OnTap Magazine

WORLD OF BEER What's not to love about a city that lives and breathes beer? B eer is everywhere in Blumenau. It’s on posters in family-run churrascarias and graces the chalkboards of hip burger bars. We nd beer-themed furniture on sale in a mall on the city outskirts and bottles of pilsner are piled at the end of every single aisle in the supermarkets we shop in. Beer is the subject of the local museum and even our AirBnB turns out to be lled with beer paraphernalia and run by an enthusiastic homebrewer who stocks our fridge with his creations. Blumenau is Brazil’s uno cial beer capital. Located in the humid Santa Catharina province about an hour’s ight south of Sao Paolo, the town of 350,000 seems an unlikely beer hub, but Blumenau’s got pedigree. e townwas founded in 1850 by German immigrants and their in uence remains. Bavarian-style buildings punctuate the city’s tidy streets and in certain restaurants, sta with notably German surnames serve schnitzel and strudel. And then of course, there is the beer. Blumenau is home to a handful of breweries, the country’s largest beer competition and one of the largest Oktoberfest celebrations outside Germany. We are attending an equally exciting festival. Each March, the Parque Vila Germânica – also home to the Oktoberfest – plays host to the Festival Brasileiro da Cerveja (Brazilian Beer Festival). It is the biggest beer fest I’ve ever attended, at least in terms of the sheer number of beers on o er. e choice is staggering and on day one I’m barely even tipsy. Instead of drinking, I spend most of my time walking the aisles, reading beer lists and wondering which breweries are worth my Ninkasis – the o cial currency of the fest. PARALLELS AND PROBLEMS One of the rst things I notice about craft beer in Brazil is how expensive it is. e country’s cost of living seems only slightly higher than in South Africa, but grabbing a cold one is hellishly expensive. A pint is upwards of R$25 (R87.50) and a taster at the fest will set you back around what a pint would cost at a South African event. Still, this doesn’t seem to stop people from drinking plenty of it. e craft beer scene is booming, with an estimated 900 breweries now found across the country. Brazil’s craft beer culture is a few years ahead of our own, but there are a lot of parallels. Like South Africans, Brazilians love beer and drink more of it than any other alcoholic beverage, but the country faces many of the same problems our small brewers are up against – high costs of imported ingredients, a warm climate that makes the cold chain essential if brewers want to distribute, and a limited number of people with the buying power to a ord craft beer. One brewer I chat to estimates craft beer’s total market share to be around 2%. It’s not much higher than here (around 1%) but beer culture in Brazil seems more developed than in South Africa. Restaurant sta are clued up on the beers that they’re serving and virtually every restaurant we enter has a choice of at least a few local brews. I’m also taken aback by the number of beer sommeliers I meet. I have actually come here to judge in a beer competition and my fellow judges count at least a dozen Brazilian beer sommeliers among them – the majority of these women. e level of beer education, at least in the south, has a lot to do with Amanda Reintenbach, who launched Science of Beer in 2010. e institute trains sommeliers and brewers as well as o ering beer appreciation courses to anyone eager to learn more. A NATIVE BREW Amanda, a well-known and respected gure in Brazilian beer circles, was also behind the Brazilian Beer Contest, which has been operating since 2011. e competition is now one of the world’s largest, with 3115 beers from across the country entered in 2019. It is seamlessly run and a joy to judge in, not least for the opportunity to enjoy Brazil’s homegrown style. I am typically a fan of hop-forward beers, but I nd the country’s IPAs almost uniformly disappointing. A fellow judge warns me o bottled Brazilian IPAs, instead suggesting I sample them only at brewery taprooms. Most craft brewers lter and pasteurise their beers to help stabilise them, but the payo is a muted hop note so I heed the warning and seek out something else to drink. e answer is simple: the Catharina sour. It is one of the best examples of a new, regional style I have ever encountered. It was conjured up around four years ago by homebrewers and craft brewers wanting to create a truly Brazilian beer and has since made it into the Local Styles appendix of the BJCP guidelines. e Catharina sour marries a base akin to a Berliner Weisse (although at a slightly higher ABV) with the varied and intense tropical fruits of the Santa Catharina region. e result is a beer that is in equal parts a gastronomic experience and a cultural one. rough judging them I meet a few new fruits – caju (the fruit of the cashew tree, which gives a muted, slightly savoury note to the beer) and jabuticaba (which tastes like tart grape candy) – and also some fruits that are familiar but simply bigger and brighter and tastier than their counterparts elsewhere. e Catharina sour becomes my go-to beer, a kettle-soured, fairly low ABV ale with bold tropical fruit avours: it is perfect for the climate. Blumenau is Brazil’s unofficial beer capital Brewpoint specialise in German styles 46 | Summer 2019 | ontapmag.co.za