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How to drink cider in Asturias without getting it wrong
Asturian sidra natural is not the cider an English or French speaker expects. It is still rather than fizzy, cloudy, sharp, low in alcohol, and made from local apple varieties grown for acidity rather than sweetness. It is also drunk according to a procedure, and the procedure is not ceremony for visitors — it is how the drink works. The pour is the first part. Sidra natural is flat in the bottle, so it is escanciada: poured from a height of half a metre or more into a wide glass held low, so the stream breaks and aerates on impact. That aeration creates a brief head and changes the taste substantially, and it lasts perhaps fifteen seconds — which is why you drink the culín in one go and why drinking it politely and slowly is the one thing that marks you out. Skilled pourers do it without looking; there are competitions, and in many sidrerías a machine now does it. The second part is what you throw away. You are poured an inch, not a glassful, and you do not drink all of it: the last mouthful, which has caught the sediment and any cider that has sat in the glass, goes on the floor or into a trough. Bars are built for this — sawdust, drains, a certain smell — and not throwing it away is considered odd rather than polite. The third part is the sharing. In a group, one glass goes round: the pourer fills it, hands it to one person, who drinks and returns it, and it is refilled for the next. This is normal and not negotiable, and declining to share is the closest thing to a social error available here. La espicha is the same thing at a larger scale — a party, often in spring, where cider is drawn straight from the barrel and eaten with tortilla, chorizo and cheese standing up. One note on the wider region. Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country are cider and cheese country, and Asturias in particular has a food culture that surprises people who came for the Camino: cabrales blue cheese, fabada bean stew, and the Picos de Europa behind it. If Galicia is the wet corner, Asturias is the green vertical one — and nobody there will talk to you about heat.