The New Mallorcan Beer Tradition

Many years before I put in an appearance, my to-be grandmother and great aunts - May, Ivy, Lily - would gather together with other family members and enjoy a holiday in the Kent countryside. Those were the days - the 1930s - when holidays meant hard work. They were the days of the East Ender holiday: hop-picking.

The manual labouring vacations in Kent evoke a period for the beer industry before it became totally corporatised and overwhelmed by the brewing monstrosities that came to typify the Spanish holiday: Watney's Red Barrel of Eric Idle fame. The hops would be picked to supply breweries both large and small, at a time when independent breweries were abundant. They weren't what would nowadays be called artisan breweries but there was a firmly traditional aspect to them, one of the traditions having been the hop-picking holidays.

A cold beer on a hot Mallorcan terrace in summer is a million miles away from the hopping era. Holidays have changed utterly and so has the beer industry. The Mallorcan holiday - in its beery sense - is dominated by the brewing corporates of Spain, but alongside the beer giants, there are the beer minnows. The new breweries, the microbreweries, the artisan breweries, all of them representative of a tradition that had been lost or that had never truly been found in the first place.

Mallorca's first brewery was established in 1905. The Rosa Blanca, it was sold on in the 1970s and then sold again - to Damm - before being closed in 1998. It's fair to say that Majorca has never really had much of a brewing tradition. But it is now cultivating one, and it has been born out of what has been a sudden and recent development - the microbrewery.

The Tramuntana Cerveza Artesanal (Cervesera de Selva) was one of the first of this new wave. The first beers were made in 2008, though it wasn't until 2011 that they were being commercialised. It is now one of several small breweries to be found across the island and to also be found at Beer Palma, which is currently taking place in Palma's Parc de la Mar. One part of this beer fest is devoted to artisan beers, with eight breweries represented, plus a ninth - Cas Cerveser from Puigpunyent - which has its own stand and five different beers (one named after the event).

Of the small breweries, one is Beer Lovers from Alcúdia, located right in the old town near the town hall in a building that has been in the family for more than 300 years but inside which is the latest brewing technology that ensures a high quality product. And what Beer Lovers produces is representative of what the other microbreweries make - innovative beers for which there hasn't been a reluctance to experiment; Cas Cerveser can claim to brew the only brown ale from almonds.

The corporates - Heineken and Mahou-San Miguel - are also at the Beer Palma fest, but with the greatest of respect to them, it is the artisan breweries which are likely to attract the greatest interest. They are, after all, Mallorcan breweries (plus one from Menorca) and, as is the case also with small Mallorcan wine producers, there is an emphasis both on novelty and bottle design and labelling.

The Mallorcan beer tradition is nothing like the Mallorcan wine tradition. It is new (so not really a tradition as such), but there is little - in drinking terms - that is more traditional than beer, whether it be a beer for the winter or for a hot summer's day on a holiday terrace.

* Beer Palma lasts until 11 May. Each day from 11am to 11pm.

* Photo is from Alcúdia's fair in April. She smiled straight after I took the photo. Damn.

Make Mine An Estrella

What a video. If you haven't seen the Estrella Damm commercial, then why haven't you? Get on YouTube now, and watch it. It is the best promotional video since Thomson's brilliant "Time For A Holiday" ad for this summer was launched last year, and the Estrella one was shot on Mallorca, unlike Thomson's.

I say promotional video, but it isn't a promotional video for Mallorca. Not officially at any rate. It is a promotion for Estrella Damm beer. I don't know what sort of impact these commercials have on Estrella sales (the commercials are now an annual and much anticipated event), but if nothing else, an immense amount of gratitude should be extended to the Catalonian brewery; the 2012 video does more in terms of Mallorcan promotion than any advert that has ever been the product of governmental control.

Remember the cheesy Nadal-on-a-boat thing? The soundtrack which sounded like it was by The Corrs? Predictable and unimaginative it was. The Estrella video isn't. It tells a story and manages simultaneously to capture all manner of facets of Mallorca that are not confined to its locations (in and around Banyalbufar, it would appear).

