All About Beer Magazine

Things are changing; brewers in Brazil are making some exciting beers, and everything is falling in place for a real revolution to develop. Some scenes, like in Colorado, have been around since the beginning, but have been ramping up their creativity in the last few years. A second wave arrived about five years ago with a big vision of what beer can be. Exotic ingredients like jaboticaba fruit and umburana wood are finding their way into test batches. Beer appreciation groups, including several specifically for women, and homebrew clubs are popping up everywhere. New laws make it a little easier to open brewpubs, and now many determined young homebrewers are readying their business plans for a new crop of breweries as exciting as any on the planet.

Hervig Gangl of Cervejaria Krug

Located in Belo Horizonte, the capitol of the state Minas Gerais, Cervejaria Krug is typical in many respects. Theo and Hervig Gangl own the brewery—part of a family that has been brewing in Austria since the early 1700s and were the creators of the international powerhouse brand Warsteiner, the Brazilian Gangls are in the ornamental stone business now. The brewery is just a side project, but a successful one, doing about 140,000 hectoliters (100,000 U.S. barrels) a month in 2009, up 100 percent from the year before.

Krug brews several Reinheitsgebot beers here: a typical Brazilian craft-brewed pils with barely detectable bitterness; curiously tame considering the vivid countryside, food, women, and music. They brew a pretty nice hefeweizen, pasteurized as is typical in this tropical climate, but it does contain yeast. They brew a dunkel, oddly called “Amber,” but with a lovely chocolate nose, and just a bit of sweetness—it’s actually pretty refreshing.

Beer and Food, Minas Style. Cheese and fruit is a classic combination in Minas Gerais. Here, it’s in the form of vanilla ice cream with chunks of lightly aged cheese topped by a rich guava sauce. Perfect with a delicate IPA: Cervejaria Colorado’s Indica, made with local rapadura cane sugar.

There are some good places to drink beer these days as well. In Belo Horizonte, Frei Tuck (Friar Tuck, Robin Hood’s monkish drinking pal) is home to Brazil’s Slow Bier movement. Haus Munchen is a warm and comfortable place that has been on the scene for years, but has recently been shifting its focus from imports to Brazilian craft beers.