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.