Living in Williamsburg’s Northside in Brooklyn, New York, one is confronted by an undeniable fact- there are Polish people everywhere.  My neighbors upstairs are Polish, as is my landlord, the cashiers at Tops grocery store, the bakers down the road, and damn near everyone else.  Which is a good thing.  For wherever one finds concentrations of immigrants, one finds their food and drink.

On the Northside one can stuff his belly with all sorts of wonderful Polish foods.  There are a couple butcher shops carrying numerous splendid varieties of kielbasa and beef and pork jerkies.  Then there’s the array of light and dark breads and sugary sweets of the Northside bakeries.

But when it comes to beverages- well, the choices aren’t so swell.  While the Polish have turned out a few good vodkas, otherwise their distilling and brewing is at best mediocre and often quite awful.  They have cooked up some passable pilsners and lagers.  Ockocim, for example, comes in a few versions, including a Budweiser-like lager, and a mind-rattling malt liquor.  Then there’s Lech, which professes to be the “Official Beer of the Polish Olympic Team” and tastes a bit like the unremarkable Lowenbrau.

And these are the best of the bunch.  Turning to the subject of this review-Lomza, one finds everything wrong in Polish brewing- filthy water, bitter grains, and no sense of the limits to the human palate’s tolerance for the foul.  With absolute honesty I can confess there is nothing good what so ever about Lomza beer.

Lomza is egregious- outstandingly bad.  Like Schaeffer, Red, White, and Blue, or maybe Cook's or Drewery's, it is thin, watery yellow, and gritty.  The taste is reminiscent of drinking from a burst, rusty city waterpipe.  In fact, if memory serves, I can actually stomach multiple cans of Schaeffer (assuredly nothing to brag of), but Lomza choked me after a few ounces.

Upon opening the can one is greeted with a forbidding stench.  And the taste- well, it damn near gagged me.  It is gross, really gross, and no stretch of the imagination can make my mouth declare otherwise.  Each sip brings a violent reaction.  The mouth says, "oh, not bad," then the tongues screams, "god damn, that's fucking silty and bitter!"  The face then begins to contort terribly and the torso and arms curl forward as the stomach cringes at what's to come.  Had anyone been watching me as I tasted Lomza they might have thought I was having an epileptic fit.

What more need be said?  Though one gets a whole 16 ounces for a mere 99 cents, it’s 99 cents wasted.  No matter how desperate and poor you might find yourself, stay away from this rotten concoction.  (Rating *)