Cusquena and other famous beers of Peru

Mar 09

Cusquena and other famous beers of Peru

In English, Peruvian Cuisine Add comments

Cusquena is the most famous Peruvian beer.

I was very surprised last year to find Cusquena in my local Asda supermaket. This is the most famous beer in Peru and gets its name from the city of Cusco, which used to be the captial of the Inca Empire. All tourists that want to visit Machu Picchu travel through Cusco where they will definitely see this beer, but you can buy Cusquena all over Peru.

It is considered a very high quality beer because it uses pure barley, where other beers use barley and corn.

Arequipena - the beer from my home city welcomes you on the road to Arequipa

Of course Cusquena is not the only beer in Peru, each region has its own favourite brands, although now many of these are owned by the same multi national companies. Arequipena is the beer from my home city and it is advertised all over the place.

There are another regional beers in Peru like Pilsen Callao that comes from Callao, a province next to Lima and is one of the most popular beers. Another very popular one is Cristal (lager type) that probably is the most popular in Peru but is not exported anywhere.

Franca a Peruvian owned beer (this one is in Mancora!)

After being abroad for a while in a visit to Peru I saw that there are many more brands, when I left Peru Brahma (the famous brazilian beer) just started to be popular and after a couple of years being abroad when I came back I saw another new brands like Barena or Franca.

In Peru there isn’t the variety of british and imported beers that you can find in the UK, but definitely the range of peruvian beers is wider now.