San Miguel Pale Pilsen: The Spanish Beer from Manila

It also came with a glass, so the hat did not get to stay on for long.

Since 1890

The brewery opened in 1890 in Manila, in a district called San Miguel, under a royal grant from the King of Spain. The Philippines was a Spanish colony then. The king himself was not yet five years old, and his mother ruled as regent, so the grant was presumably not his own idea.

The first address was No. 6, Calzada de Malacañang, a street named after Malacañang, the residence of the Spanish governor-general. Malacañang is now the presidential palace. The beer has had a respectable address from the start.

From Manila, San Miguel went looking for drinkers around Asia, and by the late 1940s it had a brewery in Hong Kong. Europe came later. In the 1950s, the Manila company let a new Spanish firm use the name there, and in 1957, in Lleida, that firm brewed its first San Miguel. The two have long been separate companies.

So the Spanish San Miguel really is Spanish. It is just sixty-seven years younger than the one from Manila.

The small print

Read closely, the label is a fair amount of geography for one bottle. The name is Spanish. Pilsen is the German name for Plzeň, the Czech town where pale golden lager was first brewed in the nineteenth century. The lettering looks as if it came from an old German beer hall. And PHILIPPINES is where all of it was bottled.

On the left of the label sits a small red crest. On my bottle, it was too small and too curved for my camera to make anything of. It comes from the arms that Philip II of Spain granted to the city of Manila in 1596: a golden castle above and, below it, a creature that is half lion and half dolphin, holding a sword. The city still has a sea-lion on its seal, though a redrawn one. Manila had a merlion more than three and a half centuries before Singapore, and it lent one to a beer.

As for the beer itself: Pale Pilsen is a pilsner-style lager at 5 percent. It was easy to drink, and I liked it. Two nights later, in my room upstairs, I would open a lemon-flavoured San Miguel to go with a bag of chicharon from Carcar. This one tasted of beer.

Before the beer

The beer was not the first thing I photographed that evening.

KAI is the lobby restaurant of the Lex Hotel Cebu, where I was staying: grey upholstered chairs, white tables, pink napkins, blue glasses and clusters of round bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Most of the tables were empty.

I had my camera with me, and the staff noticed it. They came over and asked me to take their picture. Three of them lined up beside a glass display case, the one at the back resting his hands on the shoulders of the two in front, and all three smiled straight into the lens.

In Japanese there is a word for what I felt just then: moe, a sudden affection for something endearing, normally reserved for anime characters. It does not usually apply to three grown men in matching uniforms. It did that evening.

A late bite

Later, I wanted a little something before bed, and ordered fish and chips.

What arrived was two large pieces of fried fish laid across a long white plate, a wire basket of fries lined with paper, and two sauces. It was very good. It was also enormous. My idea of a little something and the kitchen’s turned out to differ by about one piece of fish.

I finished it anyway.