Cold and colder

One of life's greatest pleasures is going to exotic beer shops and browsing for strange and intriguing beers. Today's pair came from no further abroad than Melger's of Haarlem where both made me want to know what they tasted like as soon as I saw them. They don't have anything else in common, other than having been brewed in the Netherlands.

Cold Gold is ostensibly from the Habesha brewery in Ethiopia, but that's a subsidiary of Swinkels and this version comes from one of their Dutch facilities. It is indeed gold: perfectly clear and sparkly, though the head doesn't last long. It's a full 5% ABV and nicely weighty with it; a lager of quality, not a cheaply made one, and considerably better than Swinkels's own buttery flagship pils. The malt is very much to the fore, smooth and rich, like a posh treacle-infused brown bread. The hops aren't quite as high-end, just a tangy metallic bitterness, providing sufficient balance but not much more than that. That echoes in the finish and helps make quite a heavy beer remarkably drinkable. I'm guessing this is mostly intended for ethnic-themed restaurants and it does indeed have the chops to match food well. A pleasant surprise all round.

Icebock isn't always a great choice, but I see so few of them that new ones are always of interest, especially when they're not at eye-watering artisanal prices. Gulpener is one of the bigger Dutch breweries and this is the 2023 vintage of Gulpener IJsbock. It seems a little weaker than the norm at 10.3% ABV -- Schneider's is the full 12% for example -- but it looks the part: a deep mahogany brown colour. The aroma is a warming wintery cocoa with hints of cherry liqueur and vanilla pods, which is very enticing. All of that is in the flavour too, though it's rather more severe. The vanilla ramps up to an almost sickly level, backed by gooey milk chocolate and caramel. Huge alcohol vapours accentuate all this even further, adding a hit of marker pen solvent. The gentler fruit I found in the aroma is nowhere to be seen, only brown banana for a different, but no better, type of gooeyness. You would know that this was a strong beer rendered even stronger, and the process seems to have concentrated its bad side while removing the good. Doubtless it's intended to be a slow sipper but they've achieved that by making it difficult to drink. There's no fun to be had here, only sadness and toil.

In conclusion, the exotic beer shelves is a land of contrasts.

Ask if it's glass

The UK beer media doesn't talk much about the Premium Bottled Ale category. To an outsider, it can seem like it doesn't exist any more, but small British breweries are still turning out beers in half litre bottles, and they always seem to end up at gatherings of my family. No cartoon cans here. Today's selection came from my festive break in rural Shropshire, though were suitcased in from various corners of the country.

Stone Daisy is based in Wiltshire, and Park Bottom is an IPA of 4.5% ABV, though they don't give us any further information than that. It's traditional style, of course, being a pale shade of amber with a fine white froth, the bottle pour doing a good impression of cask conditioning. There's a lemon juice tartness in the aroma, a little too severe and vinegar-like for my liking, with a twist of curdled milk for extra nastiness. Thankfully, the flavour is softer, thanks mainly, I think, to a high level of unfermented sugar, giving it an overall sweetness and full body. That tastes of jammy strawberry, sticky Lucozade and stickier Liquorice Allsorts. It's an odd set of impressions, and while it works, it's not the beer for me. There's a lingering acidity in the taste that's slightly gastric, or aspirin-esque, and that detracts from anything good or wholesome going on. The best I can say is that it's a very grown-up tasting beer, even if the label is rather childish.

Sourced more locally was Three Tuns Fezziwig, which I guess is intended as a companion piece to the brewery's Old Scrooge winter ale. This one is 4.8% ABV and copper coloured. It smells nicely floral, with more than a suggestion of honey sweetness. The flavour veers in that direction, opening on red lemonade and heavy caramel. Before it can get difficult, however, it's dried out by tea-like tannins, adding a gently leafy bitterness. That lasts long into the finish, the tea effect getting stronger and more concentrated. All told it's a bit of a bruiser, which is especially surprising given the modest strength. I don't think that it's otherwise Christmassy, though perhaps we should be glad they weren't tempted to bung novelty ingredients in. That doesn't seem to be the Three Tuns way, thankfully.

To Wales next, and Powys brewery Monty's. Gwyn a Du ("White and Black") is a 4% ABV stout, hopped with Styrian Dragons, not Welsh ones. It's bottle conditioned, so the off-white head was stained slightly browner in places with yeast dregs as it poured -- rarely a problem with stout. Much has been blathered in the beer discourse recently, especially in the UK, about possible replacements for Guinness when it's in short supply. I've never really understood the question, because Guinness's attraction is all about the brand and not the beer, but I can see where they're coming from here. This is light and toasty, just like the mainstream Irish brands, but it also has a tang of bitterness that resembles the one in Guinness. There's some properly stoutish dark chocolate and then a savoury herbal kick, mixing dried basil and oregano with more oily rosemary. Behind this, a subtler floral or medicinal note, of lavender and aniseed, something you don't get in any industrial stout. The whole is a combination that works incredibly well, resulting in something with profound complexity but which is still easy-going and thirst-quenching. There's even a certain creaminess to the texture, for those sufficiently lacking in taste and imagination to think that creaminess somehow makes a beer good.

