Last time I visited Barcelona – about five years ago on a work trip – there was no craft beer. There is now. Ever since my Three Sheets trips, Spain has always been one of my favourite places to drink. Not because of the quality of the beer (although Spanish mainstream lagers are far superior to their British equivalents) but because of the way people drink. Small glasses, often with tiny bits of food, moving through the city until the small hours, ending up happy and sated but not completely pissed. It’s the perfect way to drink beer.
Now you can do it with good beer.
I’d heard that Spain had discovered craft beer and considered reading up on it, maybe contacting a few people before I flew out. I’m glad I didn’t. I can just be a punter again, on a new journey of discovery.
La Cerveteca is in an old building of exposed massive stone blocks, very high ceilings and mosaic floors. It’s a very Spanish bar, which makes the shelves of Nogne O, BrewDog, Meantime, Dupont and Cantillon bottles lining the walls seem all the more incongruous. People stand around large hogsheads on which they drape their heavy winter coats (they seem to be feeling the chill of 15 degrees Celsius more than I do) and perch their beers.
I’m one of those people who usually speaks English slowly, assuming/hoping serving staff across Europe will understand. But here, ordering a pint of IPA in a foreign language for possibly the first time, I realise those three letters have become as international as ‘OK’ or the scribbly airsign you make when you want the bill. Even in languages where the phonetic pronunciation of the letters is different, they anglicise it for IPA, the way Brits sometimes say Zee instead of Zed if it’s in an American context. Say those three letters in a craft beer bar anywhere in the world, and the bartender will nod, whatever languages they do or don’t speak.
As well as ‘Ipanema IPA’, the bar boasts locally brewed beers including porter, saison, red ale and smoked marzen. Some of these are even cask conditioned. A half-drawn just behind the bar reveals an expansive cellar. The physics-defying heads on the pints being poured suggest there might still be some work to be done there, so I stick to the keg taps.
My IPA is good: clean, fresh and quenching, with a slowly building hop fuzziness, just how I like it.
I’m absurdly happy that I can stand at the bar in a place like this and order a pint of saison with a plate of Jamon Belotta – the king of ham, at least within my budget – or just about. (The first time I had Belotta ham is detailed in Three Sheets in the bit about the Hamburglar in Madrid, who got me and my mate Chris pissed on Ballantyne whisky and tricked us into buying a €17 plate of ham each).
The ham simply melts around it’s fat, sweet and salty. And although it’s not a perfect match with the saison, it pulls the beer into interesting new shapes, making it bolder and more cheerful than a saison usually is.
Craft beer belongs perfectly in Barcelona’s easygoing gastronomic culture, which is even now creating playful new fusions such as Asian-influenced tapas (unsurprising given the Japanese eat and drink beer in a very similar fashion). This is Ferran Adria’s city after all.
The next day I find the actual address of Hook, the last pirate theme bar, and discover it closed last summer. Instead, a few doors down, there’s a bar called CRAFT, selling BrewDog, Meantime and Brooklyn beers far more cheaply than I can buy them at home.
This prompts mixed feelings. The charm of researching Three Sheets was discovering the quirks of drinking culture around the world, realising that there was a universal template for what beer means, and what the beer moment is, and that this template gets dressed up in different national and regional costumes that are unique, and sometimes special.
In one sense it’s fantastic that I can now get the craft beers I know – plus some new ones such as Holz and Aktien, that I’d like to get to know better – in one of my favourite cities in the world. In another, it makes me slightly sad that this seemingly comes at the cost of sitting in a pub lined with prints of Telly Savalas, drinking perfectly average lager, and laughing like a drain.
But maybe those days were gone anyway.
Did you try any others? There are stacks of really good beer places in Barcelona now. Plus a growing number of local breweries. I'd recommend Homo Sibaris, Ale&Hop and La Mes Petita – all well worth a visit – plus El Vaso d'Oro for craft beer served in an old-style Barceloneta Bar. The Drunk Monk in Mataro just up the coast is good too – what little I remember of it.
Good to hear Barcelona is getting on the craft beer bandwagon. On the subject of pirate pubs, there used to be a couple in Valencia – about 10 years ago, so I imagine they too have probably heaved anchor by now. And there's at least one in Lanzarote… It must be a Spanish thing.
That's interesting about the international vernacular of IPA. I've found, from Buenos Aires to Rome, that the usual non-English pronunciation is "eepa", not that I have ever managed to bring myself to ask for it that way.
You remind me of the trip to the UK in the 1980s to see family when my brother came back complaining how, compared to the 70s when we got to learn about punk and ska, all the pubs were playing was "Born in the USA". If craft means the end of indigenous beers, that's sad. I have to admit, too, that the brands of "craft" you name are the ones I avoid now. Heavily marketed multi-nationals.
Thought-provoking piece.
It's funny that we want where we live to have variety and novelty and beer from around the world, but we want the places we visit to retain their own unique culture. Visiting, say, Berlin, I'd want to drink Berliner Weisse; if I lived there, I'd probably be delighted to hear that Brewdog was opening.
Old mate of mine runs Cat Bar : local, artisanal & brewdog beer / wheat-free tapas / all day vegan breakfast / mad pictures of cats. Bonkers.
Brewdog has become the Heineken of craft beer.
When I see that advertised in some interesting,back-street bar in a strange city my heart sinks.
Seems like you really can fool all the people all the time.
I must disagree with your conception of La Cerveteca as a "very Spanish" bar. In fact, La Cerveteca is what a bar in the 21st century should be. Spanish bars are generally just as opposite: dirty places with a bunch of old people who go there every day to smoke (before it was banned), drink some random mainstream beer, coffee or bad wine and play some card or board game.
We'll said Stanley! Mine does too.
Barcelona is a lovely city. I cannot stay more than 2 years without visiting it… it is a medical prescription for me 😉
Jane