Category: Beer Without Borders

Once dominated by a few macro lagers, Switzerland’s recent craft brewing boom has left it with more breweries per capita than any other European nation.

In Bariloche, pure water sources and proximity to Argentina’s hop fields have combined with changing local tastes to spur an exponential boom in the region’s beer consumption.

In contrast to the country’s ubiquitous lagers, a growing number of Japanese brewers are making big, bold Stouts, often with local ingredients.

Moropotente, Nicaragua’s largest craft brewery, is more than a brewery, it’s also a classroom, a workshop, a laboratory, and a working farm.

It’s last call for White Bull, South Sudan’s favorite beer. The country’s only brewery announced it will stop producing amid a ruinous civil war.

As the South American culinary scene continues to progress at an astounding rate, its craft brewing scene has begun to catch up. It started in countries like Chile and Brazil. Now Peru has joined the fray, too.

In a nation that is known for, and takes great pride in, its tradition and terroir, a new wave of brewers is creating a culture of “bieroir” that embraces locally sourced ingredients.

Craft breweries in Ecuador can’t keep up with consumer demand and are expanding as quickly as their bank accounts will allow. Only two years old, Andes Brewing Company epitomizes this growth with its expansion from a 1/2-barrel to a 3-barrel system, making it a mid-sized craft brewer for Quito.

Until recently, locals knew South Bermondsey Station as the closest stop to The New Den, home of Millwall, the city’s most blue-collar soccer club, but times have changed. Saturday morning now sees a steady stream of punters disembark here, most of them looking for beer.

Walk into Istanbul’s Bosphorus Brewing Company on any given night, and you’ll see a healthy crowd of people drinking founder Philip Hall’s craft brews. But the British expat is still facing an increasingly hostile Turkish government.

Beer and railways have a lot of history in London, dating from the 1830s. Today, no less than 14 of the capital’s more than 50 breweries are housed within railway arches of above ground train tracks.

In 2010, an Italian law reclassified beer as an agricultural product. Now, any brewery that makes its beer using 51 percent of brewery-grown raw materials can be classified as an agricultural brewery.

Berliner Kindl Weisse is the only Berliner Weisse brewed in significant volume in Berlin, and while it’s on menus around the city, it’s rare to see anyone drinking it apart from tourists. But two small breweries have started brewing Berliner Weisse, and both use old recipes to resurrect the original taste.

As many brewers are quick to mention, fermentation is an ancient science, and is even referenced in the Bible. So, perhaps microbreweries are not such a new idea in Israel.