From: San Paolo, Brazil
Type: “Beer Style Pilsen”
Price: $2
Alc. Content: 5%

As I began my tour of beers from around the world, I was in a good mood. I went to Starbucks that evening with a friend and wrote almost a page of a paper I’ve been working on. If a page doesn’t seem like a lot to you, my guess is you haven’t been in grad school, ’cause I walked out of there feeling like I was Captain Productivity.

I got back home about 10 PM, and pulled out the first bottle from my shopping spree at Wine Warehouse, a Brazilian beer called Skol. This one seemed a little more accessible to a beer neophyte such as myself; it was relatively cheap, it had a screw top (there’s even a little logo of a bottle opener with a line through it on the back), and didn’t have insanely precise directions about how it should be served (as do many of the others). The label said it’s a “Beer Style Pilsen”, which I can’t find described anywhere, but after a little bit of poking around on Wikipedia I decided that “Beer Style Pilsen” is poorly-translated Portuguese for Pilsener.

Skol is a very light beer, like a good Pilsener should be. (Apparently, at least, according to Wikipedia.) It didn’t seem very “hoppy” to me, but I say that admitting that I don’t really know what hops taste like. I once smelled a vat of hops in the Coors brewery when I was 15 and I remember thinking that was the most horrible stench I ever encountered. So now I automatically associate hops with horrible taste, with little to no evidence to back up my claim. I’d probably deny the presence of hops in a good-tasting beer just on principle, which was probably what I was doing here. In fact, the label said that this was brewed with “rice choicest hops and best barley malt”. Hey, I don’t know what those are but they sound pretty good.

Skol is also unfiltered, which freaked me out a little as I poured it into the glass. But the cloudy appearance and the little bits floating around in the liquid didn’t affect the taste at all. This was a light, slightly sweet beer that tasted pretty good, if a little bland.