Reading Time: 9 minutes read
“¡Se fuel la luz!”
Old San Juan, Puerto Rico – 16 April 25
It’s about lunchtime on a Wednesday afternoon, and La Casita De Rones (a pink-painted historic building on Plaza Dársenas, pretty close to the Coast Guard station and the cruise dock) is doing a brisk trade on their breezy, covered patio.
Clank! The two cage fans that have been helping to make the patio breezy abruptly halt. Then, from inside the restaurant, someone exclaims, “¡Se fue la Luz!”
“¡Se fue la Luz!”; literally, “The light is out!” The phrase instantly reminds me of sweltering evenings lit by candlelight, and shower temperatures dependent on how much the sun has warmed the rooftop water cistern during the day. Power outages were frequent during the summer I spent in the Barrio Maria Auxiliadora, La Vega, Dominican Republic.
Now, I’m visiting Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, enjoying the hospitality of famously historic hotels, and restaurants and bars serving masterful dishes and well-crafted cocktails.
“It’s going to be a minute,” the waiter tells us when we order queso frito and ceviche con camarones. The restaurant, like many businesses in San Juan, has a generator, and we only have to be patient for a bit while they get that up and running. Queso frito (fried cheese) is cubed queso blanco, fried. Salty, slightly sweet, a touch chewy. Usually served with a guava sauce. Even with the restaurant having to switch to a generator in the middle of the lunch rush, the meal is delicious.
As the city fills with the dulcet tones of diesel generators, we walk up to Callejón de la Capilla and chill in the shade of the centuries-old buildings while we wait for Antonio Muñiz, the owner of Cervecería del Callejón, to arrive.
Soon, a slight man of average height arrives carrying a few grocery bags.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he says (it’s maybe 2:05), and starts unlocking the shutter-style doors. He’d wanted to park and unload his bottled water and other supplies, but the traffic lights are out due to the power outage, and people are driving extra erratically, so he just parked somewhere and carried a few bags in.
Cervecería del Callejón is located in the same building as, and rents the brewery space from, Hotel El Colonial. The building has a generator, so Antonio can keep the lights on even when the power is out. As Antonio unpacks his supplies and pours us glasses of water (I’m always grateful for water in a warm climate), he explains that the brewery and taproom is in a former salsa club which operated for around 20 years. Antonio’s had the space since 2018, but even now, someone will poke their head in at least once per week and ask about the salsa club.
Tony’s made a few changes to the interior layout, but the large mural of salsa players over the door harkens to its recent heritage. Incidentally, Antonio has a strong interest in the local bomba scene, and he hosts bomba events pretty often, usually featuring a group called La Bomba Va.
Initially, Antonio planned to open Cervecería del Callejón in winter 2019. He had everything ready; he was just waiting for the brewing permits. In December, he got the word that the permit was ready and essentially needed to be rubber-stamped. But, a crazy little thing called Covid-19 showed up, delaying the brewing permit and pretty much everything else. Even so, they did a soft opening for Las Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián (Puerto Rico’s biggest street festival) in mid-January of 2020. The brewery fully opened in September of 2020.
Visiting Old San Juan entails a lot of walking. The blue-tinged cobblestone streets were built for 16th-century foot traffic, and the steep uphill slope toward the outer wall and the forts strongly encourages taking breaks to enjoy cold beverages. Cervecería del Callejón is tucked around the corner from Calle San Francisco; earlier in the week, we’d seen their sandwich board declaring the presence of a cervecería in the alley, and stopped in. Some of the beers tasted like they might have been brewed using kveik yeast, a family of yeast strains that are traditionally used in Norwegian farmhouse beers, but are relatively new to brewers in other parts of the world.
Naturally, I wanted to talk to the brewer. Antonio does use kveik in some of his beers. His ~3 barrel nanobrewery usually keeps 6 – 8 beers on tap, working with four fermenters, each of which is kind of dedicated to brews using a particular yeast strain. For clearer IPA renditions, Antonio favors Lutra, available in a dry format from Omega Yeast. For hazy beers, he likes Voss Kveik (available from several yeast labs, including Lallemand and Omega). For saison, he uses the same yeast strain as Saison Dupont, and for a more tart version, he likes to use Philly Sour (from Lallemand).
