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August 1997 Home
On the Road:
-- Madrid
On the Road:
-- Barcelona to Lyon
Kitchen Table Tasting
-- Spanish Edition
The KQED Beer Festival by Cathy Beaumont
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Stephen Beaumont's Brewpub Cookbook |
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A Taste For Beer |
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Great Canadian Beer Guide |
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A World of Beer |
Kitchen Table Tasting
With so many places to go, countries to see and beers to taste, conducting even a loose KTT for this month has proven quite impossible. So, instead, I thought that I'd use this space to briefly discuss some of the brews enjoyed along the way in Spain.As mentioned elsewhere in this month's SBWoB, Spanish beers did not exactly stand out for their character and full flavours. Nonetheless, there are -- as I see it anyways -- some winners and losers in the group
Sociedad Anonima El Alguila, the brewery operated by Heineken in Madrid, brews a very ordinary-tasting lager called Amstel Aguila, with a light, cereally taste and without much in the way of hopping. This seems to be roughly on a par with the other big beer of Madrid, Mahou, a very commercially oriented lager produced by the company of the same name.
Things improve in Barcelona, however, with the beers of Sociedad Anonima Damm having by and large more hop assertiveness and character than their Madrid cousins. (See this month's Taste of the Month for more on Damm.) And from down south in Sevilla, the eponymously-branded beer from La Cruz Campo falls somewhere in the middle between the two.
What really caught my attention in Spain, however, were not the beers but the ciders, known in Spanish as sidras.
While sidrerias (cider bars) are not nearly as common as cervezarias (beer bars), it is still fairly simple to find a good Spanish cider if you are willing to look around a bit. Particularly in Madrid, sidra taps adorn the tops of many a bar and I found that the golden cider they dispense more often than not makes the search worthwhile.
In my admittedly limited experience, I found sidras to be fairly sweet and normally sparkling. Those I found on tap generally tasted younger, fruitier and sweeter than those tried in the bottle, but even the bottled sidras tended to have enough residual sugar to make a dry cider lover wilt. Nevertheless, I found the Spanish ciders to be by and large quite flavourful and enjoyable, and refreshing despite the sugars. (The notable exception was one cider -- I'm afraid that I did not note the name-- which showed all the indications of being the product of a large company. )
And to think that up to about two months before we arrived in Spain, I didn't even know that there was such a thing as a Spanish cider!
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