There are a multitude of excuses one can use to justify a trip to Spain: tapas, incredible landscapes, Spanish cider (sidra), the Costa de Sol, Gaudí, jamón in all its many forms, flamenco.
What you don’t use as the basis for an Iberian excursion is beer. Which, I suppose, is precisely why I did so.
In the years since Tim Webb and I signed a contract to produce The World Atlas of Beer, and especially since we decided to follow that with The Pocket Beer Guide, I have become borderline obsessed with countries boasting nascent and developing craft beer cultures. First for me was Italy, an interest which I must admit predated the Atlas by a few years, but was kicked into overdrive by my research for the book. Then arrived Brazil, a nation known by few North American beer aficionados, but which is making astonishingly rapid improvements in both quantity and quality of craft beer. Then Argentina, Singapore, France, Poland.
And Spain. So when we decided to make The Pocket Beer Guide into an annual publication and our intrepid Anglo-Spanish-Czech correspondent Max Bahnson wasn’t available to get the inside scoop on Iberia, as he did for the first edition, I volunteered to do the research myself. After all, I was going to be in Belgium anyway, and since Madrid is but a mere 1,000 or so miles from Brussels, by the deeply twisted logic of the chronic beer obsessive, it really did make a lot of sense.
My research started with the good folk at Iberian Beer United, importers of numerous Spanish breweries, and the operator of the Twitter account for the Barcelona Beer Festival, who later revealed himself to be Mikel Rius, one of the young fest’s founders. As often happens in beer circles, they led me to others, who in turn led me to still others, and before long my week divided between Madrid and Barcelona was promising to be a whirlwind of tasting and discovery.
My only hope
was that at least some of the beers I’d be sampling would stand up to serious critique.
Arriving in the Spanish capital on a Sunday evening, I was faced with both great hunger and the realization that most of Madrid’s beer joints are closed on Sundays. Except, that is, for a brewpub called Fábrica Maravillas, shoehorned into a modest storefront in a district just north of the city center. And so off I went. (Continue reading at The Celebrator online…)