Beer Travels with Adrian Tierney-Jones

It’s a long way from Mechelen to Malaga but I’m happy with my glass of Het Anker’s Charles V Rouge Rubis as I sit at the counter in El Rincón Del Cervecero, a compact bar/bottle shop in the up-and-coming Malaga neighbourhood of Soho (or has it already arrived?).

It’s bittersweet in its approach to the palate, rich and resoundingly complete in its malt profile with a crisp dryness in the finish keeping out the wolves of over-sweetness. Around me couples and friends sit at tables chatting with enthusiasm about the beers in front of them or maybe plans for the weekend are discussed with gusto. Others stand, necks craned, surveying the draft beer list on the digital screen or hover around the fridges, eager to quench thirsts and make choices that will determine how they remember their night (too much of the 8.5% Rubis though and little will be recalled of the night).

I was last in Malaga 10 years ago, on assignment for a travel feature for the Sunday Times Travel Magazine (one of two magazines I wrote for that didn’t survive the pandemic, the other was Imbibe). In between visiting museums, exploring the noisy, bustling Atarazanas market and hauling myself up to the sombre former fortress of Gibralfaro, I went on the hunt what we then called, without any irony, craft beer.

I stumbled on Cervecería Arte&Sana, which designated itself as a craft beer café and was situated in the middle of the old town. This is where I planted myself every evening after my work was done and enjoyed Dougall’s 942 Pale Ale as well as Thornbridge’s St Petersburg (remember that?). At the time I pondered on whether craft beer bars were the Irish bars of the future? I could have been right.

Now, Malaga seems to have a surfeit of bars selling beer from indie breweries, both from around Europe and Spain. El Rincón not only stocked beer from Het Anker, Budvar and Erdinger (its UrWeisse, the only one of the brewery’s beers I like), but also local beers including a couple from the bar’s own cuckoo brewery.

I had already dived into a large glass of its Helles Exportbier, Gloria Bendita, a full-bodied malt-flecked, bittersweet thirst quencher, while I raised my hands in supplication when drinking its other beer on sale CyberHops A.I. 1.0. This was a ravenously refreshing DIPA that blasted the senses with a full-on display of papaya, mango and fruit salad, a clarity of fruitiness that whooped with joy as it approached the bittersweet dryness in the finish. It was an astounding beer with an assertive stance of aroma and flavour that was inspirational in its quality. As I left I asked the owner if he was open tomorrow. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘we have to brew.’ Which seemed as good a reason as any to make beer on the Sabbath.

Not being a god-fearing man or a brewery, I went to the Central Bar on the Sunday, where the soundtrack was of music that I wouldn’t listen to at home though it seemed to fit a mood that dovetailed with this afternoon sense of tranquility. Here the universal language of post-industrial interiors was very much in evidence with bare brick walls (possibly fake), ducts hanging from the ceiling, which seemed to have no use other than to be decorative, and yet another digital draft beer list up on a screen at the back of the bar.

Fifteen beers featured, including several Belgian ones and a couple of locals, as well as one that featured the dread words, ‘stout, pastry’. However, I went for Weinhenstephaner’s gorgeous Weizenbock Vitus, a study of banana and cloves on steroids and a work of art in the glass. Later on, with my son I enjoyed more classic beer in a beach bar that featured Paulaner’s Salvator on draft, which was the only consolation to watching Arsenal’s miserable capitulation to Brighton.

Yet, in spite of this ability to enjoy great independently brewed beer in Malaga there is also a joy in glasses of industrial lagers, and I especially fell like a wolf on the fold with the Cruzcampo Especial at La Fabrica. This was clean and full-bodied, with a lightness that belied its 5.7%. In fact, I drunk several glasses of this as I wrote this column and found it an ideal companion to the contemplation that beer all too often settles upon my soul.

Adrian Tierney-Jones