How'd You Like Me Now?

I could say I came back to the United States for the Chinese food, 'cause you can't get good Chinese food in Brazil. It IS that important to me. But I could also say with equal honesty I came back for the beer. Unless it's really cold, Brazilian beer kind of really sucks. There are exceptions but basically all the beer comes from the same company, Imbev _ you know them the Belgium, maybe Belgian-Brazilian, mega-conglomerate that owns everything from Stella Atois to Budweiser. The most popular, and hence most ubiquitous brew is Skol, there are others: Antartica, Brahma, Bohemia but the basic idea is embodied in Skol. Since it has the least amount of character, it is generally considered the best. I personally like Antartica better but I freely admit that may have more to do with the blue cans and the penguins on the label than anything else. There is also Kaiser, made by Coca-Cola, which can, on occasion, taste really good in its draft form. Then there's the dreaded, yes, dreaded Novo Schin, or Schincariol which is brewed in the town of Itu and the only thing available in the Sambadrome during Carnaval. Itu is famous for being the town where everything is really big _ seems a there was a Porno Chancada (we'll save this for another day, but it's not really a porn film) where the guy had a really big dick and so people said everything in Itu was like that. Now, if you go to Itu, you can see an over-sized traffic light, maybe an oversized pencil and over-sized telephone booth I forget what else _ but I actually went there once to cover a really big wedding for the Catholic News Service. Okay, and I guess you can drink a really big mug of Novo Schin there, but take my word for it, it's terrible, dreadful stuff.

In Brazil, the whole idea around beer is about keeping it really, really cold. There are little foam condom-like things you keep around the cans on the beach, draft beer is pumped through something called a "serpent" which runs through ice to keep the beer what they like to call "stupidly cold." There's a bar in Ribeirao Preto, in Sao Paulo state, called the Penguin, famous for this amazing long serpent - maybe somebody should have told them about that in Itu. I've been there, done that, and its good but not THAT good.

Now, this isn't to say there aren't good Brazilian beers _ they're just hard to find and when you find them they can be expensive. There are a few micro-breweries sprinkled across the Amazon, funnily enough and one micro-brewery in Rio, Devassa, which is pretty damn good. Problem is a bottle of Devassa in Rio costs more than a lot of imported beers and in Brazil imported don't come cheap. There's another beer called Cerpa, which comes from the Amazon state of Para. The name is a basically a shortening of the words "cerveja," or beer and "Para" _ I only figured this out after drinking quite a lot of them and then someone asked if they still made Cerma, or cerveja de Maranhao, which is the next state over. Actually, the only stuff that's any good is in the little bottles which say Cerpa on them but which everyone refers to as Cerpinha. The big bottles which say Cerpa on them, and which everybody refers to a Cerpa, are pure shite. I know, it's all too complicated. One word of warning though: A lot of people liken the taste of Cerpa, or Cerpinha more correctly, to cough syrup - while I can see their point, I still like the beer, especially after drinking too much Skol in my lifetime.

Okay, so how does this tie in to the end of Carnaval? Right, so I come back to New York and I'm overjoyed by the wide selection of international beers. My friend Henrique, who never went anywhere in Rio without his personal mini-cooler and was always ready to hand me a Skol, once told me about a bar, on the city's poor northside, where they had "every kind of beer" meaning Brahma, Antartica, Antartica Original (not bad that), Schincariol, Kaiser etc. They probably didn't have Cerpa or Devassa, which Henrique didn't even like - but I wasn't about to split hairs. When I told him there were literally hundreds if not thousands of beers in the world it really threw him for a loop. A couple of days later he got back to me conceding that while this may be true, his personal tastes stayed in Brazil. But I digress. What I'm trying to say is New York is a paradise for beer lovers, there's Sappora draft, there's Newcastle Brown Ale, there's Duvel and Delirium Tremens all at the local grocery.

But since I went away there's even something more: All these micro-breweries and extreme beers. There's Dogfish Head 60 degrees, 90 degrees even 120 degrees - though I haven't tried it yet. And Smutty Nose and Magic Hat and that beer I had the other night at Bar Great Harry that had like 11 percent alcohol and was dark and absolutely delicious but very dangerous. It's a wonder world and I want to go back to Brazil, grab Henrique by the hand and show him what he's missing. Or in other words: Who needs saudade when you've got beer.