For the first time on this trip, which is two months old today, I'm returning to a place that I visited in 2017. Arriving here was a lucky bit of timing, because the crest of the second Covid wave has resulted in border closures between Spain's various comunidades, and so skipping from city to city has been taken off the menu for a while. If I'm going to be trapped anywhere, I might as well be trapped here.
Madrid doesn't really have any big tourist attractions along the lines of the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. And indeed right now it doesn't have any tourists. Just the locals, and me. The streets aren't empty but they're a long way from jam-packed and everything is very manageable. It's tasteless to say it, but global pandemics do sometimes have their benefits.
On a couple of occasions I've ventured out, duly masked & sanitised, to sample a bit of Madrid nightlife. It's a pleasant surprise how affordable the drinks are, although this has much to do with the fact that beer taxes here are literally less than a tenth of what they are in the UK. And the city centre is quite compact, meaning that it's just about possible to incorporate all the good districts into one big walk, punctuated at agreeable intervals with food & drink as required. You certainly couldn't do that in London. There's the snot-nosed upmarket area (Salamanca), the bohemian gay district (Chueca), the slightly dodgy immigrant quarter (Lavapiés), and so on...
I've spent quite a few euros in the local bottle shops in order to give Spanish craft beer a fair hearing. Some of it was pretty good, but most of it was average, and none of it was great. I think there are two main obstacles holding the industry back. One is that the demand just isn't there. In the UK & USA, the first thing that beer nerds like me do upon walking into a bar - any bar - is to scan the casks and kegs and see if there's anything unfamiliar worth trying. In Spain, of course, most people don't even walk into the bar at all. They just sit outside and wait to be given a choice between cheap mass-market keg beer and modestly expensive mass-market keg beer.
Which leads me to the second obstacle. In the UK & USA, the craft beer surge was an unexpected phenomenon that caught the global brewing giants unawares. (The industry is much more concentrated than you might think: Budweiser, Becks, Stella, Corona, Boddingtons, Staropramen...all one firm. Amstel, Sol, Tiger, Heineken, Fosters, Moretti...ditto.) The big Spanish brewers have seen what's happened elsewhere, and they're making damn sure it doesn't happen here, using clever marketing and cosy supermarket deals to push their faux-craft 'premium' brands and prevent the Spanish craft brewers from making any real inroads. I just can't see a Spanish Brewdog appearing any time soon.
Fortunately the best British and American craft beers are available in Madrid, if you know where to look. I drank a few in my apartment while watching England's miserable defeat against Belgium last night. Football on TV is the only football available to me...I very much regret that I can't go along to the Bernabeu or the Metropolitano to see Real or Atlético do their thing. Indeed right now I'd even settle for Getafe or Leganés, both of whom are just about within walking distance. But maybe it's just as well for my readers that I won't have the opportunity to bore you with football as well as with beer. I'll try to think of something more exciting for my next blog.
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| Gran Via, seen from the rooftop terrace of the Circulo de Bellas Artes |
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| Cibeles fountain, towards sunset |
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| Ópera. This area is where I stayed last time, in 2017. |
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| Paseo de la Castellana, closed for the Vuelta (Spain's equivalent of the Tour de France). I couldn't be bothered to wait for the riders to come round. |
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| Edd vs Food #91 Chicken burrito at Cherry Pecas ('pecas' means 'freckles') Drink included for scale - that's a pint glass. |
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| Madrid apartment. Bit poky, due to being very central, but it'll do. |
