I like a bougie £8 IPA as much as the next guy. A beer festival gladdens my heart; an unusual hop intrigues me; I’ll pay close attention to extensive tasting notes, on the right day, and in the right mood. But the beer of my life is a humbler creature. Ubiquitous, ever-ready, uncomplicated. Cold enough that a miniature glacier might slide, glittering, down the side of the small glass. Cheap enough that if the party moves on – and move on it always does – the last couple of centimetres can be left behind in your glass on top of the zinc-topped table, the ringing sunshine flashing off the surface, without feeling the loss. I’m talking about the cañas I drink in Spain, but really it’s any small, cold European lager, poured from the tap into a glass no bigger than my hand and costing no more than a euro. (My ancient internal calculator, years out of step with inflation, insists on a simplifying rule: one café con leche? 1€. One Metro journey? One pack of Lucky from under the counter at a corner shop? One small beer? I’ll save you the trouble – they should all set you back a round, predictable 1€ coin.)
This is beer to be drunk with a small snack – saucerful of olives, a bit of sausage, some fried fish. You can have a great number of them without getting drunk; they come quickly, without fuss or fanfare. Later, sitting in the plaza at 3 a.m., or on the way from one afters to the next, you can move on to a street beer. These are the green or red 330ml cans of Mahou bought from a man who scrunches an empty one in his hand – crrrk! crrrrk! – the noise like birdcall, advertising the cold six-packs he has in an insulated shopping trolley beside him, to be swiftly and unobtrusively wheeled away if a police car crawls near. The price of these is negotiable but some hot night it might be such an essential purchase I’d break my own rules to pay 2€, five, a hundred. During the summer I turned nineteen, Sunday’s dawn already tinting the sky, I sat exhausted on the edge of one of the stone fountains in the plaza at Puerta del Sol. It had been ones of those nights that seem to last a thousand years, the evening portion (calamares and vermouth, chatting in the late sun) giving way to a bar, another bar, a dancing bar, then the afters. At one point I fell into a peaceful sleep in one of the toilet cubicles downstairs in El Alquimista; my then-boyfriend Juan Ángel going in search of me and having to shove the door open in increments, crumpling my pliant limbs against the porcelain. Five minutes later I was back upstairs at the bar with a vodka and peach juice, happy as Larry. A little rest, then back on it. Things get hazy. One night I lay down on the plaza with a row of ten other women so that a gang of skateboarders could jump over our sardine bodies, the crowd gasping and applauding, coins dropping to the stone around us. Another, down a small alleyway, we found a group of Chilean fire-breathers who let us have a go, passing around the plastic bottle of meths or whatever it was for us to swig from and then spit in a great plume over the burning pontil. My booze-breath alone might’ve been enough to ignite the thing. But that morning, five a.m., perhaps, and dancing done, we sat on the fountain drinking a battered can of Mahou in the first pink light, and the council’s street-cleaning trucks parked up at the bottom of Calle de los Mostenses to hose down the pavements, and with very little cajoling and much laughter turned their jets of water on our blistered feet.
In winter I remember leaving La Vía Láctea, too skint for another bar, and mashing the buttons of a building on Calle Velarde until someone in one of the upstairs apartments buzzed open the downstairs door, and we could pile into the lobby to sit in the relative warmth and drink our cans, before braving the cold rain again on our way somewhere else.
This was all different and yet not-so different to the life I’d left behind in England. Beer was the mainstay of my teenage years, in all the pubs and bars that turned a blind eye to underage drinkers, which, in the seaside town I grew up in, was all of them. The Coronation, the Fox and Goose, the Railway, the Park, the Thatch and Thistle, the Carlton, the Wellington – serviceable boozers all of them: pool table, a quiz machine, cheap lager, patterned carpet, picnic tables outside. We weren’t fussy. We weren’t gourmets. We drank in shit clubs – Maloneys, Waverleys, Lloyds Bar, Bar Flava – terrible, sticky-floored rooms in the town centre, flogging pound-a-pints to the throng of dancing fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, the air heavy with smoke and sweat, eyeliner stinging its way down our hot cheeks. Some of the bars aimed at something more alternative: Telepop at the Underground, the nights we put on at the Glass House – Le Tigre, Modest Mouse, White Stripes, Martini and lemonade, questionable outfits, chips and garlic sauce on the way to the bus stop. Weirdest of all were the band nights at Casablanca, the cartoonish faux-medina in the grounds of Pleasureland, the amusement park down by the seafront, where we’d push through the mothy velvet curtains to the ballroom, to watch our friends in bands strut around the low stage at the far end. We drank in those bars and we drank on the sand dunes, on the beach, in the pine forest, in the rec grounds, in the den we built in the rough of the golf course, at our houses and friends’ houses when parents were away. In cars, in the old quarry, in all of the beer gardens and all of the bus shelters and all of the bandstands of that streak of faded Victoriana on the northwest coast. All of it awash with cheap, plentiful lager, Hock, White Lightning, Martini Bianco, abysmal vodka with orange juice from a Tetra brick, gin and blackcurrant squash, vodka and Red Bull, vodka and lemonade, vodka and vodka and there was never enough of it and we were always in search of it.