Staying with Monty's, premium of the premiumest is Monty's Imperial Stout, a straight-up affair with no added silliness; 9% ABV and properly black. The density of colour follows through to the mouthfeel, which is nicely weighty and chewy. The flavour is sweet to begin with, with vanilla and milk chocolate, suggesting almost a milk stout vibe. Rather than going full pastry, it develops into a more serious herbal bitterness, not dissimilar to the previous one. I got cola nut and rosemary in particular. The chocolate makes a comeback in the finish and provides and long dessertish aftertaste. This is a very traditional sort of imperial stout, with a simplicity and elegance that the modern-day ratings chasers rarely manage. If you enjoyed the late-lamented Courage archetype, here's a reasonable substitute.

There was a token bit of cask to be had down at The Bridges, a pub which was once a showcase for Three Tuns but now seems to have been divested and, although there was a decent selection of local beers, only one from Three Tuns: Best. It's nearly a brown bitter but isn't quite sweet enough or brown enough. There's a decent dose of dry burnt caramel, while the appearance is a wholesome bright amber. A very English tang of metallic hops finishes things off. It tastes every inch the flagship bitter: straightforward, no-nonsense drinkability; no gimmicks or hard edges, but far from boring. I only had time for one quick one, though I would have been perfectly happy with a second or third pint of the same.

And there was one tick for me at the Birmingham airport Wetherspoon: Sambrooks Pumphouse, a pale ale. There's a mix of English and New Zealand hops, but mostly English, and so it tastes like a very straight-up English golden bitter. It's predominantly dry, without much of a foretaste or a finish, while the middle is raspy zinc and nettles, a bitterness that veers towards acridity but stays on the right side of it. The two best features are an aroma of floral honey, which it would have been nice to taste, and a soft texture, making it very easy drinking without being thin or watery. The whopping 4.2% ABV probably helps with that. It's plainer fare than I would have thought from Sambrooks, but when everything else on the handles is Greene King core range or Doom Bar, it will absolutely do. 

Traditional ales are very much still a thing in Britain. It's slightly odd that I don't read more about what's available.

Two lost gauchos

When I visited Argentina in 2011, I encountered the Patagonia beers, brewed by AB InBev as their arty premium brand.  A lot has changed in beer since then, but Patagonia is still going, and largely unchanged, with the flagship Bohemian Pilsner and Amber Lager. They can also be found in Brazil, brewed locally, and there are a couple of additions to the range.

I thought Patagonia Weisse was rather off-style for a weissbier, coming in a 355ml bottle, only 4.2% ABV and, most damning of all, having zero head retention. If I had paid better attention to the label I would have seen that it's actually a Belgian-style witbier. It works much better as one of those, even if it's still a little light. There's a proper pale yellow haze and a decent body, although it's somewhat lacking in fizz. I couldn't detect either the coriander or orange peel which I'm assured are in here, but instead there's a bright and fresh zesty lemon kick, flashing briefly in the foretaste, then fading away, leaving a very slight peppery spice. As a warm-day refresher, it does its job competently, and I'm happy with that.

How would they fare with an IPA, however? Here's a style where technically competent brewing will only take you so far. Patagonia IPA is 5.8% ABV and an attractive clear amber colour. It's very much aiming at the west coast, from both the appearance and an aroma mixing caramel malt with resinous American hops. The flavour is less bitter than the aroma suggested, presenting floral perfume notes instead of oily pine. The malt sweetness is still there, although the mouthfeel is thinner than the ABV led me to expect. Like its shelfmates, this is decent and workmanlike, though I will say it does have a certain amount of individual character and isn't just a basic big-brewery take on IPA. A lighter touch on filtration and pasteurisation would assist it, but I'm sure that was never an option.

That felt a bit like catching up with an old friend. There's something heartening about Patagonia beer remaining untouched by trends or market forces after all these years. If I lived on their patch I would happily have them as regular fridge fillers.

For the sake of completion

Among the supermarket beers I encountered in São Paulo were three from the Prius contract brand. The selling point here, which may or may not be unique, is their use of sake yeast for fermentation, hence the pseudo-Japanese branding, and the name, Ginjo, which is the highest grade of sake.

I started with Sour Ginjo, a sour ale of 3.9% ABV and including lime and yuzu: seemingly perfect for a warm and humid December afternoon. It's a pale yellow and smells like a citrus soft drink: sharply acidic but with big heaping helpings of sugar as well. The flavour continues this lemonade vibe. It's pleasant, but quite un-beer-like. For one thing, the sour side of the picture is missing. It's light and zesty, in the way sour beer tends to be, but it's not actually sour. The overly sweet citric syrup is inelegant, and gives it a cheapness I wasn't expecting from the quite classy branding. More than an exotic take on fruited sour beer, this is a kind of super-strength radler. Adjust your expectations accordingly in the event you're about to open one.

