Txotx

The word refers to the small stick or peg used to stop the tapping hole in a barrel. Calling txotx announces that a barrel is about to be opened, and it functions as a summons: people at the tables stand, take their glasses and go to the vessel.

The pour is brief and horizontal. The tap releases a thin stream that arcs out from the barrel; the drinker holds the glass low and tilted so that the stream strikes the inside wall of the glass rather than falling straight into the liquid. As with the Asturian long pour, the point of the impact is mechanical — it breaks up the stream and releases dissolved gas and aroma from a cider that carries very little carbonation of its own.

The amount taken is small, on the order of a couple of fingers, and it is drunk immediately. Then the drinker moves aside for the next person, and when the queue is done the tap is closed. The cycle repeats through the evening, at different barrels, at intervals set by whoever is running the room.

The rules are practical in origin and are enforced socially rather than formally. Take only what you will drink at once, because cider held in a glass loses the effervescence the pour just gave it and because the barrel is shared. Do not fill the glass: a full glass at a txotx marks the drinker as not knowing what is going on. Drink standing at the barrel and return to the table rather than carrying cider back.

Whoever opens the tap has an obligation to it. The tap is not left running unattended, and the person holding it stays until the flow is stopped or another person takes over. Spillage on the floor is expected and is not the concern; an unattended barrel is.

Glasses are individual rather than shared, which is the clearest difference from the Asturian format. The Basque glass is a straight, relatively narrow tumbler rather than the wide thin Asturian vaso, since the Basque pour arrives horizontally rather than falling a metre from above.

The season conventionally opens in the second half of January and runs to the end of April, with local variation at both ends. The dates are not arbitrary. Cider pressed in October and fermented over the winter reaches a drinkable state early in the new year, and the traditional window closes when the cider is taken for bottling and the barrels are needed. The season is therefore defined by the fermentation calendar, not by a festival date.

Its commercial origin is equally specific. This was the period in which buyers came to taste and commit to barrels for the year, with the meal provided as part of the transaction. Everything now understood as the format — the fixed menu, the movement between vessels, the comparison of one barrel with another — is a preserved trading procedure.

The season has real economic weight in Gipuzkoa, drawing substantial numbers of people to a small number of villages over three months, with the attendant effects on transport, employment and local planning. Those effects are documented and are part of what the institution now is. CiderHQ notes them as a description of a regional phenomenon and does not present the season as an occasion for the reader.

The custom has been modified by its own success. Where houses receive large numbers, txotx calls may be scheduled rather than spontaneous, taps may be opened on a rota, and some establishments have installed pouring points fed from tanks rather than opening the barrels themselves. Practitioners disagree about how much of this is compatible with the custom; the disagreement is genuine and is not settled by asserting that one version is authentic.

The fixed-price unmetered format has attracted public-health commentary, since it separates the amount consumed from the amount paid. This is a real and documented criticism of the institution, and a description of the sagardotegi that omits it is incomplete. It sits alongside the equally documented fact that the format is built around small measures taken at intervals, which is a different consumption pattern from continuous drinking at a table.

The season has also been extended in some establishments beyond its traditional window, and cider is served in sagardotegi premises outside it in bottled form. Where that happens, the barrel-side pour is being reproduced rather than performed, and the distinction is worth keeping.