If you could bottle a country, what would it taste like? Ireland surely would taste of Guinness, Italy a shot of espresso, while a reassuring cup of tea would stand in for England. And Chile? Well, as the fourth biggest wine exporter in the world, the answer lies on the wine aisle of any supermarket. But if the grape dominates the international perception of Chile’s drinking habits, when you travel inside the country you quickly discover that there are flavours that Chile has until recently been keeping largely to itself.
In the last two decades, Chile has been undergoing a quiet craft beer revolution. Across the country, microbreweries have been popping up in what might be considered as the unlikeliest places – with small towns deep in Patagonia’s mountains and along the Pacific coast joining the larger urban centres in a love of hops, to produce local beers that reflect the great regional diversity of the country.
The history of Chilean beer
The history of brewing in Chile is far older than the modern nation. Long before the arrival of the first Europeans in the 16th Century, indigenous people like the Mapuche were fermenting maize and berries into a mildly alcoholic drink called chicha. But the colonisers preferred the grape to the grain and introduced vines from Spain, laying the ground for the country’s modern pre-eminence as a wine producer.
It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th Century when waves of German immigrants brought new brewing techniques to Chile. Cities like Valdivia and Puerto Montt became early hubs for brewing, with locals enjoying a taste for German-style lagers. This Middle European taste for beer slowly spread throughout the country, but in 1960 Valdivia was hit by a massive earthquake that killed over 6000 people, completely knocking out the city’s beer production. While the city rebuilt, the national beer scene became dominated by bland pilsners from elsewhere. It was no wonder that people might have preferred a glass of wine.
The Growth of a Movement
Fast forward to the approach of the millennium and things were starting to look rather different. The key year was 1990, which saw both the end of the Pinochet dictatorship and the rebirth of Valdivia as a centre for brewing, with the opening of the Kunstmann Brewery. As consumer confidence grew, the influence of the American and European craft beer movements slowly began to be felt. What started as a niche movement quickly gained traction. According to the Asociación de Cerveceros Independientes de Chile (ACI Chile), the country is now home to over 400 independent breweries, a dramatic increase from even a decade ago.
Economic factors that might have hampered some industries have ironically worked in favour of Chile’s microbreweries. An imperfect cold chain system, needed to transport beer in good condition from its brewery to a national distribution system, resultingin the development of an intensely local product that reflects the character of the region.
As you’d expect, the microbreweries in Los Lagos maintain strong German brewing traditions, producing lagers, and bocks that pay homage to their European roots. Some, such as the Salzburg brewery in Frutillar on Lake Llanquihue, have a great taproom that’s open to visitors. The town’s distinctive Germanic architecture only drives home the hyper-local taste of the beer.
The landscape of Los Lagos is dominated by lakes, volcanoes and rainforest, and brewers make much of the naturally filtered crystal water here. The watershed stretches all the way up to Pucón, where IPAs, English pale ales, Czech-style lagers and chocolatey stouts are brewed by Swoop favourite Igel is brewed in the shadow of Villarrica. This water is considered one reason why Valdivia grew to be the spiritual home of Chilean craft brewing.
Heading south along the Carretera Austral the thirsty beer drinker reaches Aysen, which has long been considered one of the more isolated parts of Chile. Its strong frontier feel has also helped it develop a self-contained but thriving craft beer scene, with brews produced using the region’s crisp glacial waters. At the regional capital of Coyhaique, you can find taprooms for several local breweries, including Cerveza Hudson. Dolbek is another firm favourite, and is one of the few craft brewers that has managed to crack the national market to take the taste of Aysen to Santiago and beyond.
The tiny town of Villa Cerro Castillo, gateway to its eponymous national park, you’ll beers served up by the local brewer Caiquén, while at Puerto Rio Tranquillo, you can kick back lakeside after a day visiting the Marble Caves with a chilled Baya lager brewed in the town by Arisca. If you head a little further south to Cochrane near Patagonia National Park, the Cervecería Tehuelche is one of our favourite taprooms in Aysen.
Local tastes
One of the challenges facing Chile’s craft brewers has been the availability of local ingredients. Hops don’t thrive in Patagonia, which is frequently wet and rainy, so imported hops from the USA or Europe are the norm. Some breweries then add their own spin on this by including other ingredients. In Punta Arenas, Cervecería Austral (founded by a German immigrant in 1896, making it one of Chile’s oldest brewers) offers the unique Calafate fruit beer, which it brews with the added sourness of calafate berries. Local tradition holds that anyone tasting a calafate berry will return to Patagonia, but if you can’t do that, you can at least easily find yourself coming back for another drink.
Celebrating Chile’s craft beers
Every January, Kunstmann holds its own Bierfest in Valdivia, in a local version of Oktoberfest that attracts tens of thousands of visitors. Other regions have followed suit, with the Llanquihue Bierfest in Los Lagos, while in 2024 Aysen launched its own celebration, with nearly a dozen microbreweries taking over the town of Puerto Aysen to celebrate the taste of the region.
Such is the popularity of Chile’s brewing scene. But perhaps it was inevitable that the nation’s craft beers would eventually start to come out from the giant shadow of the wine industry to bring things full circle. In 2017, archaeologists announced that pots found closed to Chile’s Los Lagos region that pre-dated the arrival of the first Europeans by at least a century, carried traces of the Saccharomyces yeast that’s thought to be the ‘lost’ ancestral yeast needed to brew lagers at cool temperatures. While the genetic picture is still being reconstructed, it’s clear that the region’s first inhabitants knew that they were on to a good thing with their chicha.
It might have taken a while for today’s craft brewers to catch up with them, but the microbrewers of the Lake District, Aysen and the rest of Chilean Patagonia still carry that echo today – all reaching back to a long heritage to produce some fantastic beers that truly reflect that character of the places where they were created.
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