The Nadal thing was a total and utter waste of money, a video created in the misguided belief that celebrity sells, when it doesn't. What does sell is emotion, and Estrella's video, like Thomson's, has this by the bucket-load, not sentimentally as was the case with the Thomson ad, but more subliminally. It is charming and a creative work of art of which Estrella, and its agency, should be extremely proud.

While Estrella will anticipate a boost to beer sales, the video is about far more than selling. Estrella has caused something of a sensation with its annual ads. The anticipation of their release matches the anticipation of where they are to be shot and what they will be about. When it was known that Estrella would be coming to Mallorca to shoot this year's video, there was a huge buzz, and the buzz that surrounds the videos extends all the way across the social media spectrum. Estrella goes viral via Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

For Estrella Damm, it is primarily about image and brand awareness and brand enhancement. The video is not solely youthful but mainly it is. The brewery has been astute in cultivating a hip image, one that can be clearly seen on its website. Here, there are examples of bold bottle design and of associations with youth culture and music - Lana Del Ray, Dizzee Rascal, The Chemical Brothers, they all find their way into the Estrella orbit, along with, for an older market, the Human League and Roxy Music. Posters for music events, such as that staged at the old brewery in 2010 and which featured Belle and Sebastian, are retro in a style reminiscent of the 1930s; the one for the 2010 event looks as though a giant young woman has replaced King Kong.

It is very, very clever marketing, and its cleverness, innovation, image creation, brand enhancement, use of internet and social media contrasts massively with the staid approach of official Mallorcan and Balearic promotion. Tired, uninspiring websites, an apparent indifference to social media, a lack of innovation. Amidst all the debate about what should be promoted about Mallorca, e.g. for boosting winter tourism, it is all too easy to forget about how it should be promoted. Instead of the introspective and formulaic approach that is normally adopted, a leaf out of the Estrella book should be taken.

Estrella's advertising campaign is apparently costing 2.5 million euros, and its advert is to be aired for the first time in the UK this year (I'm not sure if it is the whole video or a cut-down version or whether it might just be for cinemas). This isn't a huge amount, but it's rather more than the Balearic Government has at its disposal. Yet, if a similar buzz could be created by an advert that is official promotion for Mallorca, the costs of production and advertising would all be worthwhile. The Estrella video is not just an advert, it is an event; this is the cleverness of it, a cleverness that has eluded those responsible for official tourism promotions.

Still, the Balearic Government will doubtless be grateful to Estrella for doing its job for them. Maybe in fact the video is an example of tourism privatisation. And why not? That there are some beer bottles being handed around, well fine. Beer is drunk on holiday, it is very much part of a holiday. Let Estrella do Mallorca's advertising for it, and one thing's for sure, it would do an altogether more effective job than has been the case up to now.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Estrella Damm video unveiled

The making of the annual commercial for Estrella Damm beer is quite a thing in the Balearics. The Catalonian brewery chooses locations on the islands for shooting the commercials, which are, as with the one this year, the length of a typical music video. So, spot the locations, if you can. The video is excellent.

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.


Index for August 2011

All-inclusives: BBC programme - 15 August 2011
All-inclusives: pile 'em high - 6 August 2011
Archduke Luis Salvador, Nixe III project and - 13 August 2011
Arts funding, festivals and - 12 August 2011
Bandanas - 3 August 2011
Beaches, cost of/prices on - 20 August 2011
Beer and micro-breweries - 31 August 2011
Bullfighting - 5 August 2011
Complaints in Pollensa and Alcúdia, business - 22 August 2011
Council of Mallorca elimination? - 21 August 2011
Estación náutica and marketing - 16 August 2011
Film in Mallorca: Cloud Atlas - 7 August 2011
Fires, deliberate - 27 August 2011
Football and cricket - 14 August 2011
Fundación Mallorca Turismo to be scrapped - 11 August 2011
Holiday lets - 19 August 2011
Hotel prices in 2012 - 29 August 2011
Ice cream - 17 August 2011
Image, Mallorca's - 9 August 2011
Loudness, the Spanish and - 26 August 2011
Manacor-Artà train - 1 August 2011
Mayors' salaries - 28 August 2011
Meals and eating habits - 8 August 2011
Organ music - 2 August 2011
Riots - 10 August 2011
Tax repayments by local authorities to finance ministry - 18 August 2011
Tourism satisfaction - 23 August 2011
Tourismophobia - 30 August 2011
Travel fair budget cuts - 4 August 2011
Tribute acts, Marvin Gaye and - 25 August 2011
Youth tourism, drinking and - 24 August 2011

