Drinking
Bulgarians love their own brandy, made of either grapes or plums, and called rakiya. Some foreigners think that it is lethal, but most fall in love with it after the second glass, with everything Bulgarian after the third, and declare themselves Macedonian by birth after the fourth.
It is always taken as an aperitif and goes with salads in spring and summer or preserves in autumn and winter.
N.B. In restaurants, if you order a rakiya you will be given a glass containing 100 milliliters of the stuff. If you want just 50 milliliters, you must specify “edna malka”.
Expensive Bulgarian wine, which sells for more than 10 leva in shops, is surprisingly good. Cheap and mid-range may be plonk.
We prefer red. Some people extol the virtues of Bulgarian whites, but we think that Bulgarian white wine doesn’t complement fish because it takes like it.
Legers are excellent to drinkable, and never too bad. Major brands include Zagorka, Kamenitsa, Astika, and Shumensko. Smaller, but equally good, brands are Burgasko and Pirinsko. Most are now owned by major Western brewers, for example Carlsberg.
A bottle of local larger, including Bulgarian – brewed Beck’s, Stella and Tuborg, will cost between 0,80 and 1.50 leva in the shops.
Some supposedly posh establishments will say they only stock small bottles of beer, not the standard half-liter. Ideologically, we are opposed, especially when we get told that only 33-centilitre beers are sold because “this is the way things are done in the West”. The more prosaic reason is that the smaller bottles are in fact more expensive than the large ones. We treat with suspicion any eatery or café that does not stock a proper bottle of larger.
One type of non-alcoholic drink that you will never get offered because it is considered too mundane, but which we recommend, is boza. It was brought to Bulgaria by the Albanians at the begging of the 20th Century. Ask for boza in small, local patisseries or bakeries selling, banichki, never the glitzy ones. The latter will be offended at your presumption that they’d sell anything so “base”. Another non-alcoholic drink worth trying is Ayran. This simple concoction of yoghurt and water works wonders for a hangover.
