If you walk up to a bar in Pamplona during fiesta week and ask for una cerveza, you will get served. Nobody will correct you. But the person next to you — the local who has been coming to this bar since before you knew San Fermines existed — said una caña. Two words, one small glass, cold draft beer, exactly what you wanted. The difference is not the drink. The difference is whether you know how the system works.
In Pamplona and across northern Spain, beer is ordered by its vessel and size, not by the category of liquid it represents. Una caña is the standard small draft pour. Una cañita is even smaller. A zurito is a quick one-sip stop that barely registers as a glass. A cachi (sometimes spelled katxi, the Basque-influenced version) is the large plastic liter of draft that circulates through the Casco Viejo during fiesta week, recognizable from twenty meters away. None of these words mean “beer.” They mean specific sizes of draft beer, and knowing them changes how you move through the bars, the street tables, and the seven days of San Fermines in a way that no guidebook phrase-list quite communicates.
This article is built on a 2010 Pamplona survey by journalist Miguel Izu published in Diario de Noticias de Navarra — the most thorough documented account of what beer vocabulary actually gets used in the city’s bars — alongside the history of brewing in Navarra, the modern Navarran craft beer scene, and the specific beer traditions of fiesta week. What follows is not a primer on Spanish beer in general. It is the specific vocabulary, history, and culture of drinking beer in Pamplona, during San Fermines, at the bars where locals actually drink.
The Size Ladder: From Zurito to Cachi
Una caña is what you order. But knowing what that actually gets you requires understanding that the caña is one of the most inconsistently poured measurements in Spanish bar culture.
In his 2010 survey of Pamplona bars, Miguel Izu of Diario de Noticias de Navarra found draft pours advertised as cañas ranging from 20 centiliters to 35 centiliters in bars on the same street. A caña in one bar is nearly double what it is in another. This is not error or inconsistency in the pejorative sense; it is the natural outcome of a system that evolved bar by bar rather than from a national standard. What the word caña always reliably communicates is: small draft, cold, served now. The exact volume is the bar’s decision.
Below the caña is the zurito: 10 to 20 centiliters, a very small pour, the format for a quick stop when you are moving between places during fiesta and want something cold before the next bar or the next corner. The cañita is the informal diminutive — a small caña, slightly less than standard, good for pacing across a long afternoon.
Above the caña, the cañón is a Navarran term for a double pour, roughly 40 centiliters. The doble covers similar territory and is more broadly understood across Spain. Both mean: more draft beer than a caña, in a single glass.
For bottles, the vocabulary shifts. A botellín or quinto is a 20-centiliter bottled beer — a fifth of a liter, served cold in its bottle. The tercio or mediana is the standard 33-centiliter bottle. The mediana label is particularly Navarran; in other parts of Spain tercio is the more common term. A litrona is the one-liter bottle, used more for outdoor drinking and larger group situations than for bar service.
And then there is the cachi — or katxi in the Basque-influenced spelling that circulates in Pamplona. This is one liter of draft beer served in a large plastic cup, sold at bars throughout the Casco Viejo during fiesta week. It is the format of San Fermines itself: large enough to last through a street gathering, portable enough to carry while walking, cold enough to stay relevant through a Pamplona July afternoon. The cachi is not elegant. It is exactly what it needs to be.
Beer in Pamplona also gets ordered mixed rather than straight. A clara is the most common version, and it comes with its own local rule: in Navarra it means beer cut with plain gaseosa, not lemon, a distinction that surprises visitors who have had a lemon-mixed clara elsewhere in Spain. The regional naming split behind that rule is its own piece of Pamplona bar vocabulary, separate from the size ladder above.
La Cruz Azul: Pamplona’s Own Brewery
Beer has been made in Pamplona itself. The city is not only a place that imported beer culture from the national brands that consolidated the Spanish market in the mid-twentieth century; it had its own brewery, and that brewery shaped the city’s relationship with draft beer for most of a century.
La Cruz Azul was founded in 1900 by D. Luis Ros. It operated out of Pamplona for 73 years — through the early festivals of San Fermines’ modern era, through two world wars watched from Spanish neutrality, through the years when cold draft beer became a standard feature of Pamplona’s bars rather than a luxury — until it closed in 1973. The closure came during the same era when large national brands (Mahou, San Miguel, Cruzcampo, and others) were consolidating the Spanish beer market and squeezing out smaller regional producers across the country. La Cruz Azul was not unusual in closing; most of Spain’s local and regional breweries disappeared in the same window.
What La Cruz Azul represents is a reminder that Pamplona was not simply a consumer of beer but a producer of it. The cold draft that went into the glasses of San Fermines for the first decades of the twentieth century was, in many cases, Pamplona’s own.
Beer at San Fermines: What the Fiesta Actually Looks Like
The mornings of San Fermines belong to other rituals. The encierro draws the crowd out by 6am; the post-run bars serve coffee and txistorra and, for those who want it, the kaiku y coñac combination that has its own place in the morning culture of fiesta. Beer is not the morning drink.