No Small Beer: Peguera's Oktoberfest

The Oktoberfest is on. Not the one in Munich, the one that is really a Septemberfest, but the one in Peguera, little Germany on the island's south side. 70,000 litres of German beer have crossed the Mediterranean in order to wet the whistle of Germans and others at this mini-me drinks marathon until 20 October. One Spanish report of the beer festival mentioned, almost with alarm, that the beer is not served in any quantity less than half a litre.

Beer for Germans is culture in a way that it is not for the British. It is woven into German society in a far more fundamental manner. Small towns have their breweries. Small towns and villages have their annual fairs - the "Kirchweihfesten" - at the heart of which are trestles to accommodate the beer drinkers. Beer is so much a part of German life that I once watched a television football discussion between Franz Beckenbauer and Paul Breitner. On the table in front of them were two glasses of "Weizen", wheat beer. It's hard to imagine Lineker and Shearer with a couple of pints of Tetley's in the "Match Of The Day" studio.

The Peguera Oktoberfest is an example not just of the transporting of beer to Mallorca but also the bringing of German ways to the island. The relationship between Germany and Mallorca is of a different order to the one between Britain and the island. The Germans and the Brits form the two most important tourist markets (and also form the most populous of European resident groups), but there is a deeper bond between Germany and the island, and not just one reflected in what is almost certainly an urban myth - that some German businessmen once tried to buy Mallorca.

Not so long ago, it was said by a local politician that the British have Mallorca in their "genes". It was an exaggeration. In Germany, on the other hand, Mallorca is a part of the national DNA. In Germany, you can easily buy Mallorca's German newspapers or you can watch a Schlagermusik special, probably from Peguera, or Thomas Gottschalk's "Wetten, dass...?" TV show being beamed from Palma. You can even find the Mallorca weather report on national telly.

So strong is the link that there is an imaginary lebensrauming land and sea bridge from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg that reaches as far as Mallorca. It is no surprise that the Bierfest or Kirchweih should be re-created. But an Oktoberfest or a Gottschalk show might imply that the relationship is frivolous. Not so. The Germans take their Mallorca seriously.

As a people, they are curious and inquisitive as well as acquisitive of knowledge to a degree that the Brits are not. Sometimes it can be intrusive, such as when they are standing at the gate taking photos. But they arm themselves with every guide book imaginable and, being German, follow routes or recommendations to the letter. Every German seems to have actually read George Sand's "Winter In Mallorca", unlike everyone else who may have heard of it but can't be bothered to read it. The Germans will try the language, because they're interested in doing so and are not phased by cocking up, the product probably of the fact that they do foreign languages anyway, which is not the way with the Brits.

Beer, though, is a different matter. The Germans are as capable, if not more so than the British, of putting it away in industrial quantities. As the lovely Lisa and Johanna, two German students at the neighbours' house this summer put it: "there are much very drunken persons in Arenal". They didn't approve. Beer is where Germany really kicks in and Mallorca fades into the background. The Germans take their Mallorca seriously, but not when it comes to beer. They take that just as seriously. For Germans, it is Weizen or helles or dunkel beers that matter, and not a Saint Mick. The Peguera Oktoberfest is a manifestation of Germans' obsessiveness with the Reinheitsgebot purity order of their beer. And they're right to be obsessive; German beer is the best in the world. Which is why cutting along to Peguera isn't such a bad idea before it all runs out. Prost!


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.