The Asturian sidrería

A sidrería is designed around the fact that pouring cider from a height spills some of it. The floor is hard, often tiled or covered with sawdust, and slopes or drains toward a channel; a trough or drain runs at the foot of the bar to receive what is thrown away. Tables are close together and much of the drinking is done standing. Very little of this arrangement is decorative — it is what the service method requires.

Cider is stored and served from the bottle at cellar temperature rather than chilled hard, because sidra natural is a still, low-carbonation, unfiltered drink whose aroma closes down when it is cold. Bottles are opened as they are needed and are not expected to be kept once opened, since the pour is the only thing supplying gas and the cider goes flat quickly.

The commercial unit is the bottle, not the drink. A group buys bottles, and the bottles are poured out among the group over time. This makes the sidrería structurally communal in a way that a bar selling individual glasses is not: there is no ordering of separate drinks, and the group shares both the cider and, in the traditional form, the glass.

In the traditional service one glass circulates. The pourer holds the bottle above the head and the glass low, and delivers a small measure — a culín or culete, a couple of fingers in the bottom of a wide thin glass. The glass is handed to one person, who drinks it in a single draught, then throws the last mouthful onto the floor or into the trough. That discarded remainder rinses the rim, and the glass passes to the next pour.

The etiquette around this is precise and is more about the group than about the cider. You drink your culín immediately rather than holding it; you do not sip it; you do not fill the glass yourself when someone is pouring for the table; you take your turn in sequence. A pourer serving a table is performing a role, and in many establishments it is a member of staff whose job that is.

Modern practice has diverged in two directions. Individual glasses have become common, particularly where hygiene expectations or tourism have altered the format, and mechanical pourers — devices that deliver the same falling stream from a fixed height — are now installed in many establishments, which removes the skill component without changing the physics. Both are widely used and both are contested by people who regard the hand pour as constitutive of the institution.

The food repertoire in a sidrería is settled rather than inventive, and it is built to be eaten standing and shared. Salt cod, tortilla, cured meats, Cabrales and other Asturian cheeses, and chorizo cooked in cider are the recurring items. Cider is used in the cooking as well as poured alongside it, which reflects a domestic tradition rather than a restaurant convention.

The espicha is a related but distinct event. It is the tapping of a cask, held at a llagar, at which the new cider is drawn straight from the vessel and served with standing food set out on boards. Historically this was how a producer showed the year’s cider to buyers and neighbours; it has since become a hosted format in its own right, and the word is now used for gatherings held on those lines whether or not a cask is actually being broached for the first time.

This distinction between the tasting event at the production site and the year-round urban establishment is the same one that structures Basque cider culture, and the two traditions are close neighbours geographically. They diverged in significant ways, particularly in the vessel served from and in the seasonality of the format.

Asturian cider carries a protected designation covering sidra natural, which sets requirements on permitted varieties and on production. The designation regulates the drink rather than the establishment: nothing prevents a sidrería from selling cider that falls outside the designation, and much cider poured in Asturias is not designated.

The relationship between the regulatory framework and the social institution is therefore indirect but real. A protected designation attached to a still, unfiltered, high-acid cider made from named Asturian varieties preserves the product on which the whole service format depends. A shift toward filtered, carbonated cider would make the pour pointless, because there would be nothing for it to do.