I'm glad I opened the second one, Brut Ginjo, by the kitchen sink. because it gushed like fury. This one is amber coloured and rather stronger at 6.5% ABV. As well as sake yeast, they've used Japanese hops, although they don't say which ones. We'll assume Sorachi Ace, shall we? It smells pithy, which bears that out, and the flavour has a lot of orange going on as well. That's set on a dry cracker crispness, which fulfils the brut part of the promise, but everything pretty much ends there, with only a faint smear of marmalade as the aftertaste. Although it is quite heavy, it doesn't really use the alcohol heft to deliver any extra taste. I found myself getting bored of it quite quickly. It's a bit flabby and messy overall, where I expected something sharper and cleaner. I don't really get what this is trying to be, nor whether it has succeeded.

Weiss Ginjo, finally, behaved itself impeccably on opening. It's a little light for a weissbier, at only 4.5% ABV. There's not much haze either, the lovely sunset golden colour being almost completely see-through. The aroma brings us back on track, with some attractive clove notes and a general fruitiness. That becomes more specific in the flavour, dominated by a sweet pear note, strong enough to veer into the chemical end of things, rather than actual pears. It's not unpleasant, but it is very intense. A modest sprinkle of clove or nutmeg spicing finishes it off. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that you can't make an authentic-tasting weissbier using sake yeast. Yeast is the principal reason the Bavarian ones taste how they do. This isn't bad, however, and offers a not-dissimilar experience of soft wheat and refreshing fizz: a kind of parallel-universe weissbier.

The Pruis range also has a Kölsch and, obviously, an IPA, though Carrefour Brazil deigns not to stock them. Completion will have to wait.

Big box retail

São Paulo has excellent supermarkets, in the giant French style, though with more tropical fruit than I've ever seen stacked anywhere. The beer selection tends to be mixed, and naturally is dominated by the multinationals, namely AB InBev and Heineken, including their locally brewed versions of European brands (Spaten is everywhere) and the pseudo-craft cash-ins.

I opened my account with Antarctica Cerveja Original from the local minimarket, chosen solely for the delightfully retro branding. A 269ml can cost the princely sum of about €0.60. Though it's very pale, it's a full 5% ABV and has a decent malt heft, giving it a chewy texture and white-bread flavour. The romance is short-lived. There's very little else going on here, and no proper hops to speak of. When it warms, and on a summer's day in Brazil it does that very quickly, there's a growing higher-alcohol heat, almost to solvent level. I can see why they chose such a small portion size. For something very basic from AB InBev's Brazilian arm, it's still better than I thought it was going to be. It's not terrible, and that's good enough to be going on with.

Heineken's answer, apart from the plentiful amount of its flagship pilsner, is Eisenbahn Pilsen. If there was a shortage of hops in the previous one, there's a downright famine here. The predominant flavour is concentrated dry malt extract or, to those not as familiar with shortcut homebrew recipes as I am, the inside of Maltesers. There is a little bit of Saaz-y grass in the aroma, but no more that you'd find in, say, Heineken itself, and none of that in the taste. It gets a bit sickly quite quickly, in a way that a 4.8% ABV pils shouldn't. And while I'm getting the digs in, the head retention is non-existent too. AB InBev wins this particular Battle of the Bastards.

But we stick with Sweet Lady H for another Eisenbahn: Session IPA. These aren't usually as amber as this, and the flavour is once again heavily malt-laden, though more like toffee and treacle than pure extract. The hops are layered on to this but don't really integrate with it. There's a sharply acidic bitterness up front, fading to a gentler lemon rind effect. The aftertaste, too, has this concentrated, Jif Lemon citrus, and none of it's subtle. It is helped by a little tannic dryness, which softens the blow from the hops and prevents the crystal malt side from turning cloying or sticky. It's still very much an industrial brewery's idea of a session IPA. There's a lack of freshness and zing, suggesting that it has been thoroughly pasteurised and rendered stable enough for ambient supermarket shelves in a tropical country. I don't know much about the brand's history, or whether it was ever truly independent, but I get a real sense of post-takeover Goose Island from this: trying to give the focus groups what they want, but missing the human element in doing it.

AB InBev's Brazilian flagship is, of course, Brahma, a beer which is brewed and available far beyond Brazil. Locally, there's also a variant called Brahma Duplo Malte, in its distinctive maroon can. Despite the name, it's actually slightly weaker than standard Brahma, the name referencing the use of Pilsner and Munich malt, rather than whatever floor sweepings the other one has for fermentables. It's your standard pale gold of a macro lager and has a tinny hop-extract aroma. There is a decent heft to the texture, almost syrupy, but there's almost no flavour, only a very plain cream cracker or water biscuit crispness. This is as inoffensive as they come. I guess they can validly claim it's a showcase for lager made from malt, but then, that should really be every lager.

That's the multinationals, but independents, large and small, also get a bit of a look-in at the supermarket.

