Amazon Beer taste test

In the previous post we established that there are a growing number of places that stock decent beer in Rio, but what should you order when you get there? Most of the Carioca beer enthusiasts I’ve met seem obsessed with Belgian ales, particularly those with heavy flavours and high alcohol contents. I suppose that if you’re going to spend R$30 ($13) on 330ml of beer, it’s nice to feel that you’re getting some bang for your buck.

When I take guests out on food tours, we taste a few different Brazilian beers including some from the state of Rio and others from further afield, but my favourite by far are the Amazon Beers. Amazon Beer (Cervejaria Amazon) is a brewer located in Belém in the northern state of Pará. They produce a range of 7 beers and a few days ago I decided to taste 3 of them:

From left to right – Açaí Stout, Cumaru IPA, Bacuri Forest.

Now I’m no beer expert, so don’t expect proper tasting notes, but I’ll do my best to give you my thoughts on each, without straying too far into the realms of ‘grass cuttings’ and ‘sandalwood shavings’:

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Açaí Stout

Amazon Beer Açaí Stout.

Style: Dry Stout

Alcohol: 7.2%

Description: Voted best Brazilian beer of 2014 at the Brazilian Beer Festival in Blumenau, this is a jet-black stout flavoured with açaí berries. The beer has a long-lasting creamy head and a rich aroma of coffee and chocolate. I’m always a bit wary of beers flavoured with fruit as they can be sweet and the fruit flavour overpowering, however here the açaí flavour is very subtle. Not as thick and filling as Guinness, this is still a deliciously rich, bitter and interesting beer that I would definitely recommend. 

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Cumaru IPA

Amazon Beer Cumaru IPA.

Style: India Pale Ale

Alcohol: 5.7%

Description: First of all I just have to mention that when talking about IPA, Brazilians don’t say the initials “Eye Pee Ay”  – they say “Eeepa”, which still makes me chuckle. Anyway, this IPA is flavoured with a spice called Cumaru which is sometimes referred to as Amazonian Vanilla, and has also been used in the past to flavour tobacco. Wikipedia describes the fragrance of the main chemical in cumaru seeds as being like “new-mown hay” (their words), but for me this golden-red beer has a clear hint of something a bit like cinnamon. Although the added flavouring is quite apparent in this beer, there is no sweetness and plenty of hoppy bitterness and bite. I’d definitely buy this one again, though one bottle would probably be enough.

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Bacuri Forest

Amazon Beer Bacuri Forest.

Style: Fruit Beer

Alcohol: 3.8%

Description: Bacuri (Platonia insignis) is a fruit that grows on trees in the Amazon and has a lovely lemony sweet and sour flavour. This beer is much lighter than the others and I imagine this is an attempt to appeal to people who don’t like the bitterness of stouts and IPAs (the brewer’s website rather chauvinistically describes this one as “very pleasing to the female palette”!). Although I love the flavour of bacuri as a juice or ice cream, I didn’t think it worked so well in a beer – it had a slightly metallic, artificial flavour.

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OK, so that’s my little round-up of 3 beers from the Amazon. There are 4 more in the range that I will have to try (tough job I know), but so far these have been very interesting and definitely worth a try. Amazon Beer is stocked in many Brazilian supermarkets and also internationally (UK Stockists here), so why not see if you can pick up a few bottles for the weekend? If anyone has any recommendations for an excellent Brazilian beer, let me know in the comments!