Interesting. I have some Ukrainian in my heritage. My dad drank more beer than he did vodka , Vodka and beer has been known to come out....my own ukrainian tradition!
Your Dad might have a taste for квас ( pronounced K-VAS )
Lots of poeple used to make it at home from stale crusts and rye bread and sugar.
You could hop it if you had something to use as a bitter but thats a little harder to come by ( I have a wild hops in my back yard from the Czec republic an old friend of mind smugled here for me many years ago ).
Its very much like a Saz but not as flowery or with as much snap as a cultivated variety....
Before I start to ramble ya beer is alot more common and even light beers than most people realize in slavic culture
It was easier to make and cheap.
Where you have grains you have beer and spirits.
And stills.......
My family came here and set up a farm on 160 acres in the Ottawa valey.
Booze followed.
They did not make Vodka though.
The made Rye wiskey ( rye/2 row barely/wheat what ever hwas handy and easiest to mash ).
There are all kinds of wiskey in the world made all kinds of ways.
But you can geta fairly good idea the origins of the poeple and place it was made by the ingredients and methods used.
Another tradition, if you want to call it that is sweet wines.
The former soviet repulic of Georgia is the prime producer of sweet and fruit wines of the style I am familiar with and think of as eastern wines.
I even make some ( but again with a Canadian slant because we don't have fruit trees and grapes growing wild like in Georgia )
Some of my relatives like the sweet fruit wines after dinner or with a deseart ( my brother like to put my Blueberry win ON his cake lol ).
Ukranian inlaws drank it here and did not bat an eye at it.
Guess its close enough to proper deseart wine for their taste or they are real polite lol.
Other can't stand them, my wife says that shit will rot your teeth out of your head and burn out your pancreous.
Beers....
About the only Russian beer I ever like was called something like Starry mill ( forget exactly.
I realy didn't like it all that much to be honest.
But the poles made some beers I REALY like such as Ziewic
Thread was abolut home made snowmachines.
My nefew sent me some picture of a dune buggy he made out of a old Soviet car something like VW bug ( only eal ugly ) called a ZAZ.
I need to post some pictuyre of that if I can find them.
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