Manuel Antonio Nightlife: How To Stay At A Beachfront Luxury Condo For Free

Backpackers Manuel Antonio Hostel

Nightlife?  Manuel Antonio is totally dead by midnight.  When the word "gentrified," is applied to tourist locations, this is Costa Rica's first entry.  Once I left the backpacker scene at Backpackers Manuel Antonio Hostel, I felt a lot poorer when I saw all the exclusive restaurants, hotels and villas lining the one winding street that is the "downtown."

Oh well, there's only one street.  Even if I get wasted, all I have to do is follow one road back to the hostel.

As I often point out, Costa Rica's beer scene sucks.  The good thing about this is I don't have to think much about where to go out.  Costa Rica Craft Brewing is pretty much the only microbrewery in the country, so I always start at whatever bar or restaurant they are sold.  In Manuel Antonio that place is Barba Roja, the Red Beard.

It was about 9pm.  Barba Roja was a 10 minute walk from the hostel; it could be done in flip-flops.  I had walked no less than 500 feet, when not surprisingly I heard, "Hey man...Jew want sum weed?"  It's impossible to go anywhere without some annoying, small-time drug dealer heckling me: on the street, on the beach, in bars and in clubs.  I smoke, but I'm not stupid enough to buy off the street.  Usually a simple, "No, gracias" is enough to make them go away, but some of the aggressive dealers respond to my polite "No" with a violent "Fuck You!" followed by threats.  Fortunately this pusher was on the opposite side of the street, so I ignored him and walked faster.

El Gringo Rojo

I was greeted at Barba Roja with, "We're closing soon."  'Soon' meant 'less than an hour,' which is plenty of time to get buzzed.  A quick look around told me that, as with most of the places CRCB is served, this was not in the typical backpacker's budget.  The restaurant is a giant open-air patio that sits high on a hill overlooking the ocean.  They specialize in sushi, feature local artists on their walls and usually require reservations due to their popularity.  The CRCB beers were 3,300 Colones ($6.50), so two would be enough, then I could go somewhere cheaper.

My request for Libertas or Segua got a blank stare from the bartender.  This is normal in Costa Rica.  Your average Costa Rican knows nothing about craft beer, and even if they know of CRCB, they rarely drink it since the beer is about twice the price of a Imperial or Pilsen.

I pointed at the colorful CRCB Segua tap handle to help the bartender.  "Ahhh, la roja!"  He apologized, then actually gave me the first one free.  It's amazing how speaking decent Spanish makes you stick out from every other gringo in Manuel Antonio.  We fell into a Spanglish discussion about the tiny craft beer scene in Costa Rica.  An older American guy at the bar asked about my strange 'red' beer.  Like my homebrewing profesor, Chema, who owns La Bodega de Chema, I prefer to educate and help out people who drink crappy beer.  Just call me a craft beer charity worker.  Or a motivated alcoholic.

Soon we had all ordered another round of Segua, and were discussing national soccer (bad) and pickup lines for Costa Rican girls (even worse.)

Barba Roja was closing.  The Libertas tap was cashed, so the bartender give me a free half-pint 'zarpe' before I left.  If you learn no other word in Costa Rican Spanish, learn "zarpe," which roughly translates as "one-more-for-the-road."  Typically there are 2 or 3 zarpes.

The bartender sent me to Bar El Avion down the road.  'El Avion' translates as 'The Airplane' because it is an authentic replica of Mount Rushmore.  No, seriously, it's a real C-123 Fairlane cargo airplane.  It originally was one of two planes purchased by the CIA in order to attack the Sandinista guerillas in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980s.  It's surprising that this airplane even exists since, according to Ronald Reagan and Oliver North, none of this ever happened.  As with the Iran-Contra Affair, my activities in El Avion are all allegations, since it was closed.

