Glossary · Serving
Culete
Spanish. Kept in its own language here rather than translated into the nearest English word, because the nearest English word is usually cut on a different axis.
Also written culín. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
The measure poured at one time in an Asturian cider house and drunk straight down. The regulating council puts it at not less than 100 millilitres, and six to the bottle.
- Subject
- Serving
- Language
- Spanish
- Also written
- culín
In more detail
The word is a diminutive of culo, the bottom of the glass, and in ordinary Spanish it is not a cider term at all — the dictionary has it as a colloquial word for a splash of any liquid in the bottom of a vessel.
The size is more precisely fixed than English accounts suggest. The Asturian regulating council states that a culete should not be under 100 millilitres and that the ideal bottle yields six of them. The official escanciadores’ championship, which the council half-owns, makes that a rule: six per bottle or disqualification, an optimum of 100 cc, disqualification above 150 or below 50, and a penalty if more than 30 cc is left in the bottle. Descriptions of a culete as “two fingers”, or of a bottle yielding eight or ten, are describing something smaller than the trade’s own standard.
It is poured small because it is meant to be drunk at once, and it is shared: one glass passes round the group.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Serving
Escanciar
The Asturian pour: the bottle held high overhead and the glass low at the hip, so that a thin stream falls a metre or more and breaks on the rim of the tilted glass.
Serving
Espalme
The rapid and complete *disappearance* of the foam raised in the glass by the pour. Not the foam itself — its collapse.
Cider
Sidra natural
Asturian and Basque cider fermented to complete dryness from pure juice, unfiltered, uncarbonated and bottled without added gas or sugar. It is poured from a height to raise a momentary foam.
Culture
Chigre
An Asturian cider bar, where *sidra natural* is poured by the bottle and shared, with a *culete* served at a time and the drip tray running constantly.
Serving
Glassware
The vessel a cider is served in, which changes its aroma and appearance. A tapering glass concentrates volatiles at the nose; a wide, thin-walled Asturian glass is shaped for the long pour instead.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias
Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24
The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.
Servicio Regional de Investigación y Desarrollo Agroalimentario (SERIDA)
Principado de Asturias · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The Asturian regional agri-food research service, and the technical authority behind the Asturian cultivar classification and the analysis of sidra natural. SERIDA’s own site has not been opened; what CiderHQ has read is SERIDA’s varietal characterisation as republished by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias, which credits it explicitly. The Asturian measurements therefore cite the Consejo rather than SERIDA — citing the body that did the work, at a document CiderHQ has not seen, would be exactly the kind of borrowed authority this register exists to prevent.