In 1935, a group of Valencians founded Cervezas El Turia in the Cruz Cubierta neighborhood. The Civil War and the postwar period paralyzed the project until, in 1947, the factory began to produce and market a Valencian beer. In the following decades it became a mark of the local imagination, with the Torres de Serranos as an emblem. The support of the capital of the Catalan brand Damm, owned by Demetrio Carceller Segura, was essential for this impulse.

The creator of this business saga, which currently constitutes one of the great fortunes of Spain, was Minister of Industry and Commerce in the second Franco government, between 1940 and 1945.. Carceller Segura accompanied the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Serrano Suñer, to Berlin to negotiate the sale of Spanish tungsten to the Nazi army. With him he became one of the richest men in the country. His dismissal, like that of other Germanophile Falangist positions, coincided with a cosmetic purge before the imminent allied victory.

Every three months, a council of former employees of Cervezas El Turia meets for lunch at the Granada bar, located in the San Marcelino neighborhood. The legendary rocker Emilio Solo (Benimàmet, 1953) started working as a delivery man in 1973. His father, Enrique Palomares, inaugurated a staff at the end of the 1940s that numbered around 500 employees at its peak.. “The company's first master brewer was Máximo Schnabel, a Swiss chemist who prepared the Märzenbier-style recipe”, says the musician: “According to my father, this man came to Valencia with his family and lived in a house, equipped with Bavarian style, inside the factory. When the truckload of barley arrived, he would go up to the container, chew it and, after spitting it out, decide whether it went to the warehouse or was discarded.”.

This local brewery was a relevant economic engine for the Valencian economy in the 50s and 60s. It was in this last decade when we found the antecedent of music marketing policies to attract young customers.. A concert poster for Raimon, Els 4Z and Los Supersons, the first group of a young Luis Manuel Ferri, before he was Nino Bravo, at the Alcira in 1964, shows Stark Turia's sponsorship of the Valencian Modern Music Festivals.

With the oil crisis, in the second half of the seventies, the accounts began to suffer. The first employment regulations arrived. “There was a capital increase that the Valencian business community did not cover, Damm bought its part from its Valencian partners and sent a CEO from Barcelona,” recalls Solo, then union delegate of the General Union of Workers. At the same time, he says that “they expanded their facilities in Catalonia and made a strong investment there”. They “continued to have benefits”, although they acknowledge the margin was not the same as in previous years. They never showed the accounts to the union economists. Since the early eighties, the employer's move was to close the Valencia factory and compensate the employees for the dismissals.”.

The closure of the factory was consummated in 1996. In 2013, the Catalan brewery recovered the Torres de Serranos logo in a new Turia, manufactured in Murcia, with distribution headquarters in Ribarroja, and which, through a commercial identity strategy of recovering Valencian symbols, has been introduced in various regional festivals and premises of the Valencian Community.

For 15 years, Spain has experienced an open war between beer companies for sponsoring festivals and concerts. According to the data from the report published last Monday by Cerveceros de España and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, our country is the second largest producer in the European Union, behind Germany, as well as the second most consuming, only surpassed by Czech Republic, according to data from the World Health Organization. The vast majority of beer consumed is nationally produced: Mahou-San Miguel, which last week acquired the Mad Cool festival in Madrid, is the first producer with 12.81 million hectoliters, followed by Grupo Damm with 11.34 million..

The music journalist Nando Cruz (Barcelona, 1968) has recently written Macrofestivales: the black hole of music. A meticulous study where he analyzes the practices of the sector. “The battle between Mahou-San Miguel and Damm began in Catalonia some fifteen years ago. Not only at festivals, but also at major festivals and concert halls”, analyzes. The Madrid brewery “ended up retiring due to Damm's unbeatable force in the territory”. Beer consumption at festivals multiplies the national daily average by seven, explains Cruz, so “it is a favorable enclave for these companies since they not only position their brand, but also sell their product and prevent all their competition from doing so”. Not only that. “The marketing departments are clear that after the bars, musical events are the right space to invest”, he concludes.

Music is a strategic axis for the business growth of breweries, which have sometimes even paid to rename festivals. The Benicàssim International Festival was a pioneer, in 2001, in including Heineken in the official name of the event. Between 2003 and 2009, Damm placed his mark on Primavera Sound, which in 2010 was renamed San Miguel Primavera Sound for three years.. “A 30-liter barrel of industrial beer can cost between 60 and 90 euros. If a festival has an exclusive and sponsorship contract with a brewery, it can get discounts of around 40-50%, which means that it will be paying a little more than one euro per liter”, Cruz indicates in his book.

So far in 2023, it is difficult to find a price lower than 6 euros for a 33-cl glass at a national macro-festival, while waiters charge around 8 euros gross per hour worked. What is a manual win win for the festival business and the beer industry seems not to be so much for its workers and the consumer.