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.