Written by Matt Dursum
It’s Thursday night in Lima, Peru and the sound of people talking loudly over drinks drifts through the evening fog. Inside, painters paint next to their pints of beer while regulars sit at the bar. It’s a typical early evening at Cervecería Invictus, a local craft brewery that serves the wave-rich bohemian neighborhood of Barranco.
Invictus was started by three friends in 2015. Its beers are brewed several miles away near the foot of the Andes, a location with plenty of space and a regular supply of mountain water. After brewing, the team transports their beer from their brewery to the taproom in Lima. “The city is very particular. It has its own way. Its own climate of people, its own culture,” says co-founder Fernando Salas. Originally from Arequipa, Peru, Salas moved to the city to attend the University of Lima in 1999. “People here really like to go out at night. A lot of people here surf, so it has a really chill vibe.”
Photos by Samantha Demangate
In Invictus’ taproom, you can find staple styles such as ales, lagers, ipas, Belgian ales, and stouts. Styles such as double ipas, imperial chocolate stouts, and sours serve Barranco’s pickier craft beer fanatics. On top of its regular line, Invictus experiments with chicha, a wild-fermented corn beer from the Andes that has an indigenous history that predates the Inca. “It’s not only a beverage they make, it’s part of their culture, with recipes passed down from grandfathers and grandmothers,” says Salas. Chicha is still made in indigenous communities throughout the Andes.
Using chicha as inspiration, Salas and his team created a test of what they hope could become Peru’s response to Brazil’s Caterina Sour—Brazil’s internationally acclaimed fruit-forward sour beer. “We did it a few months ago. We did a mixed fermentation using the yeast for chicha and beer yeasts, mixing both ingredients with barley and corn in different stages, and we ended up with a very good and interesting drink.”
Photos by Samantha Demangate
Lima’s connection to chicha and the Andes spans thousands of years. The city was home to several civilizations before the Inca Empire. The Spanish colonized the region in 1535 and called it the City of Kings, La Ciudad de Reyes. It soon became the powerful capital of the Peruvian Viceroyalty until the country won its independence in 1821. Lima grew significantly during the 20th century, attracting millions of people to its suburbs and improvised housing settlements in the hills.
Beer arrived in Peru in the late 19th century, by means of German immigrants such as Federico Bindels who formed the brewery Pilsen Callao, named after the Czech style pilsner he was brewing in the port city of Callao. In 1879, Americans Howard Johnston and Jacobo Backus started Backus & Johnston Brewery Ltd. For a century, it competed with the big beer and beverage companies CNC and Cervesur until it engulfed them in sales. Backus, as it’s commonly abbreviated to in Peru, now controls over 95% of the country’s beer market. And that’s where craft beer comes in.
Beer is just a small chunk of the market that craft breweries in Peru have to compete with. “I always say we don’t compete with the big breweries; we compete with alcohol, with cocktails,” says Salas. Lima is where the pisco sour, the national cocktail, became popularized. Its blend of rich pisco, sugar, lime juice and frothy egg whites fits with the city’s beach-town vibe.
Photo by Samantha Demangate
On top of competition with the drinks industry as a whole, brewery owners have to navigate other challenges, namely taxes. In Peru, small craft breweries are taxed at the same rate as the big beer brands. “We have to pay a lot of taxes, selective consumer tax, that is very high, and it’s going even higher now this year,” says Salas. On top of taxes are the raw materials. Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a global leader in barley production, grain costs have gone up considerably. “The raw materials are more expensive now, the taxes are growing, and we compete with the big cocktail bars. If we didn’t have a bar, we would be broke by now.”
Another equally challenging force brewers have to contend with is nature. Lima sits in one of the most tectonically active regions on the planet. “The last strong earthquake I remember was in 2012. It was a big earthquake,” says Salas, who was working at the time in the Bachus Brewery. “I was in the office late at night. I was almost alone. At first, there was no noise when it started and then it was like whoa!” As his coworkers fled the building, Salas stayed put. “I was about to go out of the building, but I thought this is a good opportunity to look and see. I remember stopping and starting to really see the walls moving like crazy, with the floor and the carpet.”
Still, with all its challenges, brewers In Lima and the rest of Peru are looking to get into the country’s craft beer market by starting small and dreaming big. For Salas, Invictus started as a dream while he was working for the big brand Bachus. “We started to sell the beer to two clients in the beginning, but the two clients fell in love with the beer, so one day we said maybe we should take the next step.” The team bought a micro brewery in 2015. “At the beginning, we were selling beer to clients, but in 2019, we opened a bar in Miraflores. In December, 2019. So you can imagine, the timing was…”
Photo by Jose Fuentes
Miraflores is a wealthy neighborhood on Lima’s surf-rich coastline. It’s home to surf breaks like Redondo and Waikiki that fill up with surfers during swell events. It’s also ground zero for the city’s tourism industry that attracts weekend visitors on their way to and from Cusco. At first, things were going great for the new brewery. Sales were skyrocketing. But in 2020, it had to close. “At the beginning, when we started with the brewery, there were maybe like 20 breweries here in Lima and then in 2018 there were maybe 50 or 60 and then the pandemic changed it all.”
