Yet, Mexico’s love affair with beer only blossomed within the last 100 years. During the late 19th- and early 20th-Centuries, industrialisation devastated artisanal breweries in Germany, Europe’s leading producer of beer. Scores of displaced beermakers subsequently embarked on something of a beer-making crusade, “[travelling] the world setting up breweries”, explains Jeffrey Pilcher, author of the book Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity. “One such place was Mexico.”
Small-scale breweries founded by Europeans opened all across Mexico, mostly producing top-fermenting ales. In 1875, Swiss brewer Santiago Graf introduced lager, effectively kick-starting Mexico’s industrial beer production. His Toluca brewery began producing a variety of different beers, including Victoria in 1906, which is now Mexico’s oldest continuously brewed beer.
Just before the turn of the 20th Century, the hoppy beverage was already popular among Mexico’s new bourgeois, and drinking beer signified one’s cosmopolitan status.
But its large-scale production would soon bring the drink to the masses. Other industrial breweries were established, notably the massive Cervecería Cuauhtémoc in Monterrey and Cervecería Moctezuma in Orizaba, Veracruz – which would become home to Noche Buena.
Heineken Mexico“We work for 11 months to deliver an unmatched beer in December” (Credit: Heineken Mexico)
The possibly apocryphal legend of Noche Buena goes that, in 1924, German master brewer Otto Neumaier created the beer as a special Christmas house reserve in Veracruz for him and his friends before eventually sharing it with coworkers and family, in the European yule tradition.
