Cider and Sanctions
July 25, 2015 in Daily Bulletin
During the Prohibition era, Americans made banned alcoholic drinks from legal fruit. Poland is currently brewing legal drinks from banned apples:
- Poland has condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Russia has responded by banning the import of Poland’s fruit.
- This is a significant blow to Poland’s farmers, and the ban is thought to cost 0.6% of Poland’s GDP.
- Innovative Polish farmers have taken to making cider from their surplus apples, and production has surged from 1.9 million litres in 2013 to 18 million litres in 2015.
- This isn’t the first time that an alcoholic drink has been made from a food surplus. Bailey’s Irish Cream was first invented as a way to use up excess milk, by mixing it with whiskey.
- This also isn’t the first time that Poles have brewed alcohol against the wishes of Moscow. During Soviet times the Russians turned a blind eye to Polish illicit alcohol production, perhaps because an inebriated population was less likely to rebel.
Some Polish farmers are hoping to turn the apple growing region around Lublin into a Tuscany-like region for tourists and connoisseurs, except for cider. Read more over here.
Source: The Economist
Couple of things to add:
– internal demand for apples has not changed but the large volumes of apple trade with Russia (before the ban) raised the prices of Polish apples in Poland to the level it is cheaper to buy Brazilian oranges than decent Polish apples – many markets offered imported apples because indigenous were being imported, now finally we can buy the species of our youth for reasonable prices;
– I don’t think Moscow or any other occupant has ever banned us from making alcohol; it seems strategically reasonable to keep the occupied nation drunk and under other influences (tobacco, pornography etc.), just like British Empire used opium for example;
– during Soviet Union era, Poland was not part of Soviet Union and it dealt with these things on its own; still, illegal alcohol production was always hunted down, even more so in countries where alcohol was meant to be a mean of social control – because it took away profits of the governing class.
Thanks for another interesting post.