One feature that is not uncommon in many places of Latin America -and a few other countries outside the region- is that the beer consumption is not measured by the style of beer -ale, stout, pilsen- but by the brand. Most people don’t have a clue of what type of beer they’re drinking, particularly respecting blondes. While in the latest years the weight of smaller breweries has grown, its weight on the market is definitely still small.

Why the lack of higher specialization when drinking beer? why do we drink brands and not varieties? why is that a lot of people doesn’t even know there’s many varieties of beer, as with wine? It’s interesting to see how the weight of marketing, built on brands, hasn’t even helped to associate the name of a beer to a variety. In Argentina, for example, many people drink Quilmes, and period.

What’s this beer’s variety? While it’s true that in the latest years this company, now owned by Ambev, has tried to put on the market some new variety -for instance, Quilmes stout- the attempt is at least something isolated. It doesn’t seem to exist plans, in the next months, for new labels. Thus, the argentinean beer market has no red beer, for example. And dark beers usually have generic names, with few exceptions. To get to drink well identified varieties, one has to point at smaller brewery brands, such as Otro Mundo, Antares, Barbarroja, Blest, Otto Tipp, Patagonia, etc. The big problem is, of course, the price, that can be over five times more expensive than a massive brand’s.

Many anthropology of consumption works have proved how our appropiation of the products we buy has become more sophisticated. But this phenomenon, at least in the beer market, still seems irrelevant, specially when compared to the level of sophistication the wine segment has. And I’m talking about countries where a strong wine consumption exists, wines that were once barely labeled as “red” and “white”.

Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll start to see a bigger variety in Latin American massive beers markets. But, I think that, for a while, I’ll have to settle for small breweries red or stout beers. Which, by the way, has nothing wrong as long as I can afford them And of course, good brewed beers suggestions are welcome.