Sam McPhail has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Four years ago, Madrí didn’t exist. Today, the faux Spanish lager is sold in a quarter of British pubs, which makes it one of the fastest-growing beers of all time. ‘Madrí’ is the historic name for Madrid, which is peculiar for a beer brewed in Tadcaster – or Tada as the Anglo-Saxon mead-drinkers called it.
Madrí has never been brewed in Spain, let alone Madrid. Yet it shares the same sanguine-red label of the real Spanish lagers, such as Estrella Galicia, Mahou (pronounced Mao) and Estrella Damm, which allows it to blend in with them on pub bars and supermarket shelves. ‘People think they are drinking a Spanish beer but it’s not,’ says Aitor de Artaza, international head of Estrella Galicia. He accuses Madrí of ‘lacking transparency’. It’s not an unfair criticism. Madrí’s owners, the Canadian-American brewing giant Molson Coors, claim Spanish heritage from the tiny Toledo-based brewery they own which gave Madrí its ‘inspiration’. That’s it. No recipe, malt or hops.
Madrí isn’t the first premium lager to have captured a large audience of drinkers very quickly. Peroni did the same here two decades ago, even though it is a fairly bog-standard beer – albeit actually brewed in Italy – and served in a comically tall glass. Part of the appeal of European premium lagers is that they are stronger than standards – Madrí is 4.6 per cent ABV and Peroni 5 per cent, whereas Carling and Coors are just 4 per cent.
In truth, all Madrí has going for it is that it’s the latest thing.
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