Heineken MexicoEach winter From Merida to Monterrey to Mexico City, when the deep-red Noche Buena boxes hit the supermarket shelves it’s “the unofficial start of the holidays – the moment when the Christmas season really begins”, says Marie Sarita Gaytán, author of the book, ¡Tequila!: Distilling the Spirit of Mexico.With its caramelly, burnt-coffee notes and robust 5.9% ABV, the dark-brown brew differs from many of Mexico’s better known lighter beers. While a Pacifico pilsner might pair well with fish tacos in sunny Baja California, and a cold Modelo Especial is a welcome thirst-quencher for any grilled-meat alambres, Noche Buena’s bittersweet flavour profile perfectly complements Mexico’s seasonal staples like turkey, dark-green romeritos (wild herbs steepedin mole) or salty bacalao (codfish) – making it an ideal part of the country’s classic Christmas meals.
Alamy“Its structure and body elevates the spiced flavours of Mexican cuisine,” says Karla González, brand manager at Heineken Mexico, which now owns the Moctezuma brewery where Noche Buena was first created. In recent years, the bottler has extended the sales window from the end of October to the start of January.For Mexican beer sommelier Guillermo Ysusi, Noche Buena has meant Christmas for as long as he remembers. “It’s a very traditional beverage during those December weeks,” he says. But to understand how a full-bodied, bold beer with German origins became Mexico’s de facto Christmas tipple, you have to understand the country’s unique relationship to beer itself.
The origins of a yuletide tipple
Since 2010, Mexico has been the largest beer exporter on the planet. Its $6.8bn annual international sales are more than the second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-biggest beer-exporting nations combined. Mexicans drink a lot of it, too: downing an average of 65 litres per person each year.
AlamySmall-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 MexicoThe 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.
Heineken MexicoNoche Buena today
According to Ysusi, during the Christmas season it’s become a common tradition for Mexicans to buy Noche Buena by the crateload and offer it to friends and loved ones in their home.Guille Gutiérrez, of the Adelitas Cerveceras Mexicanas national women’s beer collective, remembers that when she was at university in the late 1990s, she and her friends would eagerly await the appearance of Noche Buena, and whoever first saw it would let the others know. “We’d rush to the nearest store and make sure we got them before they disappeared,” she says.These days, as Mexican families and friends gather for Christmastime, you’ll often see children swinging bats at festive piñatas while adults crack open a cold, wintry Noche Buena. Travellers curious to see what all the buzz is about can find Noche Buena at local cantinas, bars and stocked at the many Oxxo convenience stores across the country.
Heineken Mexico