Exploring San Minguel Selecta
This article will take you 1 minutes 55 seconds to read – written by Enzo Lauretta
Try to imagine a dinner with a great chef from a very special tavern in Madrid Retiro, a unique menu, an impressive location and a lovely blonde girl serving your favourite beer every time you sip the last drop.
It’s a true story that San Miguel made happen last week, organizing a dinner inside the Museo del Ferrocarril, discovering why the Selecta is the greatest beer.
I drank lots of different beers in my life, from several countries, but I do believe that you don’t need to be a beer specialist to understand and taste the difference of the San Miguel ingredients compared to all the other beers on the market.
And after that which was already an incredible once in a lifetime experience I also had the chance to meet David with a tiny group of friends on the occasion of a degustation of San Miguel Selecta in a very characteristic bar of Las Letras, called Kaixo.
I discovered that San Miguel comes from Manila, Philippines, which is a city I love and I have been to 4 times. It really surprised me.
And I learn a lot during these two events, because the only way to learn is to explore, to be in the front row enjoying the experience with all the senses.
Johann, who was our storyteller at the Exploratorium dinner, all his talk along the dinner was focused on the tastes (sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, umami or savoriness) and how Chef José Luis Martínez from Taberna y Media has developed the menu of the dinner in order to match the Selecta tastes with his premium quality food.
After a talk with Chef José Luis Martínez I understood why San Miguel has chosen him. First of all for his passion, it really seems to me that I was full of joy when talking about the preparation of his creations, second because he’s an explorer so that this melting’ pot of different countries, tastes, ingredients and culture was crucial point of the dinner, mixing and matching top quality food with the exclusivity of San Miguel Selecta.
I mean it is not just a matter of matching food with beer, all the courses were cooked or marinated with San Miguel Selecta.
And you know you is a great fan of the beer foam for cooking?
Ferran Adria, one of the most famous chef in the world, a revolutionary man for the cuisine and restaurant world s widely credited with starting the trend of foam on food, always preferring beer or sparkling wines to the still once.
First Course
Fattened hen chicken pickled with foie and ras el hanout.
Roasted scallops with confit artichokes from Tudela.
Second Course
Roasted beef cheek and venezuelan cocoa.
Dessert
Chocolate mousse with gianduia.
With David few days after all the attention was on San Miguel Selecta, the history of San Miguel, the development of Selecta, taking into consideration all the ingredients with a five senses approach, from the hearing to the taste, analysing the smell of hops and of more complex tastes like chocolate, galleta and cinnamon.
We admired the color of the beer with the sight, and did a three tasting phases analysis on how different they were one between each other.
It was a blast. Stop thinking about everything else and just turn on the focus on what we were drinking and the sensations that we felt.
You can only reach excellence with knowledge and what’s better than exploring for accumulating more and more knowledge. This is the spirit and the vision of the Exploratorium project that we had the chance to live twice, first with the “mesa nomada” inside the Museo del Ferrocarril and than with the cata viajera at Kaixo in Las Letras.
There are lots of “mesas nomadas” you can participate, unfortunately not in Madrid, but that’s that’s an explorer challenge, to move forward.