Praya is a Rio-based beer brand, though appears to come from a contracted production brewery in São Paulo. There's a longneck lager and a witbier but the flagship is the "Receita Clássica", a blonde ale of 5.3% ABV. It's fairly basic stuff, lightly fruity from the warm fermentation, with notes of dried banana. This is set on a dry cereal base and is fully fizzed up, giving it a decent amount of crispness, by contrast. That's about your lot, however: there are no further esters, making it more English-style than Belgian, and while it has points in common with lager, it doesn't quite have the same refreshing cleanness. I'm guessing it's brewed to order to be bland, more about the retro branding than the liquid inside.

The custom bottle and gilded label suggested to me that the makers of Cidade Imperial Helles have a bit of money behind them. It's pretty standard for the spec: 5.2% ABV and a wholesome clear golden colour with decent head retention. The aroma is spot-on too, all fluffy white bread and subtle honey. And the flavour is clean, almost to the point of absence, with just a hint of crusty loaf and a very mild leafy green hop contribution. A big and smooth mouthfeel is what keeps it from seeming bland. While I never tried the version of Spaten that's presumably brewed locally, this beer has a lot in common with the Bavarian original, in a good way: Helles done precisely correctly.

What I guess is the brewery's flagship is Imperio Lager, sold by the 355ml in a green glass bottle. It's 4.7% ABV  and a convincing clone of the likes of Corona, being bland and inoffensive when served exceedingly cold. I was in need of refreshment when I opened it, and it did the job perfectly during its very short active life. There's a bit of breadiness and bit of corniness, and a suggestion that if you allow it get anywhere above icebox temperature it will give you very unwelcome solvent and vegetal notes. Don't do that. While it's far from being a quality lager, I will give it points for not tasting even slightly skunked. Kudos to whatever chemicals they've used instead of hops here.

There were a few beers available from the Black Princess range, mostly Germanic styles, produced by Cervejaria Petrópolis, up Rio way. I chose Tião Bock to represent them. I wasn't sure what they meant when they said bock, but it's definitely not a purely German sense since the recipe includes rapadura, a jaggery-like unrefined sugar. Reinheitsge-nope. It's 6.5% ABV and a beautiful shade of clear bronze. The aroma is very much that of an authentic medium-dark bock, with honeyed malt in the ascendant plus a savoury seam of wilted spinach and lightly steamed broccoli beneath. The hops lose out a bit in the taste, and I'm blaming the exotic sugar for tilting the balance heavily in favour of sweetness. What was runny honey in the aroma becomes sticky toffee in the flavour. A low level of carbonation is no help when it comes to offsetting the sweet side, though the clean lager base is of considerable assistance. The end result is a pleasantly sippable dessert beer, caramel flavoured yet not cloying. It may not be exactly how the Germans would make such a thing, but I think they would find the end result tastes familiar, and good.

Let's get some hops up in here. Brazil's fondness for bespoke can sizes continues with Aura by Hocus Pocus, also of Rio. It's a session IPA, though a whopping 5% ABV. They say it's hazy too, and it is, but only just: a nearly-clear pale yellow. The aroma is sweetly citric, like lemon curd or posset, and the texture is much lighter than I thought it would be, given the strength and the murk. The flavour is subtle, and maybe that's where the sessionability comes in: nothing about it builds or becomes difficult, and I could absolutely have consumed several in a row. There's a lightly pithy bitterness, and more tropical topnotes of mango, pineapple and passionfruit, making it the most typically Brazilian-tasting beer I'd encountered by that point. They like their hops fruity at Hocus Pocus. Only a faint echo of all that lasts into the aftertaste, making it moreish and, again, sessionable. While I've tasted many a beer among similar lines in other places, after all of the above I was glad to find that there is genuinely good stuff available from a Brazilian supermarket.

That encouraged me to pick up another Hocus Pocus beer next time out: the 7% ABV IPA called Interstellar, packaged in a 500ml bottle. They don't say anything about haze on it the label, and the flavour web points more to "Citrico" than "Frutado", but it's definitely hazy in the glass, if quite orange in colour. There's a sweet orange sherbet aroma, but it reverts to proper west-coast tropes on tasting. First it's a punchy lime bitterness, then even bitterer oily pine resin, finishing on an acidic rasp that's downright metallic. From one end to the other, that's quite a journey, and perhaps that's how it earned its name. Disappointingly for a strong beer, it doesn't feel heavy, nor leave you with any of the flavour as an aftertaste. But it's fun while it lasts, and maybe that's enough. From my bottle, I got a sense of a beer where the hops have faded a little over time, so I suspect this is one where you need to watch the dates in order to ensure an optimum experience with it, and I'm sure the ambient shelves in Carrefour don't help either.

At around €4 a bottle, the next beer cost multiples of most others. Such robbery is presumably why the brewery is named after an infamous gangster. Alcapone IPA is 6.6% ABV and a murky shade of pale amber in the glass. It smells murky too: earthy and savoury, with a dollop of marmalade in amongst the dregs. There are no dregs in the flavour, I'm happy to say, but this is one of those old-fashioned craft IPAs of the sort that mostly went extinct, except possibly in eastern parts of Europe, and seemingly Brazil, well over a decade ago. There's a high malt quotient, making it taste of toffee and rye bread first, then a sweet hop perfume, all honeysuckle and jasmine, before a sterner bitterness that's part hop bitterness and part yeasty dregs. What's missing is cleanness and freshness, the sort of things that modern IPAs, when they're not designed to be hazy, have as a central feature. There's a touch of homebrew about this one. It's not awful and I didn't find any off-flavours as such, but it's not high quality either. I wasn't rushing to spring more reais on Signor Capone's beers. 

