The long pour

A stream of cider falling a metre arrives at the glass at roughly four and a half metres per second. When it strikes the inner wall of a thin, wide glass it spreads into a rapidly moving film and shatters into droplets, and both processes multiply the liquid surface exposed to air by a very large factor for a fraction of a second. That is the whole mechanism, and everything else follows from it.

Three things happen at that moment. Dissolved carbon dioxide, which in a naturally fermented sidra natural is present at low concentration rather than at the pressure of a sparkling cider, is knocked out of solution and forms a short-lived head — the espalme or aguja. Oxygen is dissolved into the cider. And a substantial quantity of volatile aroma is thrown into the air, which is why a sidrería smells strongly of cider.

The carbon dioxide is what the drinker feels. A cider that would be flat in the glass acquires a brief prickle on the tongue and a lifted texture. Because the gas was never at high pressure, there is not much of it, and once released it is gone.

The oxygen is what the drinker tastes, indirectly and briefly. Aeration lifts volatile aroma and can slightly moderate the perception of harsh acidity and of reductive, sulphurous notes in a young cider. The same oxygen, given hours rather than seconds, would begin to damage the cider; over the life of a culín it does not.

The escanciador holds the bottle overhead at arm’s length in one hand and the glass low in the other, tilted so that the stream strikes the inner wall rather than the base. The stream is aimed at the upper part of the glass wall, not into the body of the liquid, because it is the impact against the glass that breaks the stream up.

Only a shallow measure is poured — conventionally two fingers or so, a fraction of the glass. This is not restraint for its own sake: it is the volume that can be drunk before the effect disappears. The pour is deliberately imperfect, and some cider is spilt; in a sidrería the floor is built for it, with sawdust or a drain, and the spillage is a structural expectation rather than an accident.

The last mouthful is customarily not drunk, and is thrown out onto the floor or into a trough before the glass is passed on. Two reasons are given in the tradition: it rinses the glass, which is shared, and it discards the portion that has picked up sediment from the bottom of the glass.

Mechanical escanciadores exist and are used in some settings. They deliver a controlled stream from a fixed height and produce the same physical effect. They are treated in Asturias as a practical convenience rather than as the traditional form, and their acceptability is a live question rather than a settled one.

The technique suits the drink it grew up with. Sidra natural is dry, high in acidity, unfiltered, and carries only the small quantity of dissolved gas that a natural fermentation leaves behind. It is a cider with a great deal of character and comparatively little texture, and the pour supplies texture for as long as it takes to drink a mouthful.

Applying the same treatment to a sparkling cider achieves nothing useful and wastes most of the gas: a cider that is already carbonated does not need carbon dioxide knocked out of it. Applying it to a delicate, aromatic keeved cidre discards the aroma the keeving process was performed to keep.

The Basque version differs from the Asturian in details rather than in physics. In a Basque sagardotegi the cider more often comes from the kupela — the barrel — through a spigot opened at the call of txotx, with the glass held below the jet rather than beneath a raised bottle. The stream still falls, still breaks up, and does the same thing.

The technique is straightforward to attempt and difficult to do well, and the failure modes are spilling most of the bottle and hitting the base of the glass rather than the wall. A practical compromise is a lower pour into a wide glass held at a steep angle, which produces some of the same effect with a fraction of the mess.

It is worth being clear that what the pour delivers is small and short-lived. It is a real physical effect on a specific kind of cider, not a transformation. A sidra natural poured conventionally is the same cider, slightly less lively, and entirely drinkable.

For any cider with visible sediment, the long pour has a side effect that works against it: the bottle is tipped hard and fast, which will rouse a deposit that a careful pour would leave behind.