Gallo Etc...

Curtis2010 · 01-24-2012, 08:13 PM

Toured the Gallo brewery here in Guatemala City, Guatemala yesterday. Impressive, modern, fully automated facility. Current system cranks out about 40,000 bottles per hour! Quite an evolution from a totally manual brewery that was started here in 1886.

Lots of interesting history which they have chosen to preserve. For example, some of the old narrow gauge tracks formerly used to move materials around have been preserved in situ. They have also preserved many generations of past equipment including the entire brew house from 1936 in immaculate condition -- complete with copper kettles imported from Germany.

Their flagship product, "Gallo", is a pretty typical mass produced adjunct beer. However, their "Moza" and "Moza Gold", while still mass produced beers, are not bad renditions of bock beers.

Talked with a member of the Castillo family (owners of Gallo) while I was there -- turns out his son is a home brewer.

Curtis2010 · 01-28-2012, 08:56 PM

Concurrent with visiting the Gallo brewery, I've been reading Randy Mosher's "Tasting Beer...." book. His suggestions got me to thinking about what effect proper serving might have on Gallo's "Moza Gold". Typically, you find this "bock" (or at least bock-like) beer in the same very cold cooler as Gallo's mainstream product. When served at these cold temps, Moza Gold has an almost excessive malty sweetness that is very "one-dimensional" (meaning it just tastes like sweet malt with no other interesting flavors...a bit like the starters I make using DME). However, when served at more appropriate serving temps (about 50-55F in my test), and given a good vigorous pour (off-gases some CO2 and builds quite a nice head in the process), the beer takes on a much more complex character -- the malt flavor become more complex and less sweet and you can even pick-up a bit of hops flavor. Even the head is more interesting with a mix of textures from creamy to "rocky" (as opposed to the industrially consistent head produced at very cold serving temps).

Moza Gold is a mass produced beer, so I was not expecting it to suddenly transform into a prize winning beer, but transform it did -- not into a medal winner but at least into a more interesting beer. The are no "craft brews" here in Guate so being able to coax a more interesting flavor out of a mass produced beer is quite a nice surprise.