in preparation

One thing the craft beer explosion has done is reawaken interest in older, traditional beer styles.  Some of the first US craft breweries got their start producing those, capitalizing on a sense of nostalgia, or fauxstalgia, in the public.  Spanish beer is not immune to that.  El Aguila was once the biggest brewery in Madrid, and in fact in Spain, producing almost a quarter of all the beer in the country.  That was about 100 years ago.  Later, they got bought up by Heineken, lost momentum, and ceased production in the '90s.  Then, a couple years ago, somebody thought it would be a good idea to start up the label again.  And they are appealing to tradition, insisting on the consumer being aware of the first years of production; this one is 1900, for example.  The bottle has a bit of a city map of Madrid from 1900 on the neck, with the first El Aguila brewery marked on it.  Nothing else, though.  I'm told by people who were told by former employees that the beer made now isn't quite the same as what they were making in the 20th century, but memories can be tricky, and recipes can be tweaked.  Let's see if it's worth a trip down somebody else's memory lane.

May be a traditional beer, but sure looks like a modern logo

It's on the lighter side of gold, but good head.  It's one of the sweeter smelling lagers, a little bit grainy, but with a very natural and appetizing feeling in the nose.  The flavor is an interesting mix of bitter and sweet, alternating between the two as the beer slides towards the throat.  It's not a thin and inconspicuous beer, although I wouldn't go so far as to call it heavy.  It has a nice mouthfeel, with the sweetness giving it maybe the illusion of more weight than it really has.  There isn't much aftertaste, although there is a little feeling of something hanging around at the back of the mouth.  It's not a bad beer, it gives the impression of a more "nutritious" sort of beverage, one that would sustain workers over long days in the factory.  Of course, that wasn't the marketing fashion in Spain as it was in other places, but they were trying to mimic the beer, so it would have had the same effect, more or less.