Kitchen Secrets with Our Cuban Chef – Malta and the Cuban Soda Shelf

Most Cuban restaurants keep a cooler near the register, and what is in it tells you as much about the place as the menu does. The same four Cuban sodas turn up again and again: malta, Materva, Ironbeer and Jupiña. None of them tastes like anything on a standard soda fountain, and none of them is trying to.

Malta is the strange one. It starts the way beer starts, with barley malt and hops, but it is never fermented, so there is no alcohol in the bottle and a good deal of sugar instead. It pours black and holds a tan head for a few seconds. People who grew up with it drink it very cold alongside fried food. People meeting it for the first time usually take one sip and decide on the spot.

This is a guide to what sits on that shelf, what each bottle actually tastes like, and what to eat with it.

How the Cuban soda shelf came together

Cuba had a soft drink industry of its own long before the middle of the last century. Havana bottlers made flavours you could not buy anywhere else, and the brands advertised hard, on painted walls and enamel signs, the way beer brands did. Ironbeer goes back to that period. The name belongs to an era when soft drinks borrowed the language of tonics. There is no beer in the bottle and there never was.

When the island’s industry was nationalised at the start of the 1960s, the families who had run the plants left. Materva, Ironbeer and Jupiña were rebuilt in South Florida by people who had bottled them at home, with the labels kept close to the originals. That is why these drinks belong as much to Cuban Tampa and Cuban Miami as they do to Havana. They travelled with the people who drank them.

Malta is the outlier, because it did not start in the Caribbean at all. Non-alcoholic malt drinks came out of northern European brewing, where they were sold as something strengthening rather than something refreshing. Breweries carried the style into the tropics and the Caribbean took to it. Malta is drunk in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama and most of the coast in between. The Cuban name most people abroad still reach for is Hatuey, a brand whose owners left after the nationalisations and went on making it outside the island.

What malta actually tastes like

Dark bread crust, molasses, raisin, a little caramel. It is sweet, heavier in the mouth than a cola, and lightly carbonated, so it does not sting. Underneath the sugar runs a thin line of hop bitterness that keeps the whole thing from reading as syrup. If you like the smell of a bakery early in the morning, malta is already half familiar.

Temperature decides everything. Malta wants to be cold enough that the bottle sweats within seconds of leaving the cooler. Warm, the sweetness sits on the tongue and stays there. Chill the bottle rather than pouring it over ice, because ice thins it out and flattens the little carbonation it has.

The other way to drink it is with condensed milk. Two or three spoonfuls in the bottom of a tall glass, the malta poured slowly down the inside wall, then a long stir. It turns the colour of dark caramel and drinks almost like a dessert. This is standard across the Caribbean, and it is what a lot of households make for a child who will not touch it straight. A cold bottle of malta is on the menu here; the condensed milk is something to do at home.

Materva, the mate soda

Materva is made with yerba mate, the South American herb that is normally steeped and drunk hot through a metal straw. Nobody expects to find it in a Cuban bottle, but there it is, and it has been there for generations.

It pours pale gold. The first thing you taste is sweetness, then something green and grassy behind it, closer to hay or apple skin than to citrus. It finishes clean, with a touch of the same dryness you get from ginger ale. Of the four it is the most useful next to heavy food, because it clears fat off the palate instead of adding weight to it.

Ironbeer and Jupiña

Ironbeer looks like a cola and does not taste like one. It is darker in flavour, spiced rather than sharp, with cinnamon and something like clove sitting behind the vanilla. There is less acid bite than in a cola, which makes it rounder and, for a lot of people, closer to a cream soda. It is the bottle to reach for with roast pork or ham.

Jupiña is pineapple, and the name says so: jugo de piña, run together. It is bright gold, very sweet, and it smells like the juice at the bottom of a can of pineapple. It is the one children order without looking at the rest of the cooler, and it works against anything fried. A cold Jupiña alongside a plate of croquettes works for a plain reason: the sugar resets your mouth between bites of salt and fat.

Chef’s notes

• Malta has to be properly cold, straight from the cooler and not off a shelf. Pour it into a chilled glass rather than over ice, or you water down the little carbonation it has.
• Do not decide about malta on one sip taken on its own. It reads as pure sugar until you eat something salty and fried with it, and then it makes sense. Take a bite first, then drink.
• Malta foams hard with condensed milk. Put the milk in the glass first and pour slowly down the inside wall, or you will lose half of it over the rim.
• All four are sweet and the bottles are not small. One with a meal is right. Two is a lot of sugar in one sitting, and the usual Cuban answer to that is a small strong coffee afterwards, not a second soda.

What to drink with what

Malta belongs with salty fried food and with garlic: croquettes, pork rinds, a plate of roast pork with rice and beans. The sweetness works the way sweet tea works in the American South, as a counterweight rather than a match. Ironbeer is the pork drink, good with pork shoulder, ham and anything cured or roasted, and it holds its own against a hot pressed Cuban sandwich. Materva goes with the heaviest plates on the table, breaded steak or fried yuca, because it cuts instead of piling on. Jupiña goes with everything fried, and with whatever a child is eating.

There is also a rhythm to when each one comes out. Malta is an afternoon drink in a lot of homes, taken standing in the kitchen between lunch and dinner, when nobody wants a full meal but everybody wants something. Materva and Ironbeer come out with a full plate. And whatever was on the table during the meal, the meal still ends with café cubano, small and sweet, which is a subject of its own.

Pick one on your next order

Malta is on the menu here at 5555 S 78th St in Tampa, and a bottle can go into a pickup order along with the food. If you have never had one, order it with something fried and give it a fair chance. If you already know it, you already know how cold you want it. The full menu is online, drinks included, for pickup and catering.