Eat Rio Craft Beer Tours

NOTE: (April 2023) We are hoping to re-launch our craft beer tours later this year, but for now these are not running. However, if you’re looking for some excellent places to try craft beers in Rio, get in touch and I’ll point you in the right direction!

In last week’s post I made a brief mention of a failed attempt to visit beer supply shop (this went down shortly after I had experienced a mellow kind of nirvana at a nearby snack bar). Well I expect you’ve all been eaten up with curiosity ever since, plagued by questions such as:

Why a beer supply shop? and Did you go back another time when it was open? and, erm, What did you buy there? 

Well settle down people, because I’m going to respond to your pressing perguntas. The answers, respectively, are:

I was looking for some supplies to make beer; and Yes, I went back 2 days later about an hour before they were due to close; and I bought malted grains, hops and yeast.

These are malted grains of barley. The process of malting is unthinkably cruel. First you encourage a grain to start germinating by adding water. Then, just when it gets going, dreaming of a full and happy life as a stem of grass, perhaps with plans to one day have its own child grains to continue the wondrous circle of life, you kill it by exposing it to hot air. Makes you think doesn’t it? Still, cruel or not, it’s essential for making decent beer so what can you do?

Regular readers will remember that I’ve made beer a couple of times in the last few years. On those occasions it was just some carefree fun which resulted in about 40 bottles of passably delicious home-brewed beer. But this time around things were different; this was serious. This time I was making beer with my Eat Rio colleagues and it wasn’t fun – it was work (…but also fun).

In this excruciatingly circuitous way (is anyone still reading?) I’d like to announce that we will soon be releasing our latest culinary tour experience – the Eat Rio Craft Beer Tour.  The beer scene in Rio is blowing up! Since 2012 there have been a plethora of local breweries popping up in Rio. When I first got here in 2010 you were lucky if you could find a place selling Heineken – nowadays there are dozens of speciality bars selling IPAs, APAs, Golden Ales, Bocks and Porters. Some are made in accordance with the old school traditions, others are flavoured with all kinds of exciting Brazilian fruits and spices. For a beer enthusiast in Rio it’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Mmmm, deliciously local, artisanal and other foodie buzzwords…

Our Craft Beer Tour will last around 3.5 hours and as we walk through the streets of Rio we’ll visit fantastic bars and sup excellent, locally brewed beers. Along the way our guests will learn more about how beer is made, the history of beer in Brazil and there’ll be tasty food to keep the ship steady.

In preparation for this new experience, my guides and I have been obsessing over beer for months. We’ve researched, written, asked questions, discussed, drunk, spilled, argued, drunk some more, hugged and made up. It’s been a lot of beery fun! Well a couple of days ago we went one step further – we mashed, lautered, sparged, boiled, chilled, aerated and pitched yeast.

The rule when making beer is that everyone gets at least one implement. Here you see us wielding a thermapen, a ‘rabo quente’ and The Big Spoon. Apparently I missed the memo about us all wearing grey-green shirts.

Looks like beer (kind of – there were some questions about why it was so green), smells like beer…

We have now arrived at one of the last (and most difficult) steps: waiting.

I’m reminded of Eddie Murphy’s Delirious…

So, on 4th of September, with trembling hands, we’ll reach into our custom beer fridge and crack open the first bottle of Eat Rio beer. It promises to be a very special moment. And if the beer is horrible, we will have the consolation that it will almost certainly get us drunk. And if it doesn’t get us drunk, we’ll just go to a bar and buy some from the professionals like everyone else. Cheers!