Brazilian beer German style

Rodrigo Amaral visits the Eisenbahn Brewery, a craft brewery on a mission to change Brazilian beer culture

Your typical beer aficionado in Brazil will teach you that there are only two kinds of beer: “stupidly” cold, and hot. If you happen to take a Brazilian drinker to an English pub and order him or her an honest bitter at room temperature, they won’t hide their displeasure: of course the landlord is not versed on the science of serving beer. In Brazil everybody knows that the greatest skill a bar owner can display is the ability to keep state-of-the-art fridges that maintain beer bottles at temperatures below 0ºC without turning them into ice.

A similar reasoning applies to waiters. A top-notch practitioner of the trade bringing beer to a table will hold the bottle by the cap with only two fingers of one hand, while a finger of the other hand makes smooth, round movements at the bottom, in a doubtful, but widely spread technique to prevent it from freezing.

As both the Portuguese nouns for beer (cerveja) and bottle (garrafa) are feminine words, (Brazilians usually refer to beer as an “ice-cold blondie”), the reader can imagine that misogynist jokes are de rigueur in this situation.

So teaching Brazilians about good beer will always be a tall order. But that is exactly the mission embraced by Eisenbahn, a craft brewery in the south of the country which has been gaining ground among a growing number of enthusiasts who understand that beer is much more than the best refreshment in the world. In a land dominated by powerful brands of pilsen that are beyond bland, the company has.....

To read the rest of this article you can buy this issue or subscribe to Beers of the World to have every issue delivered direct to your door.

By Rodrigo Amaral

Section : International Brewery

Page number : 36