A grass named after the bison, and a distillery founded in 1928.

Żubrówka takes its name from the żubr, the Polish word for the European bison. The grass that flavours it, Hierochloe odorata, is officially called turówka in Polish; “żubrówka” is its folk and colloquial name, the Białystok newspaper Kurier Poranny explained in 2010. The brand’s Polish website says the grass grows wild in north-eastern Poland, above all in the Białowieża Forest, and traces the habit of adding a blade of it to vodka back to the Polish nobility of the fifteenth century.

The modern brand is tied to one distillery. English Wikipedia says commercial production of the bison-grass vodka began at Polmos Białystok in 1928. Polish Wikipedia, drawing on the history Maspex publishes for the plant, says the Białystok works was founded that year and was then wholly owned by Polski Monopol Spirytusowy, the Polish state spirits monopoly whose initials gave the name Polmos, and that the original buildings in the city centre were later demolished.

Production did not stay put. English Wikipedia and the Polish article on Żubrówka say it moved in 1936 to Brześć, now Brest in Belarus, and returned to Białystok in 1945. In 1951 the Białostocka Wytwórnia Wódek opened on Jurowiecka Street; in 1970 a new plant was planned for the city’s industrial district, and it opened on Elewatorska Street in 1972 with three lines making vodka for the home market only. A second bottling hall followed in 1995, eight lines were running by the early 2000s, and in 2007 a rectification unit able to make more than 30 million litres of neutral spirit a year was added, Polish Wikipedia says.

One blade of grass, placed by hand.

The classic Żubrówka Bison Grass is a flavoured vodka. Polish Wikipedia, citing the trade title Rynki Alkoholowe, says rectified spirit is blended with an extract of bison grass made by maceration in two stages, first in water and then in alcohol, and that the resulting essence is matured and cleared of sediment; the vodka takes on a yellowish colour.

The brand’s best-known signature is in the bottle itself. Each original bottle holds a single blade of bison grass, cut to length and placed by hand, Rzeczpospolita reported in July 2016; the newspaper added that the blade is decorative and does not change the vodka’s colour or taste, and that the grass is bought from specialist firms around Białowieża.

The name has since been stretched across a range. Polish Wikipedia lists Żubrówka Biała, a clear vodka; Żubrówka Czarna; Żubrówka Złota, flavoured with oak bark; the Fresh Żu line of fruit-and-grass flavours, which the trade magazine Spirits covered in August 2023; and a ready-to-serve line called Iconic Drinks, reported by Kierunek Spożywczy in 2024. English Wikipedia notes that in Poland the brand name also appears on bottles of conventional vodka.

Żubrówka’s best-known serve is with apple juice, a drink called szarlotka (“apple cake”) in Poland; under other names it appeared in The Independent’s list of the 50 best cocktails in August 1999. Polish Wikipedia lists medals going back to Ljubljana in 1962, including a 2008 gold in the image-and-packaging category of the Vodka Masters run by the British trade titles The Drinks Business and The Spirits Business; in 2024 the New York International Spirits Competition named Żubrówka its Poland Vodka of the Year, the competition’s results show.

The vodka sold in the United States is different. English Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal in January 2011 and The New York Times in December 2010, says the original was not sold there because the grass contains coumarin, which US food rules restrict, and that since 2011 a version made from rye and aiming at a similar flavour has been sold instead.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all vodka names: Belvedere, Ketel One, Stolichnaya, Russian Standard, Finlandia, Tito’s and Żubrówka. Vodka brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a duty-free shelf.

A vodka brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit itself than by a bottle, a label and the place it names, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its distilling or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its vodka is actually distilled 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 vodka is made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the state monopoly to CEDC, Roust and Maspex.

The business behind the brand has changed hands several times. English Wikipedia says Polmos Białystok became independent of government control in 1991 and in 1998 was turned into a joint-stock company owned by the State Treasury, and that its shares traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange between 2005 and 2007. Polish Wikipedia says the business became part of Central European Distribution Corporation (CEDC) from 2005.

In June 2013 CEDC was bought by the Russian Standard group of Rustam Tariko through its subsidiary Roust Trading, Polish Wikipedia says, after Poland’s competition authority approved the deal in May 2013, the trade site portalspożywczy.pl reported. In autumn 2021 Roust agreed to sell CEDC to the Polish food and drinks group Maspex, the owner of Tymbark; Bankier.pl headlined the deal in November 2021 as the “repolonisation” of vodka. Maspex says it completed the purchase of CEDC International and its subsidiary B2B Wine & Spirits in February 2022, bringing Żubrówka, Soplica, Absolwent and Bols into the group, and that production would continue at the plants in Oborniki and Białystok. Maspex, based in Wadowice, describes Żubrówka as a brand with a tradition of nearly 500 years.

For a design guide, Żubrówka shows how a single physical detail — one blade of grass in the bottle — can carry a brand through a state monopoly and changes of ownership in 2005, 2013 and 2022. Compare Kubuś, another Maspex brand, and Nemiroff, the Ukrainian vodka. For this guide we use forest green, a grass green and a pale straw with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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