Fancy A Beer?

Cut along to your nearest Bar Brit and what beers do you find? Tetleys, Carling, Fosters, and perhaps some Saint Mick or Cruzcampo that will also be on tap in your nearest Spanish bar. What you will not find are rarer beers. There is the odd beer house which has exotic beers from far-flung parts of the globe, but it is hardly common. Beer is very much a standard commodity.

Go back some forty years and a British pub would serve the most God awful rubbish. The names themselves are sufficient to still send a shudder through any self-respecting beer drinker: Double Diamond, Red Barrel and the worst, by far the worst, Watneys Starlight, a beer that bad that you were tempted to think that the landlord must have vomited into the pipes before serving it and before you promptly threw up yourself.

Salvation, of sorts, was at hand in the form of real ale and CAMRA. Men with beards started appearing in pubs across England, earnestly discussing the hop content and specific gravities of obscure ales and marking them off in a book as though they were trainspotters (which some of them probably were).

The tyranny of real ale was that powerful that you were in fact forced to drink it. After some years of Fullers, Youngs, Thwaites, Jennings, Marstons, Mitchells and Sam Smiths, I came to the realisation, together with not infrequent heartburn and flatulence, that real ale was as bad as what had gone before. It wasn’t in the same class as Starlight, which occupied a unique position as a crime against beer humanity, but in one respect it was worse; it was snobbish.

It was a relief when lagers and lager-ish beers began to claw back the right for real keg and for bottled beers. Where previously one might have been looked upon as a traitor to the beer cause for imbibing a cold, light-coloured lager on a summer’s evening, there was now an acceptance, if not by the men with beards.

The colour of lager is all important. It is not dark. It looks what it should be and is; refreshing. Dark ales are nothing of the sort. The colour is wrong, whether from a cask or a keg; it is impossible for something that is dark brown to refresh, unless it’s Coke or Pepsi. On a chilly winter’s evening, the colour is appropriate, but there aren’t many chilly winter’s evenings during a Mallorcan summer; hence, with the exception of the Tetleys of a Mallorcan Bar Brit world, you don’t get darker-coloured beers.

However. The Spanish and indeed the Mallorcans have discovered the micro-brewery, a phenomenon of the British beer-drinking classes who are the offspring of the men with beards (those, that is, who were socially adept enough to consider indulging in procreation or hadn’t succumbed to the “droop”).

The micro-brewery, Spanish style, sounds ominous. Its artisan beer is light but also dark. Some of the beers come with all manner of weird and wonderful tastes that make you wonder why they don’t just pour some lime in, give a lager a blackcurrant top and have done with it.

But hang on, things aren’t quite as bad as they sound; in fact, most certainly not. For starters, the beards tend to just grow rather than their being cultivated as a beer-drinking fashion accessory to be left with a crusty tidemark. There isn’t the self-regarding snobbishness that attaches itself to English beers and leaves its mark on the beards. It is altogether more flamboyant and more redolent of a tradition, in Mallorca at any rate, of the type of experimentation and innovation which hitherto had been reserved for the liqueur and “hierbas” industry.

At the recent fiesta in Maria de la Salut a number of artisan beers were exhibited.  In Palma there is a micro-brewery, beer house and restaurant, S’Escorxador, which has a tradition of producing both light and dark beers of its own. In Selva there is a micro-brewery, Tramuntana Cerveza Artesanal de Mallorca, that has recently started up, producing a light beer, a “red” beer akin to a bitter and a dark beer.

The darker beers are likely to be more popular in the cooler Mallorcan winter, but this follows a pattern with wine whereby “tinto” is for the winter and “blanco” for the summer. Whether the darker beers can gain much of a market among a local population used to the light beer remains to be seen, but the advent of a more diverse beer industry is to be applauded.

Would any of these beers make it into a Bar Brit rather than the usual Tetleys? It would be nice to think that they might. But just think; it could be so much worse. You might still be able to get Starlight.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.