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This beer has history: the label says “since 1890”, so San Miguel have had over a century to get the beer right. But there is more to the past than a date, as two years ago in the floods that destroyed a lot of rural Pakistan, my Filipino colleague and I spent a long deployment together discussing our first beer once we left the country. We agreed that we would one day meet to drink a San Miguel in the Philippines, and finally we did it last month.
In 5: Wet, Icy, Cold, Damp, Fizzy
The one I drank that night was in a can. I’m not sure Brewskie will even post a review of a beer that is drunk out of a can (Mr Brewskie is becoming a purist)? In my defence I’ve drunk a lot of bottles the past fortnight too. Still the beer tastes good, and we’re served it with a glass full of ice cubes which appears to be local custom and I assume aims to keep it cold. You can taste the fruit of the hops going in, though it is well controlled so that it is clean with a pleasantly sweet after taste. Equally, the gas is just right providing a sufficiently robust fizz to back up the strength of the flavour. The pale colour is sufficiently golden and keeps its head to keep me sipping, which I’m encouraged to do by the ice cubes which I think are melting and diluting the contents of the glass. I remember my colleague explaining to me how he used to buy a 24 pack with his friends on a weekend and spend all afternoon drinking all the cans and I can understand why. He’s paid the price however and is drinking “San Miguel Lite” which together with the ice cubes looks like it tastes of nothing. There are another two types of San Miguel behind the bar so it is definitely the most popular drink in the country, 95% market share I read somewhere…
The food in this part of the country is a lot of fried or barbecued pork and fish so we keep on drinking, the saltiness is refreshed by a new can. It occurs to me that the ice cubes could be a way of counteracting the dehydration effect in the tropics, but the morning afterwards the beer passes the hangover test too. Like most foreign beers, it is a pilsener with limited scope for doing something special: San Miguel just does it well. If only they wouldn’t serve it with ice cubes…
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Much like a Glaswegian on a night out who’s had a Drop too much and is giving you a Volley of abuse, this beer Smashes you in the chops from the off.
It’s not often we try a lager and something stands out so much that we think, wow, this is truly great stuff. It’s sweet, fizzy and a real mouthful of joy that would taste as good on a boiling hot day as a cold, dreary winter evening. A lovely foamy head stays throughout and it’s hard to believe that a lager can be so full bodied and bold, but refined and refreshing in equal measures. It oozes quality and it really makes you wonder why it isn’t lining the shelves of the pubs and bars of the UK in place of some of the other tripe.
Everywhere you go in Malta you will see signs for Cisk, outside bars and cafés, on billboards and on umbrellas and verandas. There is no doubting it is the Maltese beer of choice for both locals and tourists alike. Generally speaking the beer you have on holiday will often taste nicer on holiday, and when you get home you go back to your regular tipples. This is not true with Cisk, although we’ve never seen it stocked in the UK the little supply we brought back with us taste just as good this side of the Mediterranean, especially as a curry chaser (lamb tikka jalfrezi if you must know)…
So what’s black lager all about? It’s not like the mildy irritating pop band Blue, who aren’t blue, or the lesbian fantasy Pink, who clearly isn’t pink; it’s proper black, like the night. In fact, it’s darker than the night, it’s like the night in the middle of the desert and someone turned off the moon and the stars.