We return to the familiar embrace of AB InBev with Cervejaria Colorado and its Indica IPA. The 600ml bottle suggests I should follow local practice and serve it in an ice bucket for sharing, as does the 7% ABV, but whatever. This is even darker than the previous, almost brown in colour. The aroma is both sweet and resinous, suggesting another retro experience to come. It's very heavy, with a warmth that makes it feel like cough syrup, even when consumed very cold from the fridge. Flavourwise, the malt aspect is all toffee and red liquorice. The bitter side of it should be your grapefruit and your pine, but it is concentrated beyond that, coming through as aspirin or zinc. This is 1990s American-style IPA with the controls set to maximum, and it's not enjoyable as a result. While it's as flawlessly made as you'd expect from the world's biggest industrial brewer, the recipe is terrible. Maybe there's a certain thrill to be had from drinking IPA brewed in a parallel universe where haze never happened, but that's as far as the fun goes with this one.

Not to be outdone, Heineken Brazil has the Baden Baden brewery in São Paulo. Its IPA Maracujá is superficially similar to the Colorado one, being 6.4% ABV and amber coloured. As the name tells us, they've added passionfruit to it, so it makes sense that it wouldn't be anything like as bitter as the previous, and it's not. There's a tropical perfume in the aroma, suggesting that the fruit was added in syrupy concentrated form, and the flavour still has a decent poke of hard resinous bitterness. Caramel crystal malt adds one type of sweetness, and the perfumey fruit syrup another. While the latter fades, the malt side lasts long into the finish and aftertaste, bringing more of those very old-fashioned American IPA vibes, from when hop freshness wasn't really a factor. It's sufficiently palatable that I didn't feel ripped off, but IPA has moved on from beers like this, and with good reason.

Stout is thin on the ground in Brazilian supermarkets, so I snapped up Campinas Andarilha when I saw it. This is a 6% ABV oatmeal stout, densely black and brown around the edges. The aroma is wonderfully strong, pushing out heavy black liquorice with luxurious rum-and-raisin boozy fruit added in. It's a little on the thin side for an oatmeal stout, and that does make the flavour less impactful than it could be, but it still tastes fantastic. The liquorice is a supporting player and instead it's the warming rum that takes centre stage, backed by a dry toastiness. A vanilla finish gives the impression of a barrel-aged beer, but I don't believe it is. The combination conveys wonderfully old-fashioned stout character: bitter and roasty and serious. This wasn't what I expected it to be, but I will absolutely take it.

There was plenty more from most of the above breweries and brands, but I think I got a good impression of what the mainstream looks like. There was one other set of supermarket-acquired beers that I've singled out for special treatment, and that's up next.

The gaul!

On Monday I mentioned drinking at Asterix, a beer bar and restaurant in central São Paulo. While the draft selection is modest, the stock of cans and bottles is extensive, and I made liberal use of their takeaway facility. Not knowing anything about most of the breweries and beers, the first sweep was a random selection.

Bodebrown's Popeye Spinach Lager is a fully licensed product, unusually for Brazil, though it doesn't contain any actual spinach, more's the pity. It's a straight-up 5% ABV pale lager, broadly in the Helles style, with a soft weighty body and a malt forward flavour. There is a little hint of pilsner in the finish; a burst of mown-grass bitterness. I employed it as a thirst-quencher, the first beer on a warm afternoon, and it's maybe a little too heavy for chugging, but it got the job done. The branding on the can may be inexplicably silly, but the beer inside is of very decent quality.

I liked the sound of Joy Project's Sunset Breeze, a sour ale with grapes. The name and style evokes cool and spritzy refreshment. If I'd been paying more attention, I'd have noticed that it was 6.8% ABV, and I only thought to look when it poured gloopy and felt thick and sticky, with no spritz in evidence. It's a dark pink colour, and when it settled there were quite large lumps of (hopefully) fruit pulp suspended through it. The aroma is a mix of sweet but unspecific fruit and tartness: a bit like a sorbet. The taste is shockingly sweet, and there's nothing that really resembles grape. Instead, I get an intensely artificial perfume, sending me back in time to the 1980s and a watermelon-wedge-shaped ice lolly that I found on holidays in Spain. This is a strange substance, and not a pleasant drinking experience. Slogging through the heavy texture and cloying taste was not what I had in mind when I plucked it from the fridge. Joy Project in name only, I fear.

