If you buy non-returnable bottles, you can be 99% sure they will just end up in a landfill or on the side of a road. The drinking age is the age of adulthood: 18. Buying Beer in Mexicoīeer is widely available in stores, bars, and restaurants in Mexico, with few of the silly restrictions you find north of the border. from the big boys, while the good ones are really great. Even the average brands are better than the mass-market yellow fizzy water you get in the U.S. Thankfully, the Mexican producers haven’t taken the easy way out and just produced a line of bland, indistinguishable beers. The first is owned by Heineken and the second is owned by InBev (who also owns Budweiser). Otherwise, just two powerful companies tightly control the entire beer market: Cuauhtémoc-Moctezuma Brewery and Grupo Modelo.
Things are looking up for those who want to go beyond the mass-market brands.Įmbajador at the Guanajuato craft brew festival. Guanajuato, a city of 300,000, hosted its first craft brew festival in mid-2014 and I was able to taste offerings from Irupuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Queretaro, and other cities besides my own. You’ll have an easy time of this in the big cities, an impossible time of it in small towns-for now. You have to seek them out at bars and restaurants with taste or at a specialty beer store. You can now find a staggering variety of pale ales, stouts, wheat beers, and more obscure offerings throughout the country, though rarely in a convenience store or supermarket. The Microbrew scene has improved drastically since I wrote the first version of this article in 2009. Left behind were recipes for darker beers, the precursors to Negra Modelo, Bohemia Obscura, and Dos Equis Amber today. In a footnote of Mexican history, the Austrian emperor Maximilian ruled much of the country for a brief four years. Some Mexican brands have surprisingly long histories of a century or more, thanks to German and Swiss brewers that established companies in the 1800s. Early inhabitants of the region made a variety of fermented drinks from the agave cactus and corn, but Europeans introduced beer from the homeland as they arrived. Mexico is an exception to the rule, with a long history of quality beer at good prices, with a wide array of choices. One or two brands usually dominate the market and they generally present minor variations on a similar taste profile. In most Latin America countries, the beer is a letdown. The Guide to Cerveza in Mexico Best and Worst Mexican Beerįour bottles out of the rich variety of Mexican beers. Pilsner beers are best complemented in a tall, slender and tapered glass such as the classic Pilsner glass.Volunteer Abroad Intern Abroad Study Abroad High School Language It has a rich taste with an added spicy tone and noticeable bitterness. It is pale with a straw color which is not dark or heavy just like the other ales. The new recipe uses light barley, which was partially malted, water, starch source, lager yeast and portions of fragrant Saaz hops, which offsets the malt’s sweetness. This process was called “lagering,” a method of brewing taught by Josef Groll, a Bavarian brewer that they hired.
They decided to take drastic measure by brewing beer in the Bavarian style, a process of aging beer through cool fermentation and storing it for several weeks at temperatures close to freezing point. In 1838, brewers showed dissatisfaction by pouring whole barrels of beer into the street since they became undrinkable. Since ales were prone to spoilage either by yeast or bacteria, the process faced contamination issues that were hard to contend with. It resulted in varying standards of quality.
This process fermented the ale-type beers at high temperatures for a relatively shorter period of time. In the mid-1840s, Bohemia beers commonly underwent top fermentation. It has quite an interesting story as to how it was developed. It originated in Pilsen, a city in Czech Republic (formerly known as Bohemia).
It is a type of pale lager that has a pale-to-golden hue with a varying degree of noble hops bitterness. Pilsner, also known as “pilsener” or simply “pils,” is considered to be the most popular beer in the world.