Mary’s, or a Michelada’s. Shallots, caramelized onions, oranges, Worcestershire sauce, jalapeño, Mexican salsa, and lime in one glass? Or truffle, parmesan, rosemary, and cayenne pepper? Or a galangal, garlic, fish sauce, chili, cilantro, and lemongrass combination (with shrimp paste thrown in for good measure)? In some cases, whole tomatoes were used, lending the beers a fuller, thicker body, and making them even more sauce-like.
Didko Brewery has done at least 15 versions of its Travmato beer, featuring a tomato base and a range of other flavors, ranging from Tabasco and celery to dill and leeks. These releases share not only the main ingredient, but they were also brewed with the same animating idea—craft brewers brew the beer they like to drink.
(The brewer and owner has since sold his brewery and is back to contract-brewing when he has time, in between facilitating fundraisers to buy, search for, and deliver drones.)
“The idea of a tomato beer got into the team’s head around 2019, and even before we brewed and tasted the actual beer, we knew we would like it,” says Dmytro Kovalenko, head brewer of Ten Men Brewery. “All of us, the whole team, my wife included, are tomato-heads; we love tomatoes, be it fresh or cooked, juiced or pickled. So it was indeed a no-brainer.”
Since then, Ten Men has brewed a few iterations of condiment-inspired beers, tweaked the process a bit, and changed the mouthfeel. One result was Berry Blood Pico de Gallo, a storm of coriander, salt, tomato, lime, chili, shallots, smoked paprika, and cilantro. But Dmytro’s favorite is another version of Berry Blood: Sangrita, brewed with tomato puree, shallots, fresh orange and lime juice, fermented chilies, and Worcestershire sauce.
(Some members of the Ten Men team are now contract-brewing in Lviv. The status of their brewery in occupied Vovchansk is unknown, probably plundered. There are no updates on the fate of the team members who could not leave.)
Tomato-and-onion experiments by Ten Men are among the favorites of Andriy Mazurok, aka NorfolkLviv, an Untapped user with the highest number of beer check-ins (17,000) in Ukraine, and who has lots of experience with the style. “I love tomato beer in general. Since most of them are based on Gose, the final profile is very fitting to our local cuisine. It’s a natural combo. Hot-sauce imitations are definitely not for me as I don’t like sharp-tasting foods. But if I just sip those beers as a ticker, I can enjoy more than a few liters of each tomato beer by Ten Men, Volta and Rebrew.”
(Beer geeks all over Ukraine have donated their lovingly cellared rare bottles and beer paraphernalia to be auctioned, with proceeds sent to various funds supporting the Ukrainian Army.)
But not all of these culinary-minded beers are tomato-based. O²xygen has brewed a sumac, cornus, and cherry Gose, and a tkemali-inspired Gose with red cherry plum, garlic, mint, dill, and green chilies. Rebrew made a beer with mango and chili peppers, and Hoppy Hog Family Brewery created a narsharab-inspired sauce-beer with black mulberry, caramel, and pomegranate.
(The latter now spends part of its production time bottling water and supplying the neighboring city of Mykolaiv, which has sustained continuous shelling.)
While many of these beers have been influenced by international flavors or ingredients, others have responded to a distinctly local dish: borshch. A hearty soup with many variations, but which usually contains beets and tomato (and is served with a spoon of smetana, a type of sour cream), borshsch is Ukraine’s national dish. Every family has its own recipe, and you’d better refrain from starting a discussion about which one is better. After the tomato Gose’s inception, it was only a matter of time before a borshch-inspired beer came into the world.
“From the dawn of its history borshch was a very multifaceted dish, cooked in various ways, and the first written recipes have little resemblance to modern interpretations,” says Dushar. “But it also makes it a very accessible dish, because every cook could adapt it to their flavor preferences. It was welcomed at the palace kitchens and taverns; there were celebratory recipes, variants for fasting, and everyday kinds. It became an inseparable part of the family and religious holiday menus. Its versatility allows it to be cooked all year round, tweaking the ingredients with seasons in mind. So there’s a plethora of borshch recipes in traditional Ukrainian cuisine.”
Borshch has such cultural importance that it was recently inscribed on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. And—to serendipitously connect it with modern beer trends—ancient variations of this dish were even fermented. Some used fermented hogweed leaves and other wild herbs; some recipes called for fermented wheat or rye; and there’s also beetroot kvas.
Likely the first beer to actively take inspiration from borshch was Feel the Beet, a beetroot and pink peppercorn Gose by Varvar and Underwood Brewery. “In April 2019, we gathered at Varvar’s brewhouse, tasted the Gose base, and started working on the additions,” recounts Paul Liniewicz, brand manager at Underwood. “First, we peeled the beetroots, wrapped them in foil, and loaded them into the oven to get rid of the raw earthy note of the vegetables and caramelize them a bit. Then we sliced the hot beetroots and put them into the hop gun, as well as salt, pink pepper, and coriander seeds. The result was amazing right away! We joked that people would call this beer Borschch, no matter the name we will give this beer. And we were right on the money.”
Then things snowballed. There was Borschch by Litopys, made with beets and spices; Borshch To Be Wild by Didko, with tomatoes, beets, leeks, pepper, and dill. And there was True Borsch by Red Cat Brewery with beets, tomatoes, garlic, black pepper, onion, and bay leaf.
“I wasn’t really a fan of tomato beers when I opened my location. But bit by bit they got under my skin,” says Oleksandr Dzengilevsky, owner of The Dealer, a specialty beer shop in Kyiv. “Every time I had True Borsch in stock it was a bestseller; people just couldn’t get enough of it. Sometimes I would open a bottle to offer a taster to someone, and usually people bought the whole bottle and took some with them. Talking about preferences, curious regulars or newcomers prefer clearer tomato beers without too much solid matter and hardcore beer geeks [prefer] more thick, smoothie-style ones.”
(Now Oleksandr has reopened his shop, but his wife and baby son have evacuated to Europe. Young parents won’t be celebrating their kids’ first birthdays together, since Kyiv is still not safe enough. They will see each other on Zoom at best: no hugs, no kisses, like thousands of displaced families.)
Most recently, 120 breweries around the world brewed Resist Anti-Imperial Stout (a collaborative beer which has raised funds for humanitarian causes), and showed solidarity through the Drinkers for Ukraine initiative. The Resist recipe is built on the use of beets, yet another reference to borshch.
As I write this, my chest tightens. I first conceived of this piece in February, intending to show the world a little-known and unexpected side of Ukrainian beer. That’s still my intention, but now I want to show how everything about daily life has changed in the blink of an eye as well—from meeting friends to attending events to shopping for beer. Never have I been so heartbroken and so grateful for the overwhelming support of the global beer industry reaching out with words of consolation and offers to help.
No matter what happens, we will harvest new cucumbers, tomatoes, and beets on our missile-scarred, blackened but unconquered land, because we are not only pickle-loving, we are resilient. We will drink tomato beer together in my beautiful, brave, freedom-loving, independent country. Here’s to that day coming as soon as possible.
Words by Lana SvitankovaIllustrations by David Alvarado
