Polish beer: Not great news for foreign beer lovers.

Eight years ago, you could still find good Polish beers, they seem to be disappearing. The Polish breweries are now mostly foreign owned (SAB Miller, Carlsberg, Heineken have snapped up the big brands and dominate the market), the few local independent breweries have fallen on hard times.

What's available tends to be sweet and heavy like a late-August afternoon; sunny, humid, with more than a hint of thunder, plenty of fruity smells in the air.

Wherever Poles take their beer, there's always large plastic bottles of fruit syrops about. If an Englishman asked for a large dash of raspberry syrop in his beer, he'd be rightly considered a poof. Here, you'll see many a shaven headed, muscle-bound type knocking back the Tyskie, the Zywiec or the Lech discoloured by some syropy, sugary goo.

The beer companies have not been slow to spot this, and have launched their own sugary fruit-flavour concoctions - beers like Redd's, FreeQ, Gingers. And mainstream beers have become sweeter. New launches, like the 'English style' beer 'Dog in the Fog', posing as a 'smooth beer' (one thinks draughtflow beers like Boddingtons), turn out to be ghastly in taste. Even the much-praised Perla from Lublin, said to have a strongly hoppy flavour, lacks hops. If you like hoppy beers, try the German Jever pils.

And so after eight years in Poland my quaffs of choice are not Polish, but Czech - Pilsner Urquell or Ukrainian Obolon's wheat beer.