Summer drinks

Have you noticed that the Spaniards drink their beer cold? I mean cold. Not chilled; cold. If you go into a bar, run by people of other nationalities, in Spain, the difference can be noticeable. That idea of crisp, cool and refreshing is one of the reasons why telly adverts associate friends laughing together, eating together, swimming at the beach and drinking beer together with summer. Beer isn't a traditional Spanish drink, it didn't really take off  till the 1970s and it wasn't till 1982 that beer took over from wine as the biggest selling alcoholic drink. 

Spaniards notice when Britons, and other Northern Europeans, put ice in their wine. Odd really considering that Spaniards pour their hot coffee and tea over ice all summer through.

When you're out and about, when it's too late at night to drink beer or wine, and we move on to mixed drinks nearly all of them get ice. When the Spanish mix a copa - spirit and mixer type drinks like rum and coke or vodka and lemon - ice is the order of the day. Sometimes there is so much ice in a gin and tonic, gin tonic in Spanish, that it might cause nasal frostbite. It also serves to disguise a less than generous serving of gin.

Vermouth, wine spiced with a mixture of herbs, is as traditional a drink as wine itself. For vermouth to be vermouth one of the spices it has to contain is wormwood; that's what makes vermouth taste like vermouth. It's more or less analogous to sparkling wines from the Champagne region being champagne and sparkling wine from Norfolk being sparkling wine. The most well known Spanish sparkling wine is cava which comes from specific areas, generally in Cataluña. By the way it's pronounced cavva not carver. Vermouth is so Spanish that it gives the name to a period of the day, just before lunch, la hora del vermut. The red versions usually get a twist of orange, the whites get a twist of lemon, olives too and, of course, an ice cube or two – a splash of soda water, sifón, is optional. Drink vermouth for an immersive cultural experience. 

And let's not to forget anis. It's an aniseed flavoured drink more or less like pastis, raki, ouzo etc. There are a couple of local producers near Pinoso, in Monforte del Cid. Anis comes in sweet and dry versions and a dry anis diluted about four to one with water and with an ice cube added, locally called a paloma, was a very common summer drink. That reminds me that I should get a bottle in.

Sangria always confuses me. So far as I know sangria is a Spanish (and Portuguese) alcoholic drink made from wine, slices of fruit, gaseosa (a sort of fizzy sugary water a bit like the cheap lemonade of my youth) with some sugar and a touch of liqueur (often Spanish brandy). The reason Sangria has me confused is that, certainly in the past, Spaniards hardly ever drank it. They left it to the tourists but, nowadays, you'll often see plastic cups of the stuff, ready prepared and labelled as sangria on market type food stalls. What Spaniards tended to drink, and it is quite similar, is tinto de verano, red summer wine, which is just cheap red wine, gaseosa, ice and, usually, a twist of lemon. In the way that the modern world has of marketing some inferior product masquerading behind a name it's difficult to decide which is which among the industrial ready made mixes that belittle both the original products.

Just before I move off booze a special mention for calimocho. This was the drink of poor young people who wanted to get drunk at one of the outdoor street drinking sessions (park up your car, best if it's got huge speakers, play reggaeton and drink calimocho) called botellones. Obviously this is about as true as Britons wearing socks with their sandals or Germans having no sense of humour. Indeed a Spaniard told me the other day it was their preferred drink! Calimocho proper uses the cheapest wine available, think Don Simon cooking wine in cartons, mixed with Coke - Coca Cola that is. Nowadays, on Friday and Saturday evenings, outside supermarkets, what I see are young people pouring vodka into the big bottles of Fanta instead. 

