Two old Poznań breweries and a plant from the 1970s.

Lech is a young brand from an old brewing city. It is brewed by Lech Browary Wielkopolski in Poznań, the capital of the Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) region, which its owner, Kompania Piwowarska, presents as the heir of two late-nineteenth-century Poznań breweries: Count Józef Mycielski’s brewery at Kobylepole, opened in 1872, and the Hugger brothers’ brewery, whose history the company dates to February 1876 and which became a joint-stock company in 1895. Kompania Piwowarska gives 1895 as the founding year of its Poznań brewery.

The present plant is a product of the 1970s. After the Second World War the Poznań breweries were nationalised and, from 1951, grouped into a state brewing and malting enterprise. In 1975, at the urging of Tadeusz Kaczorowski, then director of the Poznań breweries, construction began on a new brewery at Franowo, on the city’s eastern side, the company says. It was designed under Stefan Kwiatkowski of the state design office for the fermentation industry in Warsaw and placed on a 17-hectare site beside the Poznań-Franowo railway junction. The brewery started on 16 May 1980, its first beer was bottled on 23 June, and the old Hugger brewery in the city centre closed that month. English and Polish Wikipedia give the construction period as 1975 to 1980 and record a malthouse added in 1984.

The beer came two years later. In October 1982 the brewery made its first 9,660 hectolitres of a new pilsner-style beer called Lech, a name chosen by the brewers then running the plant, Kompania Piwowarska says. The company names Lech as the brewery’s flagship from that year and says the beer won a bronze medal at a national beer competition in 1986.

Green on the label, green in the glass.

Lech’s identity is built on green. When the Poznań plant became the state-owned company Lech Browary Wielkopolski SA in 1992, the new name reflected a marketing strategy built around the flagship Lech Premium, and the company ran an advertising campaign linking the brand with the colour green, which it says stood for purity, joy and youth. In 1995 a beer called “10,5” was launched with the slogan “Welcome to the club,” the company’s timeline adds.

The green extended to the glass. Polish Wikipedia, citing Wirtualnemedia, says a 2004 refresh brought a new label and changed the bottles of Lech Premium and Lech Mocny from brown to green. A later bottle, it says, was slimmer, with embossed “Easy Grip” ridges and embossed goats, and a label that moved from green to green and silver; embossing had been added to the sides of the cans in 2010, according to Target Marketing.

The range runs from Lech Premium and the regional Lech Pils, which the company calls a symbol of Wielkopolska and which Polish Wikipedia says has been brewed in Poznań since 1982, to shandies, flavoured beers and the alcohol-free Lech Free; Kompania Piwowarska says the Poznań brewery has specialised in non-alcoholic beer. In 2012 Lech Pils began a sponsorship of the city’s football club, KKS Lech Poznań, the company says.

Advertising has leaned on events. On 11 March 2007 Lech Pils set a Guinness world record for the most people drinking from a single mug, a 4,250-litre vessel at Poznań’s Stary Browar centre, with 10,625 participants, Kompania Piwowarska said at the time. In 2020 the brand launched the “Źródło Lechend” platform, a play on “Lech” and legenda (legend), and the Lech Music Festiwale Inaczej project, which produced an album with artists including Natalia Przybysz and Beata Kozidrak. The brand’s website now carries the line “Łap chwile” (“Catch the moments”).

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink names from Poland, Russia, Georgia and Brazil: Tyskie, Lech, Okocim, Baltika, Natakhtari, Skol and Itubaína. Drink brands from these countries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry the town or brewery where they began to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a can, a label and a name, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A tender, a South African brewer and a Japanese owner.

Lech’s brewery was privatised in the 1990s. In 1993 the government decided to sell it, and the strategic investor chosen in the tender was Euro Agro Centrum, owned by the Poznań businessman Jan Kulczyk, Polish and English Wikipedia say, citing Wyborcza.biz. In 1996 South African Breweries took control of the brewery and, the same year and together with Kulczyk, bought the Tyskie brewery in Tychy. In 1999 the two breweries were merged to form Kompania Piwowarska.

Kompania Piwowarska was part of SABMiller until that brewer was bought by Anheuser-Busch InBev. To satisfy European regulators, SABMiller’s Central and Eastern European business was sold to Japan’s Asahi, a deal announced on 13 December 2016, as Fortune and the Financial Times reported, and completed on 31 March 2017, Polish Wikipedia says. Kompania Piwowarska says it has been part of Asahi Europe & International since 2017.

Lech is made in Poland. The Poznań brewery is one of three run by Kompania Piwowarska, alongside Tychy and Białystok, and Polish Wikipedia says the Tychy brewery also brews Lech for southern Poland. The company says Poznań’s capacity grew from 1 million to 8 million hectolitres a year over four decades, and that a wind farm built under a 2019 power agreement with RWE was named LECH Nowy Staw III after the plant and its brand when it began operating in 2023. Its sister brands include Tyskie and Żubr, and the company also sells Asahi’s Czech lager Kozel in Poland.

For a design guide, Lech shows how a brand can claim a single colour, set out in a 1990s campaign and then carried into the bottle glass itself. Compare it with Tyskie, its sister brand, and Kozel. For this guide we use Lech green, bottle green and label silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lech’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.