New Brewery at the End Of The World

I recently spent a couple of days in Punta Arenas, Chile - one of the most southerly cities in the world, home to high winds and bad weather, penguin colonies, and the famous Straits of Magellan (the original westerly entrance to the Pacific).

It's also home to Austral beer, which has been around in one form or another for over 100 years.  However, since Austral is more or less a widely distributed macro light lager, I wasn't falling over myself to tour their facilities.  Especially when a new brewery had opened up downtown barely a month ago!  Enter Cerveceria Hernando de Magallanes ("Magellan Brewery"), located less than 100m from the Straits of the same name.

Wow, what an incredibly swank building in an otherwise run down old port neighbourhood!  Somebody is investing in future tourist dollars.  Not a bad bet, since Punta Arenas is on the main tourist route between Tierra Del Fuego and Chile's popular Torres Del Paine National Park.  And you can take a penguin tour while you're here.

El Penguino de Magallanes

One of the co-owners was on hand to pour us a couple of samples.  She was was very generous with her time, and using a combination of broken Spanish, French and English, I gathered that she and her husband had developed this brewery after her husband had homebrewed for a couple of years. They've certainly put a lot of effort and capital into the venture, as the small brewery is beautiful and spotless.  They've started shipping to some restaurants and a couple of grocery stores in town, mostly in bottles.

As usual, the beers on offer were the colour-coded blonde/red/black triumvirate that first-timer craft breweries feel the need to provide in South America.  We sampled the red and black - and again, as expected, the red was bottled prematurely and had fermentation issues (huge crust of brown yeast on the bottom of the bottle; yeasty, sour and strong vegetal flavours), while the stout was mostly passable.  However, given that they've only been at it for a few weeks, good on them - and hopefully they'll work out these issues in the near future.  They certainly have the technology to make good beer.

Lovely, shining though small equipment.  If they gain any popularity, this will quickly become undersized.  Everything is piped in stainless steel (no hoses), the walls sport modern electronic controls and clean cable conduit runs - it looks like little expense was spared.

You can see the Straits of Magellan across the street as you have a taste.

Sexy brewery equipment is showcased through the interior windows.

The best part of the beers/brewery so far is the labelling and historical imagery.  Let's hope this kind of quality will soon extend to the beers.

Arrgh, it be a treasure chest of sweet malty booty!

So while I wouldn't recommend Hernando De Magallanes beer quite yet (though the stout could work in a pinch), it was great to have an early-stage view into one of the newest and most remote craft breweries in the world.  I've now had craft beer at 64 degrees N (Iceland) and 53 degrees South (Punta Arenas) - it's blanketing the world!  Craft beer drinkers rejoice and keep supporting your local craft brewers who truly care.

First Beers in the Southern Hemisphere

What's the first thing I see in the beer section of a grocery store upon arriving in Santiago?

Well, that was unexpected.  I wonder if it's Duff, Duff Dry or Duff Light?

It was quite warm out, so to start I bought a couple of the big-name Argentinian macro lagers, and a Santiago-made craft beer.

If it's hot and you need a cheap beer, you could do worse than a 1 L Cristal beer.  I'm sure this is what the ganstas drink in Argentina.

Pouring out the Argentinian Cristal would have been a lot cheaper...

The other big brand is Escudo.  Initial sips were a bit better, but it goes downhill quickly upon exposure to the atmosphere, so it's Cristal by a nose.

Beer choice seems less important when travelling and faced with a sunny patio

Szot is craft beer made on the outskirts of Santiago - I bought an Amber.  Fives times the cost of Cristal.  It was bottle conditioned, but had far too much brown yeast at the bottom of the bottle.  Tasting confirmed that there were fermentation issues and/or premature bottling - unfortunately it was kind of a sour mess.

Good try Szot, but this bottle was not drinkable

We were thinking of visiting a brewery - despite having a nice-looking facility, Szot was a long/complicated mini-bus ride SW of the center of Santiago, and didn't seem worth the effort given the bottle we had purchased.  Handwerk Brewers (makers of Rothhammer craft beer) were beyond the reach of normal transit to the NW, and we weren't even sure if they were open to the public.  However, just down the street was a craft beer pub that featured Rothhammer beer!

Rothmann beers at Cerveceria Nacional

So of course we had to try all their draft offerings.

Tasters!

In sum, a couple were not good (why do many far-flung craft breweries pass off an unfinished, failed, yeasty, opaque, sour beer as a "special cloudy beer"?), a couple had promise, and - wonder of wonders - their IPA was very tasty!  A real (South) American style IPA.  (Pronounced "EE-pa" down here.)  Mugs of IPA all around!

The interior had all the trappings of a craft beer bar.  Except for the fact that everyone smoked relentlessly so it was a bit difficult to taste your food/beer.

And they served some pretty respectable thin-crust pizza.  The prices were roughly equivalent to what we'd pay back home.

Mrs. Hoplog loving pizza & IPA

We moved on to Valparaiso, Chile, and tried a couple of beers from the local Cervecera del Puerto.  The restaurant we were at had only "light and dark" - which in my limited travels is usually a huge warning flag that the local beer offered is going to be bad.

Fortunately, it wasn't bad.  The "light" wasn't great, but the "dark" was quite interesting.  The malt/hop bill was almost identical to a Belgian Dubbel, but it probably used a more standard (non-Belgian) fruity ale yeast.  Actually pretty good!

"Light" and "Dark" (not the real names, just what we were told) from Cervecera del Puerto

Standard serving practices in Chile seem to be icy (literally) beer, frozen glasses, and lots of overflow/excessive foam.  I'll hold off commenting for now.

Hey, why is the drip tray getting all the beer?

So far Chile does appear to have some craft beer, though it's a bit hard to find and the quality seems highly variable.