El Avion crash-landed, and most of Manuel Antonio already had too.  There is Mar Luna next to Backpackers Manuel Antonio, but an ugly incident there put me off it.  Some Costa Ricans, like the bartender at Barba Roja, truly appreciate gringos who can speak Spanish.  But many, thanks to years of American influence, would much rather have their gringos remain ignorant, "Uhh-No-Hablo-Espanol" tourists.  They're usually prostitutes, drug dealers, or sketchy guys trying to hook up with foreign chicks.

The previous night I was at Mar Luna talking to some cute, blond American expat chick who had recently moved to Manuel Antonio.  Three Ticos asked if they could join us to "practice their English," which of course meant they wanted to practice with the girl.  She wanted to practice her Spanish, and they obliged.  It quickly degenerated from there...

I spoke Spanish, but they responded to me in broken English.  They talked to the blond chick in Spanish and complimented her even though, quite frankly, her Spanish sucked.  They tried to sell me weed; I declined.  The girl smoked for free.  At some point one of them started talking about Che "El Comandante" Guevera.  He had the cliched, mass-marketed image of Che Guevara as a symbol of the struggle against capitalism, oppression, the Western world, blahblahblah.  In other words, he got his information from a t-shirt sold at The Gap.  Nothing capitalist about that.

I was already annoyed with their tag team cock-blocking.  I pointed out that Che was a brilliant doctor and writer, but as a military commander, he had shot himself in the foot (rimshot!)  During his failed campaign in Africa, he thought Blacks would be easy to control because they were an "inferior race."  Oh, and by the way, he killed lots of innocent people.  This was all said in Spanish, and judging by the look on the guy's face, he wasn't expecting actual facts in his language:

"You think you ares so smart.  I am warning you.  You are alone here."

Better a smartass than a dumbass, I say.  I left before it got ugly.

That incident was out of my mind tonight.  I followed the sound of loud salsa music to the Bar Billfish that was pretty dead, but at least it was still open at 10:30pm on a Friday.  It had a typical Costa Rica late night tourist crowd: drunk local expat business owners; Costa Rican locals who worked for them; old, dirty whoremongers on a "business trip,"; Costa Rican women with dresses that were suspiciously too tight; and twenty-something tourists still energetic enough to drink all night and surf/hike/zipline/drink all day.

Fine Ass Blasian

I was talking to one of these twenty-something tourists about an ATV trip her group of friends were taking the next day.  She was Blasian, and she was hot.  For the uninitiated, a Blasian is a half-Black, half-Asian person (she was half-Korean.)  As the name implies, they are usually blazin' hot, and consequently the subject of many rap songs.  Being from St. Louis, I must mention Kimora Lee Simmons as a prime example, also sexy Amerie, and of course, Tiger Woods.  The Wu-Tang Clan's Blasian status is questionable.

Her friend was half-Black, half-Mexican, or as she put it, Blaxican.  In fact, the whole group was a multiracial reunion of former TCU (Texas Christian University) classmates.  They had rented a fancy beachfront condo for a week in Manuel Antonio.  Everyone was already back at the condo except for the two girls and a Mexican/Filipino/White(??) friend.  He was trying to convince the Blaxican girl that they should be "more than just friends."  That left me with the Blasian.

The tequila shots came fast.  The girls were on vacation, the bar was pretty empty and none of the other guys there stepped up to these chicks.  When the bar did last call, they invited me back to their beachfront condo.  We stopped by a liquor store first.  Unfortunately, Manuel Antonio being the gentrified tourist location it is, had already closed all its liquor stores, even though it was only 11pm.

The guy remembered the fancy condo had provided beer and some liquor, but didn't know if it was included in their payment package.  This wasn't my problem, so I convinced everyone to get beers at the house

Damn flip-flops: the condo was at the bottom of a long rocky winding road on a cliff, and we were pretty drunk by then.  After several cuts and falls, we finally reached the door.  Hooking up with this hot Blasian chick was already motivation enough, but when I saw the property, I knew I wasn't going back to the Backpackers Hostel that night.