So when I washed up in Madrid, having done very badly on A-levels and decided to get away rather than try and fail to get into a university, I soon found a new pattern. The fever of early alcoholism already taking form in my circle in England felt less present in Spain, where the drinking provided a backdrop rather than taking centre-stage. Sometimes I think it might’ve saved my life. Now the drinks, those cañas, were small, cool and abundant. Drinking felt easy, unhurried, unburdened of that freight of urgency. It was like someone had let go of my string, and I had floated off into that ringing blue sky.
The flavour? Variable. Hard to say. At its best, cold and long-awaited, it’s liquid sunshine, honey on ice, cut grass, toasted grain, yeast, fried batter, an almost chlorinated acidity. Leave it sitting too long and you’ve got warm, mild piss, all that bright hop gone to bitterness. It doesn’t last. You can’t take it with you.
For whatever reason, they seem to be to be slipping out of popularity, now. Last few times I went back, most recently in April this year, I asked for a caña – ‘un doble,’ the waiter corrected me, firmly. I couldn’t get anything smaller, the whole long weekend – it’s like the city’s been supersized. The beer landscape in Madrid has changed in other ways, of course, since I was first living there in the mid-aughts. Craft is readily available, tap rooms popping up where until relatively recently I couldn’t imagine any such thing popping. The Toast, La Tape, Fábrica Maravillas and The Stuyck Co in the Malasaña district, which also has a Mikkeller; Be Hoppy and La Maripepa in Las Letras; Bee Beer in Chueca, round the corner from La Buena Cerveza; La Caníbal near the Reina Sofia; La Osita on Cava Baja (run by a pair of Brits), Chinaski in Lavapiés (which hosts ‘meet the brewer’ events). Perhaps outside the capital things are different.
Back in England at twenty, I went off lager a bit. My drink of choice was the local Lancaster Red – malty, punchy, 4.8%, something like the warmth of crystallised ginger in a good fruitcake at the back of your mouth – that I drank by the pint in the student union bar where I worked. Five years later I graduated and moved to London to sink dangerous 6.8% pints of Lagunitas IPA (Simcoe, Cascade, Chinook and Centennial hops, still a favourite) at lunchtime round the corner from the publisher where I worked. I gave a hundred quid to a start-up brewery in Leyton, a friend of a friend of a boyfriend. That was an unmitigated disaster. They launched the first three beers outside their premises, a lock-up on an industrial estate, between a non-denominational West African church and a frozen Chinese-food storage unit full of dim sum and chicken feet. We lounged around on top of the dumpsters with the other terrible, pretentious arseholes, sipping atrocious amber ale from plastic cups. It was the best of a bad bunch: the ‘carrot IPA’ had failed to drop; the brewers audaciously handed around shot glasses of the acrid, luminous stuff for us to try. Their ‘ancho chilli porter’ hadn’t fared better, with gritty little crimson pieces of the capsicum floating on the surface of the pint.
I have recently discovered the ‘bière continentale’ Morrisons sell for an extremely reasonable £3.65 for ten stubby 25cl bottles. On the one hand, they’re trashy. On the other, they’re scratching an itch I hadn’t known needed scratching. I’ve had other loves. Of course, of course. I bought more than one case of the Black Isle’s Black Run Imperial stout aged in Tomatin bourbon casks (and if anyone can find me another bottle of it, that’s my birthday present sorted). The little brewery off the cycle path near my current home in Gloucestershire, the Fresh Standard, do a lovely Red Mild. I like Tiny Rebel’s fruity Club Tropica and Mantle’s Cwrw Teifi, and some of Dark Star. Someone brought a cask of very nice Uley Pale to my son’s first birthday party this summer, which I (and he, I think) appreciated.
But it’ll always a caña, for me. It’s a symbol of reaching the continent. The first one after stepping off the train into Madrid’s August heat. The one at a Bordeaux café, à la pression, under a dusty Coca-Cola parasol, watching people hurrying when you have no hurrying to do. A line of them on a crawl from place to place, seeing down bacalao croquetas and fried peppers and bowls of salted crisps. In a square in Sofia, on a translation workshop. A few thirsty sips from my partner’s glass in Rome the year before last when I was a couple of months pregnant. The one by the swimming pool, grabbed from the freezer on my way out of the flat, cooling and dampening the pages of my book in the bottom of my rucksack. The one at the foot of Monte Abantos, having hiked high enough to see across the whole wide and endless plain. The 2L bottles of it bought from the petrol station round the corner from the flat in Chamartín, and drunk on the tiny balcony with my six flatmates. All those cañas when I was eighteen and nineteen in Madrid, with nothing to do but teach a few afternoon lessons and then roam around the city in the velvet night, following the crow-call of a beer can towards the rising sun.