Shouting lager, lager, lager; shouting mega, mega white thing. Shouting lager, lager, lager; shouting mega, mega beer park.
Underworld's frenetic, drum-driven techno anthem may be too frenetic for even Arenal's Mega Park when the annual bierfest gets underway and drinks itself into a month-long binge from 20 September. Schlagermusik may be more the order of the month or perhaps it will be Peter Wackel's insane "Scheiss drauf (Mallorca ist nur einmal im Jahr)".
It's that time of the year again. When September pretends it is October (or "Oktober" to be Germanically correct), attaches the suffix "fest" to the tenth month of the year and Germans get astonishingly drunk. Not one, not two but three fests - Arenal, Palma and Santa Ponsa - and all in the name of beer. A great deal of it. Palma gets lagered up from 26 September, while Santa Ponsa will have to wait until it really is October (the tenth day of the tenth month) for it to celebrate browny liquid with a white froth in a Masskrug. (There may also be one in Cala Millor; there was last year, but I can't confirm that it is taking place again this year.)
Arenal starts it all off, its poster for the event showing a suitably blonde, pigtailed Mädchen wearing a Dirndl, thrusting out a large glass of cold drink and sporting a welcoming smile. The image of a beer-holding girl in traditional Bavarian dress is synonymous with the bierfest wherever it might be held, and she is always beaming except on the occasions when she might not be. Fortunately, I don't recall the full impact of a cuff that was delivered at Munich's Hofbräu house many years ago.
Say beer to the Brit tourist and the names Tetley, Fosters and Guinness will come to mind. The more cosmopolitan of Britain's human exports will think San Miguel, Estrella or Cruzcampo (other Spanish branded beers are available). The German tourist will have his own imported brands, but the limited supply of German beers around and about on the island disguises the sheer volume of beers available back in Deutschland.
Go to pretty much any town or even village in Germany and you will find a brewery. The beer-making tradition of Germany partly stemmed from the belief (a not entirely unjustified belief) that beer was a vital form of sustenance. Beer-drinking may long ago have also become a means of getting drunk but it remains a part of the rhythm of a German healthy lifestyle. Every bit as important in warding of the crankiness of "Krankheit" as driving on motorways without speed limits, consuming industrial quantities of red meat, and nudism.
The German town brewery is not a microbrewery. There is a trend towards this miniaturisation of beer manufacture, as there is in other countries, and the microbrewery has increasingly come into its own in places where there isn't an obvious tradition of brewing. Places like Mallorca.
The first brewery in Mallorca was founded in 1905 and it was to become, in 1927, the Rosa Blanca brewery. In 1971 Rosa Blanca was sold to Pripps Española, a brewing company which had arrived on the island in the 1960s. Further acquisition - by Damm - eventually led to the brewery being closed in 1998.
A positive consequence of economic crisis has been the revival of artisan cottage industries and one of these has been the emergence in Mallorca of the microbrewery. At Palma's beer festival last year, four Mallorcan breweries were represented, one of them, the Tramuntana Cerveza Artesanal de Mallorca in Selva, being the microbrewery which has perhaps attracted most attention. The developing interest in beer and the growth of this artisan business has inspired events dedicated to beer which is "made in Mallorca". The fiesta in Maria de la Salut a couple of years back made artisan beer a part of the celebrations, and in Mancor de la Vall there was a beer show last weekend with fifteen brands and thirty types of beer, one of the breweries represented having been Beer Lovers, based in Alcúdia old town and launched in May this year.
The bierfests that are about to take place on the island will predominantly be corporate in style. The well-known brands will conceal what is a small but growing industry in Mallorca. Lager, lager, lager may be shouted at Mega Park, and the unwary may slip on beer slopped from a Masskrug, but elsewhere, born out of a craft revival, is a sort of beer underworld, now being discovered and coming into the light, that of the Mallorcan microbrewery.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Showing posts with label Bierfests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bierfests. Show all posts
Monday, September 16, 2013
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Roll Out The Barrel: Mallorca's Oktoberfests
Drunken tourism. Scandalised though the tourism industry in parts of Mallorca is by buckets of booze and bingeing, it is still more than happy to sanction the intake of industrial quantities of beer in the form of "bierfests".
October is nearly upon us and so the Oktoberfests have already begun. And there will be not one, not two, but three: Peguera, Arenal and Palma. Drunken tourism is fine, so long as it has lager slopping over the veneer of tradition, albeit a German one.
Palma has joined the beer festival fray for the first time. It will be a gastronomic and cultural event, the town hall maintains, one that contributes to an ayuntamiento policy of leisure activities, 365 days a year, and so to a reduction of the impact of seasonality. Who are they kidding?
Shove the words "gastronomic" and "cultural" into a sentence and, bingo, you afford an event legitimacy in a peculiarly Mallorcan way, one which demands that events fall into on-message line with tourism of a gastronomic or cultural nature. Substitute the two words with drunken, and legitimacy is the last thing you get. But they amount to the same thing. The bierfest exists for one purpose and one purpose alone - to get absolutely slaughtered.
And what's with this reduction of the impact of seasonality business? The season is still with us, isn't it? Yes, but this outbreak of the rolling out of the Germanic beer barrel will mean more German tourists rolling in, thus ensuring the season does indeed extend beyond a September sell-by date.
Such optimism is based on a gargantuan German thirst for beer and hunger for schnitzel and wurst (which is what the gastronomy presumably refers to) and also on the fact that Mallorca, rather than either Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg, is the southerly most state of Germany. The Germans are as likely to gravitate to specific gravities in Mallorca as they are in Munich.