Five stories stretched down from the cliff face to the beach below.  When we entered the main door, I saw the blue starry sky stretched out over the dark Pacific Ocean through a glass wall vista that opened onto a deck with an installed firepit.  The marble and steel kitchen was stocked with food and drink.  "We have a French chef who cooks us breakfast and dinner everyday.  His accent is funny." said the Blaxican.  Far below the deck, in front of the beach, was a long, illuminated pool with a waterfall flowing into it.

"Let's go swimming...maybe skinny-dipping?"

We grabbed beers from the fridge and stumbled down the five flights to the pool.  Some of the other friends were awoken by our loud, drunk group.  I expected some issues.  One Puerto Rican(?) guy, who was clearly the mastermind of this TCU class reunion, interrogated me for a minute.  Once satisfied, he shrugged, and in a fatherly tone, reminded his drunk friends that they had to be up early the next day for the ATV tour.

The MexiFilipino and the Blaxican jumped into the pool.  The Blasian and I avoided the pool, and lounged in two recliners, already deep in conversation.  Being a fine half-Asian, half-Black, college graduate working in a big business, she's what you might call a bougie-bitch.  Fine by me.  I hook up with more girls by being a sophisticated intellectual then by trying any bad boy, alpha male bullshit.  Well, not quite: there's a fine line between intelligent, multimillionare, technology-obsessed super-nerd Bill Gates, and intelligent, multimillionare, technology-obsessed super-badass Tony Starks.

Indeed, Ms. Blasian was rolling her eyes at her friend's drunken antics now.  The Blaxican had taken her top off, and I tried my damnedest to ignore her nice tits.  The Filipino guy seemed like was he making progress, but an unfortunate accident ruined his chances.  Drunk Blaxican went to the toilet, and in the process fell up the stairs.  We heard a thump, Ms. Blasian ran away, and she returned helping her friend, whose head was now bleeding.  After some ice, she was put down for the night, and Filipinexican called it quits.

Finally.  I spent the night rolling around with Ms. Blasian on a plush king-sized bed that put my empty bunk bed back at the Backpackers Hostel to shame.  To say the least, she was flexible.  The room had a great view of the beach, but we didn't need any of the TCU crew to peek in on us.  The shower was more of a small pool than a shower.

I missed Backpacker Manuel Antonio Hostel's free pancake breakfast, but getting a Gruyere Cheese and Prosciutto Omelette with fresh pineapple prepared by a French chef with a funny accent is not a bad Plan B.

La Bodega De Chema: How To Make Costa Rica Craft Beer

I have pointed out before that the beer in Costa Rica sucks.  What are the solutions to this problem?

You can be a typical expat and complain about it.  You can switch to liquor or wine (always a good solution.)  You can pay expensive shipping fees and risk broken bottles in beer-soaked cartons.  Or you can make your own beer.

This Is Not Beer

If you are living in Costa Rica and want to make something new for your pint glass, La Bodega de Chema is the place to try your hand at homebrewing.  Chema is a brillant Costa Rican who studied engineering in Rochester, New York.  While living there he fell in love with American craft beer.  When he returned to Costa Rica, he realized he was stuck drinking the same old, boring Imperial and Pilsen again (boo!) and had to find a way to bring tasty craft beer home.

The result of his efforts is La Bodega De Chema.  It isn't a bar or a restaurant, but a beer education facility.  In this little room in a quiet part of San Jose, you can sample Costa Rican and foreign craft beer, buy homebrewing products and materials, and enroll in one-day homebrewing classes taught by Chema and his brewing team.  Experienced brewers will be excited to see this course is taught using the all-grain method, and not with malt extract (mainly because imported extract is really expensive in Costa Rica.)

