The windmills of Mallorca number in the thousands. They punctuate inland stretches of red earth and olive trees, some 400 years old, some 200; some jaunty with their slow-spinning blades, some collapsed into ruin. In Manacor, the 18th-century windmill that Neus Llopis Mas and Miquel Gelabert found was dilapidated and decapitated, its bricks smeared with black mold and scum, each cavity filled with rubble.
Though they show me the first photos they took of the site as proof, the evidence is hard to square with the building in its current state of gleaming, whitewashed polish. After several years of punishing renovation, Llopis Mas and Gelabert opened Brusca Brewpub within the windmill in the summer of 2021. Today, sculptures from local artists fill its cavities, and its taproom opens onto a courtyard ringed by balconies whose drying bed sheets float ghostly in the small breeze.
There are just 10 breweries in Mallorca, Llopis Mas and Gelabert say, and they must work with what they have. For Brusca’s founders, that means sourcing what they can locally, using the grapes grown by Gelabert’s family to make Italian-style Grape Ales. It also meant transforming a 45-foot-deep cellar adjacent to the windmill into cold storage. When they found it, it was full of water and effluent, a waist-high layer of muck with an unimaginable stench. Now, it smells as coolly aquatic as an overgrown pond, and horizontal tanks of Helles slumber where floodwaters once sloshed in the dark.
Sure, the bartenders need to bolt down its spiral staircase every time they need to change a keg. Sure, too much rain still brings the threat of inundation. But out of almost nothing, there is presence now; in every crevice whispers from 300 years of time.
