MEXICO CITY — It sounds like a movie where high jinks ensue: A teetotaling Mexican hotel worker travels to England, befriends a whisky-drinking Irishman and scrubs toilets in a pub while learning to brew killer beer.
Such is the odd path Jose Morales has taken since a sweltering day five yea
rs ago when he found himself wondering how to make a beverage he doesn’t even drink. The daydreaming has led Morales, then a hotel warehouse manager, to an unlikely new calling as a beer maker.
Morales, 36, is among a burst of Mexican brewers who are testing recipes and investing in imported equipment in hopes of finding the same formula for success that microbreweries north of the border have found.
Mostly self-taught, the Mexican brewers have launched an array of offerings, from Belgian-style wheat beers and imperial stouts to an ale aged in tequila barrels. They want to translate a hobby into commercial success in a country that is increasingly quick to embrace foreign trends, from smartphones to designer coffee.
“There’s a niche. People are looking for something different,” said Jaime Andreu, commercial director of the Primus Brewery and spokesman for the Mexican microbrewers association, which has 16 members.
Some brands of cerveza artesanal have won awards abroad. But the entrepreneurs have found that peddling fancy $4 beers in Mexico means battling a couple of Goliaths.
Although Mexicans are among the world’s leading consumers of beer, drinking about 16 gallons a year per person, microbrews are dwarfed by two huge companies that dominate the $15 billion market at home and make almost every Mexican brand known abroad, from Corona to Dos Equis.
The newcomers say the vast majority of restaurants and bars in Mexico are off-limits because the establishments have agreements to buy only from one of the two giants, Grupo Modelo or Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, in exchange for equipment and discounts.
The small brewers often have to import ingredients and even bottles, making their product considerably more expensive than the big-name beers. Moreover, they lack the kind of tax breaks that have given beer makers in the United States a chance to survive infancy.
For every 100,000 beers drunk in Mexico, only eight are craft beers, according to the microbrewers association. “Basically we’re working against the system,” said Jesus Briseno, who owns the Guadalajara-based Minerva Brewery, which makes Imperial Tequila Ale and five other beers. “We have all the odds of dying in battle.”
The entrepreneurs have sought to tap into the Facebook generation to promote their beers, and two have opened stores, part beer boutique and part pub. So far, though, sales are modest.
The struggle hasn’t stopped Gustavo Gonzalez, a brewing pioneer who produces three ales — an amber-toned pale, Belgian-inspired red and caramel-hinted porter — in a former tortilla factory on the southern end of Mexico City.
Gonzalez was a marketing student when he tried American craft beers during trips to Austin, Texas, in the 1990s. Before long, he was schlepping ingredients and home-brewing equipment back across the border and devouring books and magazines on beer making. By 2000, he was brewing Cosaco, or Cossack, in 18-gallon batches in his yard.
Gonzalez, 39, now has two workers who help mill grains and cook and ferment ingredients in stainless steel kettles in a brewery the size of a two-car garage.
His production is a drop in the bucket compared with that of U.S. microbreweries: just 3,200 gallons a year. And he sells only by the keg, meaning you won’t find Cosaco even in specialty shops.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
