Mexican craft beer may still only have 3% of the national market, but it is crushing it in Mexico City.
Folks are clamoring for local beer, and while there has always been an abundance of breweries in cities like Guadalajara and Tijuana, until recently not many breweries were actually located in the heart of CDMX.
These breweries have braved the traffic and chaos to bring capitalinos beer right down the street and around the corner and here is where you can find them.
Cerveza Cru Cru
Callejón de Romita #8, Colonia Roma
Making beer was just the hobby of a few of the Cru Cru partners until they banded together to open their microbrewery in the Colonia Roma. They now have a production area and a small taproom in a 19-century mansion in La Romita (with lots of intrigue sprinkled throughout the house’s pre-brewery history).
Cru Cru always has four of their standard beers on tap as well a few innovations or collaborations behind the bar if you ask nicely (the gose made with worm salt is fantastic). Their most popular beer is the pale ale (it makes up a whopping 70% of their production), but founder Luis de la Reguera says his current favorite is the Cru Cru porter.
While they don’t have a full-service taproom and bar just yet, which is what they are working towards, for the time being if you want to visit you can join my craft beer and taco tour (MexicoCityStreets.com), or join the twice weekly Craft Beer Turibus tour on Fridays and Saturdays, or come by the brewery on Thursday at 7:00pm for salsa class (no, you don’t have to dance in order to try the beer, it’s just when the brewery is guaranteed to be open).
Falling Piano Brewing
Coahuila 99, Colonia Roma
Started as a crowd-funding project, Falling Piano Brewery in the heart of Colonia Roma has 45 investors and two founding partners. In March of this year their set-up will be complete and downstairs will be the production area where you can get a tour and some beer-making 101.
For now, upstairs is a warehouse-style taproom with space for about 100 people. The kitchen is a rotating pop-up — each month a new chef or restaurant is invited to create the menu. They have 15 beers on tap, all the Falling Piano brand, with classic Mexico City names like tu perro está ladrando (your dog is barking), an IPA, or the tusci pop, a fruit beer inspired by a traditional Mexican candy.
These are some of the same folks that brought you HOP: The Beer Experience (see below), dedicated to bringing delicious beer to the masses of Mexico City. As founder Diego Lara likes to say, beer makes good moments better and bad moments bearable.
CervecerÃa Reforma
Calle Laura Mendez de Cuenca 21 A, Colonia Obrera
Officially opened in 2015 and selling beer since 2016 the CervecerÃa Reforma is a high-tech set-up where you can get a hyper-detailed tour of the processing room and learn how they make their three styles: a gose, a porter and an Irish red ale.
They are currently working on a fourth style so stay tuned. The name Reforma obviously refers to the city’s grand avenue but also, according to the brewery’s founders, the union of Mexico’s two strongest cultural influences – Europe, represented by Chapultepec castle at one end, and its indigenous roots, represented by the Templo Mayor at the other.
These two sides of the Mexican psyche are represented in their beer as well. This cervecerÃa doesn’t have its doors thrown open wide to the public (that is their next step), but is part of the city’s Craft Beer Turibus tour on Fridays and Saturdays and offers its space for group tastings and tours with advance notice.
HOP: The Beer Experience
Avenida Cuauhtémoc 870, Colonia Narvarte Poniente
Ok so HOP is not a brewery, but the three city locations are great places to get craft beer. HOP 2 in Colonia Narvarte has 52 beers on tap, more than anywhere else in the country! They started out as a craft beer store and then slowly evolved into craft beer bars and beer gardens that import hard-to-find-in-Mexico craft beer from around the world.
HOP 1 in Juárez is a cozy little beer cave, HOP 2 in Narvarte is a massive rollicking beer garden and the new HOP in Polanco is somewhere in the middle and a little more fancy, as you would imagine.
One more round
A couple more spots for tasting craft beer: the relatively new Principia brewing from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, in Colonia Del Valle (Magdalena 311) currently has 12 beers on their menu, with a little over half the bar’s own brand.
The Tasting Room (Chiapas 73) has also become a cult classic, their brand is Morenos and in addition to that they have a lot of United States craft beers on their menu.
The tiny Beer Bros in Narvarte (corner of Luz Saviñon and Juan Sánchez Azcona) also has a wide range of craft beer from Mexico and around the world.
Lydia Carey is a freelance writer based in Mexico City.
