Beer Drinking in Spain


by Laura E. Conrad

August 1997


My latest adventure as a world traveler was to go to a music workshop in a small town in Spain. Darocca is an hour and a half by bus south of Zaragoza, which is the capitol of Aragon, and is about half way between Madrid and Barcelona.

Like Japan (my previous adventure), Spain is not the place to go to get a variety of wonderfully hand-crafted, idiosyncratic beers. However, there are good reasons to go there (one of which is that they really do know some things we don't about how to party); if you go there, you will drink beer; and here are a couple of things you will want to know.

All the draft beer is better than all the bottled beer. This means that what the dictionary tells you about how to order beer is wrong. If you ask for "una cerveza", they will give you a bottle. In order to get a draft beer, ask for "una caña". This will usually get you 6 or 10 ounces. To get a half-liter, try saying "una caña grande".

I spoke disparagingly about the bottled beer above, but I don't remember when I've enjoyed a beer more than the one I got out of a vending machine at the Madrid bus station, when it was seeming like a very long time in 95 degree heat since an airline stewardess had asked me what I wanted to drink.

Right now, the dollar is strong, so everything in Spain seemed really cheap. I got to Madrid after the workshop too late to be able to find a cheap "Hostal", so I decided I really didn't mind turning back into a rich American, and I went to the hotel across the street from the Hostal than had been recommended to me. Although I had been looking forward to the Madrid nightlife, and had chosen this location as halfway between the nightlife and the Prado museum, I decided the nightlife could wait until the following night. The mini-bar had prices that were about twice what I'd been paying in the bars in Darocca, but still less than I would pay at a bar in Cambridge.

When I did get to the bars in Madrid, it turned out that the thing they serve with beer where we would get nuts or pretzels is green olives with pits. I wondered what to do with the pits -- the answer is that you throw them on the floor.

Because the beer is standardized and not especially interesting, you may want to experiment with the other things to drink. Sangria seems to be what people order when we would be buying pitchers of draft beer. I was staying in a wine-producing area; the wines ranged from the very fine wine which we were served in large quantities in a bodega after one of the concerts, through the perfectly respectable red table wine served in large quantities at the workshop communal meals, to some real rotgut someone bought in town in a bottle without a label (luckily not in large quantities). The meals usually ended with fruit; most often peaches which were local and in season. Many people chopped the peaches up into the wine, and added some sugar, creating a version of sangria. My French serpent professor said that was how he had begun drinking wine when he was about 10. The night of the student-organized costume party, this beverage was produced in bulk in plastic buckets.

The communal meals were eaten with red wine and water. Afterwards (at both lunch and supper), servers came around with coffee, milk, an herb tea called manzanilla, brandy, and anise liqueur. Opinions varied about whether the manzanilla was just camomile, or had other things in it, of which one may have been linden flowers. I believe it was not simply camomile. In any case, the after dinner drink I got hooked on was spiking the manzanilla with the anise liqueur. The other advantage of the anise liqueur was that it came in a bottle with a rough surface, so when the singing started, the bottle worked as a percussion instrument when rubbed with a piece of silverware.

Both Saturday nights I was in Darocca, there was a festival of some kind, with live music and dancing in the streets. For the second one, they were serving a drink which was a mixture of rum, coffee, and some kind of sweetener, and seemed quite good, although far stronger than I would chose to dance for hours on. (I had a couple of "caña grande"s.)

One of the subjects the non-Spaniards at the workshop discussed regularly was whether anyone in Spain ever gets any sleep. The Spaniards assured us that they when they weren't on vacation, and were getting up to go to their offices, they were on a much more reasonable schedule, but a student from Toronto, currently living in Madrid, assured me that people do in fact party every night until early morning and then get up and go to the office at 9.

At the workshop, there was a concert every night from 8-10, followed by dinner, followed by singing in the dining room until the staff threw us out at about midnight, followed by collecting at the "official" bar, and possibly going on to other bars for more singing and dancing. The sleeping accommodations didn't lend themselves to getting to sleep before everyone else decided to go to sleep, which was never before 3, and some nights not until much later. I never made it much past 4, but people did stay up until 6 AM. (This is why I never had trouble getting a practice room when I looked before 10 in the morning.) I did get one data point on what the Spaniards do when there isn't a workshop: One of the best dance musicians I've ever met, who had been playing, singing, and dancing longer than most other people in Darocca, met me at a bar in Madrid the night before my plane left (two days after the workshop ended). I can vouch that he actually yawned at only 12:30, and we called it a night and said "adios" at only 1 AM.

Last modified: 2005-06-12 08:50, 2007
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