As well as the iced coffee and tea the other, alcohol free, summer drinks are granizado and horchata. Britons often refer to granizado as Slush Puppy but that's a bit like using the word crab to describe the things that were once called crabsticks. There is a vague similarity. Spanish granizado is made by mixing whatever gives the flavour, usually lemon or coffee, with sugar and water and then cooling and stirring the mixture continuously to give flavoured ice with the consistency of wallpaper paste. There is a significant difference to the Slush Puppy type granizado, where the flavour is added, as a syrup, to granulated ice. Granizado tastes of whatever it tastes of to the last morsel whereas, with the syrup versions, you end up sucking on ice pellets. There is a version that you see from time to time, called agua de cebada which is made from an infusion of barley grains (cebada) strained and sweetened. I haven't seen any for ages.

And last, but not least, horchata. Horchata is associated with the Valencian region and particularly with the town of Alboraya. They sell horchata in supermarkets and in bottles in most bars but you should really buy it in a horchateria or horchata shop - sometimes the ice cream shops do horchata too. There the horchata will be home made. The chufas, we Brits call them tiger nuts, are mixed with water, left to soak, crushed and sieved to produce a thick liquid which is then mixed with water and sugar. Again it gets cooled before serving.

I set out to just name a few summer drinks and, as always, the topic has got away from me. I'm trying to stop here but then I remembered that, as well as the hundreds of other drinks available there are two more local offerings that deserve a mention. One is simple grape juice or mosto. The other is Bitter Kas (Kas is a trademark but the drink is always ordered like that) which tastes like Campari without the booze.

Now I'll go.

Do you know what a gallo is?

Humankind has a long relationship with mind altering substances. We chew mushrooms and leaves, we sniff things, we smoke all sorts of vegetation, we (not me you understand but we, humankind) drink snow laced with reindeer urine and, for lots of us there is a close relationship with fermented and distilled alcohol. Around here the most obvious local booze is wine, and the variants on it like vermouth, but there are others. In fact, years ago, I wrote an article about it for the old TIM magazine.

That TIM article was inspired by a visit to the bar in Calle Sol in the Santa Catalina district of Pinoso. We were in Santa Catalina for their fiestas, I had never been in the bar there and, once inside, I realised that every second person in the bar was drinking cantueso. I'd been blissfully unaware of its existence till that moment but it's actually readily available around here. It's fine, not my preferred tipple but, if you like the brandy based drinks like Ponche Caballero, you may like it.

In a similar way this post was prompted by reading a book and a visit. The local book club, based in Pinoso library, chose to read Modorra by Rafael Azuar. The book is set in Salinas. We followed up on the reading of the book by going on a visit to places mentioned in the text. As we stood outside the old posada (posadas are the old inns - if this were Shakespeare they're where we'd have Falstaff drinking flagons of ale, eating mutton, sleeping on paillasses and rubbing shoulders with muleteers) we read out paragraphs which referred to the building. In one section the text mentioned that the inn users were not so keen on Coca Cola and preferred tried and tested drinks like absinthe, wine, carajillo, paloma or gallo. 

I didn't know what gallo was - other than the Spanish word for cockerel. I know that absinthe is the high spirit aniseed flavoured drink, wine I think we all know, carajillo is a spirit laced coffee (usually brandy but you can ask for a splash of anything). Now paloma I happened to know because years ago, when I first arrived in Pinoso and we were doing Spanish classes with Cruz, we went over to Monforte del Cid for some sort of Adult Education get together. Monforte is well known for producing anis. To be honest I've never quite been able to work out the difference between absinthe and anise but the one from Monforte is very much like Pastis or Ouzo or Sambuca or Raki or Aquavit. Generally this sort of aniseedy tasting alcohol is taken with water. The local version turns cloudy white with water, the same colour as a dove and hence, paloma. 

Nobody else in the group knew gallo either. I wondered if it were the lemon flavoured anis. No, that one is called a canario, a canary, again, presumably, for the colour. Wikipedia doesn't know either. I think this is something we could all do, in search of cultural enlightenment you understand. We could go into as many bars as possible and ask for a gallo until we eventually find out what it is. Until we discover what it is we will have no option but to drink something else while we're there.