What all of those different yeast strains have in common is that they like to be fermented at temperatures around 80 or 90 degrees Fahrenheit and that’s when they create the cleanest beers with few to no faults. Unlike lagers, which are usually what large breweries in hot places turn out (Medalla, for instance, is ubiquitous here) or like most ales, which still need some temperature control as they ferment, Antonio ferments his ales at ambient temperatures. He also carbonates them naturally in the keg, rather than using CO₂ to force carbonate. He’s been naturally keg-carbing his beers since he was homebrewing in Colorado, and the method seems to work quite well for him here at home, in Puerto Rico.
Common brewing wisdom maintains that you can’t get consistent results with keg-carbing; Tony explains that he uses about 45% of the usual volume of sugar for keg carbing. He says he does get consistent results, and the keg carbing scavenges the dissolved oxygen in the finished product.
(Ben’s note: Antonio had the D.O. in his beers tested. They ranged from 7-12 ppb. Additionally, Antonio relies on hop creep during refermentation; he said that it took a little while to dial in, but his consistency is spot-on. While I didn’t bring any lab equipment, sensory evaluation shows little to no oxidative products and beers that are within style.)
An exception to the ambient-temp beers is Calé, which the label on the bottle proclaims to be a biere de garde lager. It’s brewed off-site, as a collaboration project for Bohemia Cocina en Movimiento, which seems to be less a single restaurant, and more a series of culinary events. I don’t have a lot to say about that, since I’ve not attended any of their events. Antonio relates that two or three more restaurants have recently decided they want to serve Calé, which will enable him to brew it more regularly.
This is an island and just about everything has to be shipped in. That supply dynamic seems similar to Alaska, so I ask Antonio about how he sources his malt and hops. Largely, he buys malts from another local brewery (Ocean Labs) and he gets his hops from Yakima Valley Hops. The water is filtered San Juan water. Antonio finds that the local water profile works well for IPAs; he hardly has to add any salts to get the profile he wants for those.
Shipping time for things like hops and grains is usually two weeks or so. Antonio buys grain about every two to three weeks, and he usually brews once per week. He has some help in the taproom, but he does all the brewing and the business admin himself.
I’m starting to feel pretty toasty by the time we step out of the brewery and back into the taproom (which is still fairly warm, since the only power is from the building’s generator and out of respect for the hotel, Antonio doesn’t really crank the AC when he’s running on the generator).
I want something light, so I order a Sonoman Saison Noir. At 4.2% alcohol by volume, it’s an easy choice for a tropical afternoon. For this one, Antonio uses figs in the boil, which lend the beer a somewhat hazy medium-brown hue, and a rich aroma of dark fruits (go figure), and spices. Ben drinks the Saison Clásica. At 6.6% ABV, it’s a pretty spot-on expression of the style. Per Ben’s description, it’s dry, with some lemony flavors and black pepper-ish phenolics. It would be great to be able to compare Saison Clásica side-by-side with Saison Dupont, but that would be difficult.
On two other occasions, I try the Amapola Sour (4.5%). It’s brewed along the same lines as the saisons, but fermented with Philly Sour rather than saison yeast. Antonio explains that it usually turns out more sour, but this batch has a more restrained tart character than usual. He’s made a change when brewing this batch; he doesn’t say what’s different but he plans to go back to his earlier method for the next batch.
(Ben’s note: Tony also says that his Philly sour fermented beers typically finish at a pH below 3.5, however the Amapola sour which we tried finished at 3.64. It was still a bit tart, and very pleasant, but I would have loved to taste it below 3.5, ideally below 3.0).
Cervecería del Callejón appears to have a very local, community focus. Antonio is a technically proficient brewer; he’s working with his local environment to create clean beers that can be fermented at warm temps, without a lot of refrigeration, glycol chilling, or turbo-fermented under pressure. He’s also doing his part to bolster the bomba resurgence in San Juan. Sadly, I can’t stay long enough to see La Bomba Va this time, but maybe I can catch them on a return trip. After all, San Juan is only two or three flights, and three or four time zones (they don’t observe Daylight Saving Time) from home.
Afterword:
“Sí, volvió la luz.” Yes, the power came back. The power outage described here affected the entire island and also disabled municipal water services for thousands of people (many sources quoted 78,000 customers). The outage made national headlines in the States, and lasted all night, with power returning between late morning and the afternoon, depending on the area.
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