I hoped for a bit more bite from the one called I'm F#cking Sour, by Three Monkeys in Rio. This is another strong one, at 6.3% ABV, and contains lime, raspberry and pitaya, a cactus fruit I'd never heard of. In the glass it's a mostly-clear golden with a very faint pink tint. There's definitely a tang to the aroma, and the texture is fairly light considering the strength, with a pleasant refreshing sparkle. That's just as well, because the flavour is very plain. The mineral sourness I found in the aroma is here, and there's a little hint of raspberry, but nothing I could identify as lime and I'm none the wiser as to what pitaya tastes like. This is very basic and inoffensive stuff, but at least it is actually sour.

One last go at the sour selection brought me a gose: The Seer, by Overall Brewing. Surely this will be a reasonable stren... nope: 6.3% ABV. Lads. There's no ingredients listing, but it does look quite authentic, being a hazy pale yellow. The spritzy, briny aroma also says proper gose to me. There are no surprises in the flavour, which is a good thing. The lemony zest is at the centre, and that really helps a strong beer feel light and thirst-quenching. It's best not to let it get warm, as I could feel a certain soupiness creeping in by the half way point: I guess salt and savoury herbs will do that. There's a certain candy sweet side too: boiled sweets or clove rock, presumably a function of the high gravity. Niggles about strength aside, this is pretty good stuff, and performs the job of a gose well, even if it's slightly overclocked. 

Finding out what the Brazilian take on Irish stout is like was irresistible. Step forward, O'Sullivan Y Su Sueño de Cremosidad ("O'Sullivan and his Dream of Creaminess") by Juan Caloto brewery. It's 4.5% ABV, fully black and with lots of foam. The aroma is pure roast, like the crumb tray of an especially busy toaster. It's light bodied and, served cold from the fridge, was nicely refreshing, my palate getting a good scrub from the busy fizz. The flavour is plain but decent, with a slightly metallic bitterness of the sort you get from mainstream carbonated stouts back home. Like the biggest selling one of those, there's no coffee or chocolate complexity on offer, and actually not much roast either. This is clean to the point where it could pass as a Schwarzbier. As such, I enjoyed it, without thinking too deeply about it, which I guess is what session-strength stout ought to be. How nice for the Brazilians to have one on offer, especially since Big G barely exists there. As for creaminess: dream on, O'Sullivan.

A barley wine is next: the 11% ABV Perna de Pau ("Peg Leg"), described on the label as being English in style. The initial pour was an attractive deep crimson, but there was a heap of dregs in the can and the second glass ended up looking like milky tea. There's a slight marker-pen heat in the aroma, which shouldn't be surprising, but it's not so strong as to be off-putting. The flavour is fairly understated -- maybe that's what the Brazilians understand "English" to mean -- but has very pleasant dark fruits, tea brack and buttery cookies, with a smooth and rounded texture and an appropriate level of warmth. This is one of the well-balanced sorts of extreme beers, and the only downside is the earthy-tasting dregs in the bottom of the can which I feel the brewer could have taken measures to avoid. On balance, though: nice work.

I've saved a couple of imperial stouts to the end of this set, beginning with Schornstein Imperial Stout, a lightweight at 8% ABV. The aroma, too, is understated, giving only a faint impression of coffee and cereal. Things ramp up somewhat in the flavour, where there's liquorice aplenty, for a very grown-up foretaste. It's smooth and almost creamy, and after that initial bitterness there's only a smear of dark chocolate, some buttery vanilla, and nothing else beyond, making it quite an easy drinker. I expected it to be rather more involved but found I didn't mind its simplicity. Imperial stout can be calm and sensible too. Smooth it out, hide the heat, don't add anything silly, and you still get a jolly nice beer.

The other one is the rather more involved Czarina by Zev. Barrel aged and blended, it says, and also 11% ABV. It doesn't smell very barrel aged, all dry and toasty. On tasting it's no syrupy vanilla-bomb, but rather rough and splintery, the wood dry and more than a little acrid. The can doesn't say what spirit was in the barrel beforehand, but I'm wondering if it was anything: this is pure, raw sappy timber, and it's not a good angle for a beer. Delve deep and there's a crumb of dark chocolate and a crunch of coffee grinds, but otherwise there's not much of luxury stout about this. Normally I don't mind the seriousness but this is lacking in your classical imperial stout flavours. There, I said it. Do better, Zev.

I genuinely thought I picked the above more-or-less at random but realised when I got to the end that there wasn't a single IPA in the set. Since it occupies the same dominant position here as elsewhere, I made a return visit to rectify that. Here are your two properly randomly picked IPAs to represent all of the ones made in Brazil.

Cervejaria Dilema brews Green Citra, badged as an American IPA, though surprisingly light for both the US and Brazil at just 5.5% ABV. No coastal designation is given, but it's pale yellow and medium hazy, looking casually unfiltered rather than deliberately murked. The aroma is indeed very Citra, with lemon-and-lime icepop meeting pine floor cleaner and a little bit of harder resin. It's the pine that's mostly in charge in the flavour, starting floral and forest-like before becoming more concentrated and chemically bitter. The citrus end of things is really only in the aftertaste: a rasp of fresh lemon peel or zest. And while it may not be specifically in the New England style, it does have the gentle softness of those, ensuring it's quite easy drinking regardless of how busy the flavour gets. This time I'm complaining about the low strength because I think more could have been made of the flavour profile by ramping up the gravity. It's fun and interesting as-is, however, with more complexity than I'd have thought I'd get from a single-hopper.

