Is it a car, is it a skirt? No, it's a glass!

Being remarkably hip and cool, or whatever you say nowadays for being hip and cool - straight fire Gucci maybe - we go to see a fair number of contemporary musicians. Just so my mum understands I mean pop festivals. We go to see the town band too so, really, we're neither hip nor cool. Never mind. At a music festival, in non Covid times, the security check at the entrance was to look for anything unsafe and to root out food and drink. Nobody likes to pay festival prices for beer or for a rum and coke.

Festivals aren't permanent events, more or less by definition. The jobs they provide are temporary. Most of the staff are temporary. And temporary tends to unknown and unknown tends to untrustworthy. Years ago the daughter of one of my work colleagues went to Ibiza for the summer season to work in a bar. The young woman turned up, sober and unstoned, on time, every day, for the whole of her contract. Her boss was so unused to this responsible behaviour from his young, temporary staff that he paid her a bonus and tried to hire her, then and there, for the next season.

At a festival the temporary staff on the bars aren't trusted to handle money but someone has to, so the bosses get someone to run a cash office in whom they have more confidence. These money handling trusties take the money from the paying punters and change it into little tokens which then become the currency of the festival. It's a doubly good trick because, as well as limiting pilfering, not all the tokens get changed into goods. If, for instance, the tokens are worth 1€ and they are sold in blocks of 10 with the charge for a beer being 3€ there will be a good number of people who buy three beers and have one useless token left over. It's not a huge intellectual leap for friends to pool the left over tokens or for people to queue at the cash office to turn the tokens back into money but both processes are a bit of a faff. The end result is that lots of people go home with a couple of plastic tokens and the organisers get to keep the euros that bought them.

The cost of a small glass of beer in Spain varies but it's still not that unusual to get a beer for as little as a euro, maybe 1.50€. In a decent sized city normal bars might charge around 2.50€ and, if the bar specialises in good looking servers and is trendy - sorry, straight fire - then you can pay a lot more. Nonetheless, even in posh restaurants, restaurants with Michelin stars and strange names, restaurants with oddly named craft beers, I don't think I've ever been particularly shocked by the price of beer; it's not like buying a beer in Paris. One of our local bars charges as much as 6€ for high alcohol (often Belgian) beer and I think that's as much as I've ever paid in anywhere normal. 

At festivals there will be a beer sponsor. They'll have all the bars and serve their, usually, very ordinary lager in plastic glasses at inflated prices. Nowadays the tendency is that you will need a token to buy a reusable plastic glass in a pretence of being environmentally friendly. Festival beer is as expensive as beer gets - 3€ or 4€ for a small glass is pretty usual. The first time it's a shock but by the fifth glass nobody cares much especially if the bands are good.

There are lots of ways to ask for beer in a bar. By name for instance or by the size of the glass. When Britons want a, nearly, pint sized glass (as in Pulp Fiction we have no quarter pounders or pints because we have the metric system) you can ask for a tanque or una jarra. A small glass of beer is usually a caña. The size of a caña varies - in Madrid it tends to be around 200ml but, in the Basque Country, a caña is around a third of a litre. In Castilla y León they have smaller measures that are called cortos, in Andalucia tubos are common and so it goes. Bottles are usually botellín or quinto for the 200 ml size and tercio for the 330 ml size. Again there are regional differences, in Cataluña for instance I think the 330 ml bottles are called medianas by the locals, and there are litre bottles or litronas. Young people and seasoned drinkers often order beer in litronas to share.

Recently we've been to see three bands in the music festival in Cartagena called the Mar de Músicas. With our allocated seats located I went to find the bar and I was pleased to find that the bar staff dealt in cash (and cards). Maggie's wish for a vodka was thwarted though - only soft drinks and beer. I order a couple of cañas and paid the 3€ each. Beer in hand I now have time to read the price list and I notice that they have a bigger, squashy, plastic glass which contain as much as a litre and the price is 7€. This sort of big plastic glass is habitually used for cubatas and cubatas are mixed drinks in the rum and coke, vodka and lemon style. At the Mar de Músicas, and at most festivals, you don't have to go to the bar. Men and women with beer filled backpacks wander the auditoria happy to bring it to you. Near us a couple of young women were ordering beer; they checked prices and quantities and eventually asked for a big plastic glass full of 7€ worth of beer and two smaller empty glasses. They were going to share. As they ask the price their question is "How much is a mini?". I'd forgotten that's what the big glasses are called. Spanish irony I presume.