By mid-morning that changes. The bars of the Casco Viejo open to full pace, the street tables fill, and the caña becomes the primary unit of exchange for most of the day and into the night. During fiesta week, Pamplona’s bars operate at a pace that has no non-fiesta equivalent. A bar that serves 400 people in a normal week serves 400 people before noon on July 8th. The zurito and the caña — small, fast, cold — are the right format for this pace. You drink one, you move, you come back.
The cachi is the fiesta’s specific contribution to beer culture. Bars along the main streets of the Casco Viejo sell liters of draft in plastic cups throughout fiesta week. The format is practical: it travels, it lasts, it does not require a table. Fiesta is street culture, and the cachi is street beer.
Peñas — the social clubs whose members fill the communal tables that dominate the streets of neighborhoods like Navarrería and San Nicolás — bring their own drinks to their gatherings, and those drinks tend toward the communal and the prepared: zurracapote, kalimotxo, wine. But the peña world coexists with the bar world, and the transition from one to the other across a fiesta day is smooth. You finish the communal bowl and you stop at the bar for a caña. This is how San Fermines actually works.
Navarran Craft Beer: A Scene Built Around the Fiesta
Navarra’s craft beer movement is real and growing. Several producers have established themselves with regional distribution and a clear Navarran identity.
Naparbier is the most established of the Navarran craft breweries, with a range that spans styles and distribution beyond the region. Named for Navarra itself (Napar being the Basque root of the region’s name), it is the easiest Navarran craft to find in Pamplona’s specialty bars.
Saltus and Sesma Brewing (named for the Navarran town of Sesma) represent the smaller-scale end of the scene: focused on the local market, available in a more limited number of venues, but part of the infrastructure of a growing craft culture in the region. Brew and Roll operates from Pamplona itself, bringing craft production directly into the city.
And then there is Morlaco Beer, whose origin story is the most specifically San Fermines of any brewery in the region. The founders were at San Fermines 2011 when they conceived the idea. Morlaco is a Navarran and Spanish word for a large, physically impressive bull — the kind that commands attention on sight. The name is the brewery’s way of putting its origin inside the fiesta without leaning on it as a marketing gimmick. A brewery that was born during the week Pamplona turns itself inside out, named for a word that means something everyone at San Fermines understands. The beer exists because the fiesta exists.
Guinness Monday at Cervecería Baztán
One of the persistent small surprises of San Fermines for visitors who expect only lager and kalimotxo is that an Irish pub has become a genuine fixture in Pamplona’s fiesta social calendar.
Cervecería Baztán opened on December 12, 2015, at Calle Nueva 125 in the Casco Viejo, run by Leti and Patxi. It has become sufficiently embedded in Pamplona’s life that it has been covered by Diario de Noticias de Navarra, Navarra Televisión, and Diario de Navarra — not as a novelty but as a neighborhood institution. Its trivia nights draw people from across the city; its Irish music sessions and rugby broadcasts fill the calendar.
During San Fermines, Cervecería Baztán is the site of an informal tradition: Guinness Monday, which happens on Monday evenings around 5pm during fiesta week. In the 2026 fiesta (July 6 through 14), there are two Mondays and therefore two Guinness Mondays: July 6 and July 13. Both around 5pm. Both at Calle Nueva 125.
Guinness in Pamplona, at 5pm on a Monday, in July, during San Fermines. This is the kind of thing that happens to a city that has been hosting the world for seven days every summer for generations. The culture absorbs what arrives, if what arrives is worth keeping. An Irish pub on Calle Nueva, apparently, was.
FAQ
What is a caña in Pamplona?
A caña is a small glass of draft beer — the standard unit of beer ordering in Pamplona and across northern Spain. The size varies by bar, typically ranging from 20 to 35 centiliters, but the word reliably means: cold draft beer, served now, in a small glass. You order una caña at the bar, not una cerveza. The latter is technically correct but marks the speaker as someone unfamiliar with how Spanish bars actually work.
What sizes of beer can you get at San Fermines?
The full range runs from the zurito (a 10–20 cl quick pour, often a stop-and-go drink), through the caña (standard small draft), the cañita (smaller than a standard caña), the doble or cañón (a double pour, around 40 cl), and up to the cachi or katxi — a one-liter plastic cup of draft beer sold at bars throughout the Casco Viejo during fiesta week. Bottles run from botellín/quinto (20 cl) to mediana/tercio (33 cl) to litrona (1 liter). The cachi is the format most specific to San Fermines itself.
Is there local Navarran beer available in Pamplona?
Yes. Navarra has a growing craft beer scene. The most established name is Naparbier, available in specialty bars across the region. Other producers include Saltus, Sesma Brewing, Brew and Roll (Pamplona-based), and Morlaco Beer, which was founded during San Fermines 2011 — its name comes from a Navarran word for a large, physically impressive bull. Pamplona also had its own brewery for most of the twentieth century: La Cruz Azul, founded in 1900 by D. Luis Ros and operating until 1973.
Is there a good bar to drink beer during San Fermines in Pamplona?
Beyond the hundreds of bars in the Casco Viejo that operate at full pace during fiesta week, one worth noting is Cervecería Baztán at Calle Nueva 125 — an Irish pub that has become a genuine Pamplona institution since opening in 2015. During San Fermines, Monday evenings around 5pm bring an informal Guinness Monday tradition to the bar. In the 2026 fiesta, that means July 6 and July 13.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.