People are baffled to find out that San Miguel beer isn’t really from Spain, and that its origins actually hail from a country more than 7,000 miles away.
San Miguel is often seen as a swig of sunshine that reminds many of us of sipping away happily on a cerveza while soaking up the rays on a Spanish beach.
Indeed, the head office for Cervezas San Miguel SLU - which is owned by Mahou San Miguel, one of Spain’s largest brewers - is based in Málaga on the Costa del Sol, according to its website.
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But that’s just one part of what is actually a very complex global puzzle.
As with many international brands, the beer is brewed in various places across the world; the stuff you’re usually drinking in the UK is manufactured in Northampton for Carlsberg, which controls the brand over here - which is hardly a taste of the tropics, let’s face it.
Mahou San Miguel says it also has eight ‘beer production facilities’ in Spain and a further two in the USA.
So if the drink has now set roots all over the place, where did it all begin?
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On the label, you’ll notice the beer has been going ‘since 1890’ - at which point it definitely wasn’t being made in Northampton.
The first San Miguel Brewery was actually founded as La Fábrica de Cerveza San Miguel in a neighbourhood called San Miguel in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines.
A local businessman called Enrique María Barretto de Ycaza y Esteban had applied for a royal grant from Spain in 1889 so that he could set up a brewery in the Philippines, which was a Spanish colony at the time.
This means that, while the beer may have had clear Spanish links, its real home is this archipelagic country in South-East Asia.
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It wasn’t until 1914 that San Miguel began to export, and it wasn’t even introduced in Spain until 1946.
The Spanish rights were eventually spun-off by the brewery in 1953 to become an independent business - the one now known as Mahou-San Miguel Group.
Over the past few years, the backstory has proven to a be a bit of a bombshell to beer lovers, with one tweeting: “Just learnt San Miguel is from the Philippines and not Spain. Head's on a wobble now. Reality doesn't make sense anymore.”
Someone else said a couple of years back: “Blows my mind that San Miguel is from the Philippines and not Spain.”
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A third also said: “You really have to question your existence when you realise San Miguel is from the Philippines and not Spain.”
A fourth added: “I have found out tonight that San Miguel is not... I repeat not from Spain... who the hell knew it was from the Philippines?”
How’s that for some pub quiz knowledge?
Topics: Food And Drink, World News, Weird
Jess Hardiman