Well possibly. One great advantage of the Mallorca bierfests is that they go on beyond the Munich Oktoberfest. The Peguera fest, for example, doesn't start until a few days after Munich finishes, so it is definitely an Oktoberfest, whereas Munich's is a September-und-Oktoberfest. Palma's will last for a good week longer than Munich and Arenal's appears to go on forever. It's pretty much a case of being able to drink up in Munich, hop on an Air Berlin beer airbus and shuttle down to Palma in time to get the next round in; the timing of Mallorca's events allow for an entire month's worth of unbroken bierfesting.
But are tourists specifically attracted by the bierfests? In Peguera last year, 60% or so of the reservations in its 1,800 square metre tent (and they love to announce how big these tents are; Palma's is 1,125 square metres in case you're interested, which you almost certainly aren't) were from Spanish drinkers. And for the Spaniard, a bierfest is something of a drinking culture shock, presented as he or she would be by a vessel of a size more appropriate for putting flowers in rather than drinking from. Reporting of the Peguera event last year made a point of stressing that it wasn't possible to drink in a measure less than half a litre; the reporting had the hint of a warning for the average Spaniard schooled on the junior measures of the caña.
But then culture shock for the Spanish there should be, as the Oktoberfest is a cultural experience; Palma town hall says so. It is unlikely, though, that typical Bavarian culture will take hold among the locals. Don't expect the sale of dirndls to suddenly shoot up or for the local fiestas to dispense with pipers and whistlers and replace them with accordion and tuba players.
The Mallorca Oktoberfests aren't really to do with culture. They owe far more to an acknowledgement of the importance of the German market and, in the case of both Peguera and Arenal, that there are parts of Mallorca which will be forever and über alles Deutschland. In Palma, there is a further aspect. It's German culture that is costing the town hall barely a centimo.
One might be inclined to ask why it is that German culture can be exported and that of other countries, Britain for example, isn't. One might ask, but then one might also ask - "what culture"? The Germans have at least retained some. Moreover, there may be a lot of drinking involved in a bierfest, but when it comes to the real thing of drunken tourism, there is only one nation that does it properly. No prizes for guessing.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
October is nearly upon us and so the Oktoberfests have already begun. And there will be not one, not two, but three: Peguera, Arenal and Palma. Drunken tourism is fine, so long as it has lager slopping over the veneer of tradition, albeit a German one.
Palma has joined the beer festival fray for the first time. It will be a gastronomic and cultural event, the town hall maintains, one that contributes to an ayuntamiento policy of leisure activities, 365 days a year, and so to a reduction of the impact of seasonality. Who are they kidding?
Shove the words "gastronomic" and "cultural" into a sentence and, bingo, you afford an event legitimacy in a peculiarly Mallorcan way, one which demands that events fall into on-message line with tourism of a gastronomic or cultural nature. Substitute the two words with drunken, and legitimacy is the last thing you get. But they amount to the same thing. The bierfest exists for one purpose and one purpose alone - to get absolutely slaughtered.
And what's with this reduction of the impact of seasonality business? The season is still with us, isn't it? Yes, but this outbreak of the rolling out of the Germanic beer barrel will mean more German tourists rolling in, thus ensuring the season does indeed extend beyond a September sell-by date.
Such optimism is based on a gargantuan German thirst for beer and hunger for schnitzel and wurst (which is what the gastronomy presumably refers to) and also on the fact that Mallorca, rather than either Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg, is the southerly most state of Germany. The Germans are as likely to gravitate to specific gravities in Mallorca as they are in Munich.
Well possibly. One great advantage of the Mallorca bierfests is that they go on beyond the Munich Oktoberfest. The Peguera fest, for example, doesn't start until a few days after Munich finishes, so it is definitely an Oktoberfest, whereas Munich's is a September-und-Oktoberfest. Palma's will last for a good week longer than Munich and Arenal's appears to go on forever. It's pretty much a case of being able to drink up in Munich, hop on an Air Berlin beer airbus and shuttle down to Palma in time to get the next round in; the timing of Mallorca's events allow for an entire month's worth of unbroken bierfesting.
But are tourists specifically attracted by the bierfests? In Peguera last year, 60% or so of the reservations in its 1,800 square metre tent (and they love to announce how big these tents are; Palma's is 1,125 square metres in case you're interested, which you almost certainly aren't) were from Spanish drinkers. And for the Spaniard, a bierfest is something of a drinking culture shock, presented as he or she would be by a vessel of a size more appropriate for putting flowers in rather than drinking from. Reporting of the Peguera event last year made a point of stressing that it wasn't possible to drink in a measure less than half a litre; the reporting had the hint of a warning for the average Spaniard schooled on the junior measures of the caña.
But then culture shock for the Spanish there should be, as the Oktoberfest is a cultural experience; Palma town hall says so. It is unlikely, though, that typical Bavarian culture will take hold among the locals. Don't expect the sale of dirndls to suddenly shoot up or for the local fiestas to dispense with pipers and whistlers and replace them with accordion and tuba players.
The Mallorca Oktoberfests aren't really to do with culture. They owe far more to an acknowledgement of the importance of the German market and, in the case of both Peguera and Arenal, that there are parts of Mallorca which will be forever and über alles Deutschland. In Palma, there is a further aspect. It's German culture that is costing the town hall barely a centimo.
One might be inclined to ask why it is that German culture can be exported and that of other countries, Britain for example, isn't. One might ask, but then one might also ask - "what culture"? The Germans have at least retained some. Moreover, there may be a lot of drinking involved in a bierfest, but when it comes to the real thing of drunken tourism, there is only one nation that does it properly. No prizes for guessing.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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