I went for a New England-style triple IPA to try out the opposite end of the scale: Facehugger by Haunted Brewing, which is a bit of a lightweight at only 9.5% ABV. With the sun behind it, it almost glows in the glass, though the suspended globules make it much less attractive. Mosaic and Motueka are the hops, and I get a little dry caraway seed in the aroma, and maybe some eucalyptus, but not much of anything, all told. The mouthfeel is thick and unfizzy, and without any imposing heat, which is a mercy. The flavour is OK, but not terribly busy or complex, and there's certainly nothing extreme going on. Instead it's a simple orange cordial confection with perhaps a hint of candied orange peel, low in bitterness, high in slickness and very easy to drink; just a bit boring. The label is the most exciting feature.

So that's the high end of things. Tomorrow we head for the supermarket to find out what the big boys are up to.

Follow the bear

Farra Funda is a tiny brewpub in the bohemian Barra Funda district of São Paulo. The draw here is that one of the owners is Dubliner Phil Keatley, who packed up his Crafty Bear brand last year and shipped out to Brazil. His business partner had already established the Jaysenberg brand, and they've joined the two operations under the common name of BrewYo. Everything is brewed on a tiny kit out the back of the pub, utilising all Brazilian hops and all kveik for fermentation.

There were two BrewYo beers on tap when I visited, and I began with the Hazy Session IPA. This is 4.8% ABV and a solid murky orange colour. It tastes a bit murky too, with a certain dreggy savouriness interfering with the hops. It's quite sweet overall, with notes of marmalade and orange cordial: low on bitterness and zest. A bright spot was a mild piquant pepperiness, presumably a kveik side-effect. Otherwise it was passable but not brilliant, in need of a cleaning up that the brewing equipment may not be able for.

Alongside it was the 6.6% ABV BrewYo NEIPA. This, too, was rather rough, but bigger flavoured and with more hop fun. There's a proper bitterness, like jaffa pith, but also some lighter mandarin notes. It has a decent substance and heft to it -- the marmalade here is spread on thickly sliced toast -- and it's very satisfying to drink. While one could probably tell it's brewed on the nano scale, it does a lot of things that New England-style IPAs produced on bigger kits do.

One Jaysenberg beer was hanging on: the American Amber. This definitely had a rub of homebrew about it, the flavour pulling in weird directions: sweet like strawberry, sharp like raspberry and no proper hop character. It's murky and mucky, like it wasn't quite finished when put on tap, or else it was the tail end of the keg. While the other two just needed a bit of a polish, this one would have benefitted from a serious deep clean. Make it taste of malt and hops, please.

Filling in two other taps was another small São Paulo brewery, Wayne190. Their Premium Pilsen was pretty impressive, being completely clear and with a crisp water biscuit aroma. Not much happens in the flavour, which is exceptionally clean and offers only a mild meadowy floral effect by way of complexity. Although it's a little strong for a pils at 5.1% ABV, it made for very easy drinking, each mouthful delivering a blast of refreshing coolness down the throat. It's a perfect house lager for a brewpub and I hope BrewYo manages to emulate it at some point.

Believe it or not, Wayne190's Maracutaya was the only Catharina sour I found in Brazil. I assumed they would be everywhere, though admittedly I didn't look very hard. It's an orange-to-pink colour in the glass and a light 4.2% ABV with loads of fizz. Although it's made with exotic fruit, it tasted more like prosaic raspberry to me; I didn't get any tropical juice. And although the aroma has an assertive acidity, it's not really sour either. Overall it's a bit basic, the fruit flavour jammy and processed-tasting, not fresh, while the high carbonation gets in the way. I can't believe I've had better experiences drinking locally-brewed Catharina sour in Ireland than Brazil.

That's all I've got for you as regards bar drinking. Next, let's go shopping.

Get down

It's hard to beat a bit of sunshine and warmth in the midst of the winter gloom. Last month's New Year jaunt certainly provided that, with a week or so in sunny, and rainy, but most of all warm, São Paulo, Brazil's largest city. It's a city that sprawls like few others, so I'm definitely not in a position to provide you with a guide to the best beer places. This week's posts are just about what I drank, and most of that came from the supermarkets. I did get to a handful of bars, however.

Just around the corner from where I was staying, and a stone's throw from Paulista, the city's grand main boulevard, was a small and bustling open-fronted restaurant and bar called Asterix, specialising in beers from local outfits.

For the first round, that's me in the middle, with Evertreze Stout, a 4% ABV version by Everbrew. This guy goes heavy on the coffee: oily and nutty, with only a little dry roast on the end. The bitterness gets no more intense than a thin sprinkling of dark chocolate. Still it works rather well. They weren't serving it nitrogenated, but it retains a beautifully smooth texture, which is especially impressive given the strength.

