![]() If you want to make a sad, yellow beer that tastes like piss, honestly, be my guest. I decided to brew a Vienna-style lager in the end, even though it’s nothing like how Chango is portrayed in Desperado. “I think it’s a good way to use Mexican produce, and as craft brewers, we’re competing with mass market brewers that can make their beers much more cheaply,” Mariana says. Corn is often derided as a cheap adjunct used to save money by British brewers, but what do Mexican brewers think of it? ![]() “We’ll even mix the two together 50/50 in a glass, that’s called a Campechana.” Pilsners and Viennas are what 99% of people are drinking,” Mariana explains. “They came over with imperialism and they stayed popular. I started to think that I wanted this recipe to be more like a Vienna lager, to hark to the homebrew stereotype, but I wondered if these were actually popular in Mexico, or if this was just another falsely perpetuated myth. “My favourite is Carta Blanca, but it’s really available in the north.” “ are the kinds of beers you can’t get overseas, some of them even in parts of Mexico,” she tells me. Thankfully, Mariana was able to put me at ease. If all Mexican Lagers are bad, then I’m in real trouble with this recipe. We’ll often make cocktails called Michelada where we add lime and salt and maybe tomato juice or Worcestershire Sauce, and even a rim of shrimp around the glass.” That’s the reason for the lime, it’s the only way to make them drinkable. “I wouldn’t drink Sol or Corona if you paid me. “Well one or two of them do taste awful,” she says. I asked Mariana how she felt about the stereotypes surrounding Mexican Lager. The first time I saw anyone stuff the wedge into the bottle I was in Edinburgh, I was so shocked.” ![]() “If you go to the beach you will get given a lime, but you just squeeze the juice into the beer. “That’s a stereotype but not entirely,” Mariana says. This revelation made me wonder if there were other stereotypes around Mexican beer we had just assumed were correct, so I asked the ultimate question: do Mexicans actually stuff lime wedges into their bottles? “We’re not brewing ‘Mexican lager’, we’re brewing lager.” No one in Mexico really uses this as it’s too expensive.” “They are selling a yeast supposedly propagated from a Mexican beer as ‘Mexican Lager Yeast’. “I think it’s something that White Labs made popular,” she explains. “What about Mexican lager? Is there such a style?” I ask. “We brew all sorts of lagers in Mexico: pilsners, Viennas, bocks,” Mariana Dominguez of Cervecera Macaria, based in Mexico City, tells me as I try to get to the bottom of this Mexican lager mystery. There’s an implication that there are pilsner and Vienna style lagers produced in Mexico, but that there is no such thing specifically as ‘Mexican lager’. However, in beer writer Mark Dredge’s book A Brief History of Lager, he suggests that Mexican lagers are more like pilsners, and don’t have anything to do with Vienna lagers. This was initially going to be my template for this recipe. Homebrew recipes for Mexican lager ( like this homebrew kit from Northern Brewer) will, largely, tell you that the style has evolved from Vienna lager, but is lighter in colour and that it primarily uses pilsner and Vienna malt, plus flaked corn, German hops and Mexican lager yeast.
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