Private enterprise has vastly increased the number of places to drink, and all town centres now have a healthy sprinkling of kiosks serving coffee, soft drinks and basic snack food, usually with plastic chairs and tables on the adjoining pavement. Some of them serve beer, vodka, and other strong drinks, and stay open well after nightfall, but for the most part they're a daytime, fairweather phenomenon. A more traditional venue is the sladkarnitsa, a Bulgarian version of the Central European cafe, many of which serve cakes as well as alcohol.

Evening drinking tends to take place in restaurants (where it's quite common for tables to be monopolized by drinkers rather than diners), or in the vast number of bars operating under the generic title of kafe-aperitiv. Some are no more than a converted garage or basement room, though many of them - in Sofia, Plovdiv and along the coast in particular - compare favourably with anything found in the average Western European town. Here you can get the full range of domestic alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as imported spirits and canned beers, and all kinds of cocktails in the flashier places.

Coffee can be excellent or vile, so it pays to look before ordering. If they've got a machine behind the counter, you can order a kafe espresso or a kapuchino with reasonable confidence and maybe feel emboldened to ask if they also do turska (Turkish coffee) or Viensko kafe (Viennese coffee), which comes with a dollop of ice cream on top. If not, you risk getting a revolting brew from some kind of instant coffee under the generic title of neskafe, or nes. Coffee is often drunk in tandem with a glass of juice (sok), usually a pretty artificial cocktail of citrus fruits - naturalen sok (natural fruit Juice from a bottle or packet) or fresh (freshly squeezed juice) usually costs more. Delicious domestically produced fruit juices (nektar, or fruktovi sok) are sometimes sold bottled in supermarkets and food shops, but rarely appear in cafes or bars. Tea (chay) is available in most cafes; specify cheren chay or black tea unless you want some herbal concoction.

Other bezalkoholni (non-alcoholic) choices include gazirana voda (gaseous mineral water), or international beverages such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, Fanta and Sprite.

Bulgarian wine
From having an insular wine industry before World War II, Bulgaria has muscled its way into the forefront of the world's export market, specializing in robust red wines of basic but solid quality. Tried and tested grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot have been planted in different regions (such as Pomorie, Haskovo, Asenovgrad or Suhindol), under whose name they're sold with phenomenal success abroad. Inside Bulgaria there's a greater variety and more differentiation between the various blended wines, all of which cost less than 2 euro a bottle in supermarkets and mehanas.

Among the reds are full-bodied Cabernet; heavier, mellower Melnik and Gamza; rich, dark Mavrud; and the smooth, strawberry-flavoured Haskovski Merlot. Sweet Pamid, first grown by the Thracians and verging on rose, is blended with Mavrud to produce Trakiya, or with Melnik wine to make Pirin, while Madara is obtained from concentrated Gamza and Dimyat grapes (a similar mix is used for the more acidic Tarnovo). Asenovgradski Mavrud and the red Muscatel Slavyanska are both dessert wines,

The sweeter whites are preferable to Dimyat unless you like your wine very dry. Of these, Karlovski and Rilski Misket (Muscatels) and Tamyanka are widely available, but the golden-coloured Evksinograd is much harder to find. Of the dry whites, Traminer Han Krum is the one to look for, while Preslav is a decent rose.

In wine-growing areas, many tavernas and restaurants offer home-made wine (domashno vino), often straight from the cask (nalivno). There is never a problem ordering by the glass (chasha).

Spirits
Native spirits are highly potent and cost little more than 4 euro a bottle. They are drunk diluted with water in the case of mastika (like ouzo in Greece or raki in Turkey), or downed in one, Balkan-style, in the form of rakiya, or brandy. Slivova rakiya is made from plums, Kaisieva rakiya from apricots, and grozdova from grapes - Pomorska rakiya is the best example of the latter. Rakiya is always accompanied by a soft drink and a salad or appetizer. Vodka is also widely drunk: domestic brands like Tsarevets are the cheapest, although Russian and Scandinavian brands are widely available. Imported whisky is cheaper than in the West, but much of it is counterfeit (mente). Buy it from the bigger outlets, and avoid stuff sold by the smaller kiosks and street traders. In bars and restaurants spirits are sold by the gramme. Pedeset grama (50g or 5cl) is roughly equivalent to a British double measure, sto grama (10cl) a quadruple. You'll see plenty of men downing sto grama at 11am, or even earlier, although Bulgarians maintain that they're not such heavy drinkers as the Russians.

Beer
Bulgarian beer (bira) is pretty unexciting but perfectly drinkable. The most popular brands are Zagorka from Stara Zagora, Astika from Haskovo and Kamenitza from Plovdiv, all of which are lager-type beers. While Pirin, brewed in Blagoevgrad and available in the southwest, and Plevensko Pivo from the northern town of Pleven, also have a following, true drinkers sniff at Ariana from Sofia. A 50cl bottle of regular Kamenitza, Astika or Zagorka rarely costs more than 0.75 euro in a bar or restaurant, while the slightly stronger, 33cl "export" bottles will set you back about 1 euro. Imported German, Austrian, Czech or Danish beers are also widely available, at about twice the price. An increasingly number of bars offer draft beer (nalivna bira) as well as bottled - either Bulgarian or an imported brand.