And that's Evertreze Red on the left of the picture. This is stronger, at 5.1% ABV, and is a slightly murky shade of copper. They've kept the flavour cleaner than I expected, with nothing dreggy or hot going on. Instead there's a brief and perfunctory offering of toffee and cherry, before a quick finish. Foreign takes on red ale are usually more interesting than this, but if the aim was to capture the quintessential dullness of most Irish examples, then I think they've nailed it quite well. It's not a patch on their stout, however.

And to the right we have Citra Blast, from one of Brazilian's better-known breweries (ie I had heard of it): Dogma. The name writes a big cheque but the beer can cash it, the clear and innocent gold hiding a huge punchy slap of lime-rind bitterness right from the start of the flavour. And it continues all the way through, almost burningly citric, concentrated like a cordial or sorbet. I found it invigorating and fun, with a zingy freshness as well as a more serious dank and oily side. At 6.4% ABV it's perhaps not really made for session drinking, but I could see how it could become one's regular IPA.

I stuck with stout in the next round, and another brewery whose beers I'd had before: Trilha. Their Oyster Stout is 10.2 % ABV and extremely thick. I can't say I got any oyster from it, nor even the slightest salinity. Instead it's a very dessertish beast, tasting mostly like a heavy Turkish coffee: molasses-sweet, and with a supporting cast of spices, flowers and herbs. A harder roasted bitterness arrives in the finish, and makes an already slow-drinker into something you really need to take time over. I enjoyed it for all that: a well-made big stout is always a pleasure, even when the gimmick gets lost.

And the IPA to the right this time is Purple Sabbath by Hocus Pocus. The brewery claims this for the West Coast, but it's very definitely hazy, and has the soft and creamy mouthfeel to go along with that. And it's fruity too, with a beautiful bright and colourful flavour of mandarin or similar small and sweet oranges; all the juicy. There's not much beyond this, but what's there is delicious and very thirst-quenching. I would never have guessed it's all of 7% ABV.

Not far away, across Paulista, is The Blue Pub. It's an understated name for what turned out to be a vast rambling venue across multiple floors, with several bars and two simultaneous live bands. The payment system is a ridiculously cumbersome one, whereby a card is issued to you at the door, you charge drinks to it, and then pay at automated tills on the way out. This also allows them to add a cover charge on exit, without any previous mention of it. "Pub" strictly in name only, then.

It's not a speciality beer bar at all, but they've made a bit of an effort, with some Brazilian independents and exotic imports from the likes of Fuller's and O'Hara's.

Dogma features again here. The can on the left is Hop Lover, a double IPA of 8.4%. It's a big and chewy one, using both its alcohol and its haze to bulk out the texture. It ends up rather soupy, however, with lots of boozy heat shouting over the hops. These are savoury and crisp rather than juicy or citric, so while it's a passable double IPA, it wasn't in the way I prefer them.

They did rather better with Dogma American IPA beside it. It's still no lightweight at 6.5% ABV, but it blends the classical American hop flavours beautifully and without allegiance to coast. There's juicy peach and pineapple, leading to a punchier citrus acidity before building to a hard resinous bitterness in the finish. This is an accomplished beer, brewed by people who know exactly what they're doing when it comes to American hops.

In the next round, there was a gamble on a gluten-free pale ale called simply Cerveja Sem Glúten, by southern Brazilian brewery Farrapos. I'm glad it wasn't my gamble, because I thought the beer was terrible, tasting of rancid butter and old fish. I've no idea what process they've used -- although the weirder-tasting gluten-free beers tend to be brewed with alternative grains, and maybe that's what disturbed me here. Disturb me it did, however.

Luckily I had a palate-cleanser to hand, in the form of Cerpa Export lager, looking very 1980s macro in its foil-necked bottle. This is 5.3% ABV but tasted much stronger to me, with a heavy texture and big brown-sugar sweetness. Its bready fruitcake effect isn't unpleasant, but I was looking for a lighter and crisper beer when I ordered it, not this slightly sickly low-hop bock effort. I'm not sure how something this mainstream ended up on the list here. Regardless, that was enough. We left The Blue Pub a-grumbling. You have been warned.

Not really counting as bar drinking, the best beer option I found at São Paulo airport was from the little newsagent. For swigging at the gate I got a can of Orange Sunshine by Hocus Pocus. It's described as an American blonde ale with natural orange flavour, and they've really laid that on thick. It tastes syrupy and sweet, the fruit really killing any of the blonde ale benefits. Before I got to the airport I considered Hocus Pocus to be one of the better breweries I had encountered. Maybe this beer is just a blip.

I'll have more from them in an upcoming post, and also from Baden Baden, whose Witbier I bought. It's pretty plain stuff, lowballing both the herbs and fruit, though I recognise that drinking from the can didn't give me the full sensory picture. There's a refreshing crispness so I'm sure it does what the brewer (Heineken) wants it to do. Another sub-Hoegaarden witbier, then. Perhaps that wasn't the best note on which to conclude my exploration of Brazilian beer, but this week's posts are just getting started. We'll visit a brewery tomorrow.