I was too late to enroll in his inaugural brewing class in May of 2012, but I did get a place in the second class in the second week of June, 2012.  A 5 hour class costs 20,000 colones, or approximately 40 dollars.  This price not only includes the hands-on brewing class, but also a brewing instruction manual, several beer tastings, a discount on La Bodega's products and two bottles of your own beer when it is ready 2 weeks later.  You also get to study your Spanish for 5 straight hours (what, don't you speak Spanish??)

I was the only gringo in the course that day.  My Spanish is far from perfect, but making beer doesn't require much listening.  Just watch and learn.  I will break from my usual long ranting, sarcastic style and present this course in simple, step-by-step pictures and videos.

All you need to make beer are grains, hops, yeast and water.  Start by grinding the grains.  You can do this with a plastic bag and a rubber hammer, or use this convenient grist:

 Now you have malt.  You have to soak the malt in hot water to start fermentation, which produces the most important part of the beer, the alcohol!!  We did this in a cooler fitted with a complex, handmade plastic sieve at the bottom.  It helps to have technical skills (there's a reason many engineers are homebrewers.)

It takes around an hour for fermentation.  We used this time in the most productive way possible, by drinking beer!  We sampled Imperial, Costa Rica Craft Brewing's beer Libertas and Segua and Germany's Erdinger.

The result of the hot soaking malt is a boozy soup called wort.  You have to separate the liquid wort from the grains.  Chema sends the used grains to local farms for cow feed.  How pleasantly organic.

While we are separating the liquid wort from the grains, we have to constantly take samples.  We check the samples for alcoholic content with a little glass stick called a hydrometer.  If it's too strong, you will have to water it down.  As a typical alcoholic I don't mind a 10% alcohol beer, but for the mass market 4% is a little easier to handle.

This wort has alcohol and looks like beer, but it still doesn't smell like beer.  We have to boil the wort with hops to get that lovely beer smell.  What time, what type and how much hops you add all depend on the style of beer.  I'll save that part for the beer geeks to argue about.  Most Costa Ricans just aren't ready to drink Quintupletripledipple-Dry-Hopped, Barrel-Rolled, Sour Imperial Monarch Butterfly, Double-Ds IPAs...or whatever ridiculous, over-hyped shit they're making in the United States now.

While the wort is boiling, several other things are happening.  Chema's last class prepared some hopped wort which has been fermenting for the past few weeks.  We have to add sugar to this prepared wort and mix it.  This starts carbonation, which gives the beer that happy head we love so much.  We used natural sugar; Costa Rica still doesn't have a lot of those fancy brewing products yet.

We were also sanitizing bottles while the wort was boiling.  These sanitized bottles will now store the finished, carbonating product.  To properly ferment, the bottles need to be sealed airtight with caps.  Bottling the beer is probably the most physically strenuous process in homebrewing.  Don't expect it to burn off your beer belly though.

We have added all the hops and the wort is finished cooking.  Now comes the complicated part of cooling off the mix rapidly without infecting it.  This is another part where being an engineer helps.  It's usually enough to cool off the pot in a cold water bath, but Chema constructed a nifty copper tube device connected to a water hose.  It runs cold water through the beer to cool it off even quicker.  This is the part where my technical skills would fail...

Finally we have beer.  Well, not yet.  We still have to wait 2 more weeks for the bottled product to finish fermenting.  If you've been observant, you see we're actually drinking the beer made from the previous class.  Either way the end result is the same.  I have two new bottles of Cahuita Pale Ale to drink.  It's not Imperial or Pilsen, Gracias a Dios!

I am aware that this is not a complete course on brewing beer, so please beer geeks refrain from writing comments about details I've forgotten (e.g. temperatures, IBUs)  I am an alcoholic traveler, not a brewer.

There Is Costa Rican Craft Beer: Costa Rica Craft Brewing in Cartago

What do I have to do to get a good craft beer in Costa Rica?