The pandemic also affected inland breweries like Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado, one of Peru’s most awarded craft breweries, located in Pachar, a small town in the heart of the Andes Mountains. As of 2024, the brewery has two tap rooms in the popular gastronomic neighborhood of Miraflores. “I got more into brewing just from the actual flavor side of it, more from just being a drinker,” says Juan Mayorga, Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado’s co-founder and chief of marketing.
Mayorga worked for many years between the United States before returning home to Peru and discussing the logistics of opening a brewery with co-founder Joe Giammatteo. “We sort of joked about the idea of opening a brewery. Fast forward some years, Peru’s culinary scene obviously started exploding, but beer in Peru was still dominated by industrial beer. There was really not a craft beer scene,” he says. Other countries in South America already had a thriving craft beer industry, and when the brewery opened in 2014, it was the only one in the Sacred Valley.
Photos by Samantha Demangate
Peru’s Sacred Valley is just over two hours from Cusco and Machu Picchu. For the Inca and earlier civilizations, it was a crucial hub of agriculture, where thousands of species of potatoes, quinoa, herbs, and fruits were cultivated over millennia. For Mayorga, a longtime resident of the valley, it made sense to open in such a special place, away from the city and close to nature and great ingredients. “We were sort of the founding craft brewery in the valley at the time and we got started with the idea of being a brewery that was not really set within boundaries,” he says. “Let’s do whatever we want. We’re brewing new things, a real focus on quality always, really sort of doing the best we can, making the best beer possible, really pushing to perfect the art of craft beer, while at the same time innovating.”
The brewers at Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado use ingredients that reflect the region’s terroir. Fruits such as copoazú, maracuya (passionfruit), wild Andean berries, and cacao; herbs such as muña, and Andean grains go into its beers. “We really enjoy the innovative side of things and playing with new yeasts, new hops, and new adjuncts, new fruits, and new things,” says Mayorga. For its red ale, the team uses the seeds of the local cactus fruit airampo to dye it red. “We have a seasonal program that sort of opens us up to doing whatever we want whenever we want. We just did a purple corn barley wine that is now being aged in whiskey barrels that will come out in about a year or so.”
Photos by Samantha Demangate
The terroir at Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado couldn’t be more different from Lima’s. At just over 9,000 feet, brewers have to compensate with altitude when carbonating their beer. Challenges such as shortage of raw materials, roadblocks, and high altitude make brewing beer in the high Andes challenging.
For years, the brewery relied on local sales, especially through tourism. “If you had talked to me in 2019, our idea was just to be within the Cusco region, just become a really regional brewery,” says Mayorga. Bottles especially were out of the team’s focus. “We didn’t have any idea of wanting to bottle, but covid came around and forced us to get into bottling because otherwise we would have been shut down for many, many months.”
The pandemic hit the tourism-dependent Sacred Valley hard and the brewery had to adapt quickly. “When covid came around, we didn’t have a single bottle, we didn’t have labels, or anything at our brewery. We were like man, what are we going to do?” says Mayorga. The team started with a generic label where they could fill in a blank bubble to indicate what style of beer it is. “Little by little, we’ve grown our bottling department. I still hate bottles. I find them to be just trash. I hate that aspect of it.”
As time went on, the brewery needed to switch gears again. Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado was dependent on tourism and when the tourism market evaporated, its mission of being solely a regional brewery went with it. “That’s what Covid did for us. It gave me a lot of gray hairs and gave me a chance to somewhat reinvent the brewery. To a certain degree, it made us stronger because we are much more self-reliant.” Today, Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado has six taprooms, two in Cusco, two in the Sacred Valley, and two in Lima.
Photo (left) by Alexandra Tran – Photo (right) by Gwendolyn Anderson
“Covid was a very difficult point for the industry and even now there are breweries which are really struggling to make it through, to find their place in the market,” says Mayorga. Still, the market is ripe with creative brewers and businesses that are looking to push Peru’s beer industry to new heights. “It’s a complicated market, but there’s a lot of beautiful things going on in it. The quality of beer over the years has grown. To make a name in the scene now, you’ve really got to be making some great beer. You really need to have quality and you really need to have consistency there.”
Another key to survival, in addition to consistency and quality, is, according to Salas and Mayorga, cooperation and community. “That’s the fun side of the brewery scene, that collaborative, that communicative, that sharing ideas, sharing expertise, taking the business side of things away,” says Mayorga. In Lima and Cusco, brewers are organizing beer festivals, such as Lima’s Craft Beer Sessions Festival.
Breweries are also connecting to their customers and their communities. For the surf community, breweries such as Almirante and Cerveza Candelaria are becoming sponsors of local surf events and competitions. Invictus is connecting with art by hosting local artists and art workshops in their taproom. “We wanted to position ourselves as a place where artists can come and do something with their art, not the big ones, but the artists who are very young, not very well known,” says Salas.
Photo by Samantha Demangate
Aside from its challenges, Peru’s craft beer industry is developing fast. Breweries, such as Cervecería del Valle Sagrado and 7 Vidas, have won international medals. The latter won gold at the 2024 World Beer Cup for its rose gose. “There’s a nice beautiful scene that’s re-growing, re-fermenting really, that I think it’s really going to push,” says Mayorga. For Peru, impediments like taxes and earthquakes are hardly shaking the drive to create a new force in the international beer scene. As Mayorga puts it, “I wake up, happy to come to work every day. I still find things that keep me amused.”