I've spent the past few years becoming a good beer geek in the United States.  My 2 years in Europe was fine for drinking good beer, but Costa Rica put that to a stand still.  As anyone who has been in Costa Rica for more than one day knows, it's pretty much Imperial or Pilsen everyday.  One of Costa Rica's brews, Rock Ice, even got on a list of "Worst Beers On Earth."  It looks pretty desperate.

What I found was "Costa Rica Craft Brewing" in Cartago.  This is possibly the most awkward, obvious name for a microbrewery in existence, but it serves a purpose.  The name clearly communicates to any gringo traveler or American expat beer nerd that this is not just another yellow, watery, mass-produced Central American beer.  To avoid typing out this ungainly name, I shall now refer to the brewery by their initials, CRCB.

CRCB's flagship brews are Libertas, a light, fruity "tropical ale," and Segua, a sweet, hoppy red ale.  Libertas caters more to the local Costa Rica market, which typically finds big beers like IPAs and Russian Imperial Porters to be too strong.  Segua is for American Hopheads who need a fix in Costa Rica because they can't find any IPAs.  CRCB also has seasonal beers which show up on tap every 3 or 4 months around the country.  You can find draft and bottle locations at their website: http://beer.cr/   Additionally there are specialty beers which they only have at the brewery itself.

My goal on a rainy Saturday in October was to locate the CRCB brewery and buy a few dozen bottles to sell (illegally) at the hostel I managed.  If you don't have a car, take a bus from San Jose to central Cartago.  After searching for a local bus to the "Tejar de El Guarco" neighborhood, you either walk a mile or take a taxi.  The specific address is: "800 mts oeste de RITEVE El Tejar de El Guarco" but as I've discussed in a previous post, directions in Costa Rica are meaningless.  Just call them first: (506) 2573-3724.

I went with two lovely Quebecois girls from the hostel who were in Costa Rica representing their clothing company, Poze, for a 'fashion bicycle tour.'  I'm still not sure what this means, but I got to take lots of pictures of two good-looking, French-Canadian girls.  Oh-la-la, eh?

Our first bus dropped us off in downtown Cartago, so we spent some time checking out the historic ruins of Santiago Apostal Parish.  Technically they aren't ruins, but were in mid-construction in 1910 when an earthquake struck.  The Costa Ricans figured - eh, Pura Vida - we'll get around to finishing them, and 100 years later...  The earthquake is the source of much myth; one 'telenovela-style' story says the priest who helped found the Santiago Parish fell in love with his non-clerical brother's wife.  God sent the earthquake as his punishment for being unfaithful.

After (literally) jumping around on the ruins for awhile, we found the bus to the rural Tejar neighborhood where CRCB is located.  With rain impeding our progress, we opted for a taxi down the country road and actually drove by the brewery once before finding it.  I don't know about the Quebecois girls' sentiments, but I felt as if I had arrived at an oasis in the middle of a beer desert.

CRCB, however is not a desert.  It is officially the coldest place in Costa Rica due to sub-zero refrigeration used in the building to maintain stable beer fermentation temperatures.  We were given a Spanglish tour by friendly Juan and one of the brewers, Stefan, a young half-German, half-Tico who favored the German side.  After showing the us the tanks, grains and bottle-works, we finished the short tour with the most important part - tasting.























Cartago is surprisingly more insanely, religiously-conservative than most of Costa Rica.  What this means for CRCB is that the provincial law prohibits you from opening bottles of beer in the brewery!  You are allowed to drink three tap samples, but you can't actually enjoy a full beer pint there...unreal.  The nice part of the tasting was getting to try a Blueberry Stout which was only available at the brewery.  When I realized I couldn't drink bottles or pints there, I attempted to abuse my sampling privileges then quickly got out of there with a 24 case of Libertas and Segua I had purchased for $50.

We briefly stopped at the Cartago City Market so the girls could go shopping for random, handicraft crap.  I wandered aimlessly around the market with my box of beer, listening to the Cartago rain fall, and savoring the moment I would return to the hostel and open the first hoppy Segua bottle.