Craft Beer in Rio de Janeiro: Taprooms, Breweries & What to Order

Chope is not craft beer, and this is the confusion that ruins orders

Rio's default beer culture is built on chope — draught lager, poured fast, served in a small glass with a thick head, and drunk cold enough to hurt. It is served in every boteco in the city and it is wonderful in its specific way: it is the thing you drink at a plastic table in 34 °C heat while eating a bolinho, and nothing else does that job as well.

It is also industrial lager, usually from one of the two big brewing groups, and it is not what anyone means by craft beer. If you walk into a boteco and ask for a chope you will get exactly what the city has been drinking for a century, and if you were hoping for something from a small brewery you will be disappointed in a way that is nobody's fault.

The words that get you the other thing are cerveja artesanal — artisanal beer — or, colloquially, breja when people are being casual about beer in general. A bar that has craft beer will say so: look for cervejaria, chopp artesanal, or a tap list on a blackboard rather than two branded fonts on the bar.

Understanding this distinction also tells you where to go. Botecos do chope. Craft beer lives in taprooms, brewpubs and a particular kind of bar, and those are concentrated in specific parts of the city rather than spread evenly through it.

Rua da Carioca: Rio's beer street

The most interesting development in Rio drinking over the last few years has happened on one downtown block. Rua da Carioca — a narrow historic street running off Praça Tiradentes that was, for most of the twentieth century, known for musical-instrument shops and the old Bar Luiz — has turned into a concentration of small breweries and brewpubs, to the point of being promoted as a beer district.

Several working houses now operate on and around the street, producing and serving on site. The effect is unusual for Rio: you can walk a short stretch of downtown and drink beer made in the buildings you are standing in, which is not something the Zona Sul offers.

It is a daytime-into-early-evening proposition rather than a late-night one. Centro empties after office hours, and while the beer street has given the area a reason to stay open later than it used to, you should plan to arrive in the late afternoon and take an app ride home rather than walking through downtown late. Our Centro guide covers the wider district.

Pair it with the rest of Centro. A Portuguese lunch, the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, the Travessa do Comércio, and then the beer street as the afternoon ends is one of the better days in Rio and almost no visitor does it.

Botafogo and the taproom model

If Centro is where the beer is made, Botafogo is where the scene drinks. The neighbourhood has become the centre of Rio's independent bar culture — small rooms, exposed brick, blackboard tap lists, shared tables and a crowd in its twenties and thirties — and it is where most of the dedicated craft-beer bars are.

Hocus Pocus, one of the best-known Brazilian craft breweries and a Rio fixture, runs a taproom in Botafogo in a converted workshop space, and its hazy IPAs and the Orange Sunshine blonde ale are among the beers that put Brazilian craft on the map internationally. It is a good orientation stop: if you like what is on there, you will recognise the brewery's taps all over the city afterwards.

The broader Botafogo pattern is worth knowing even if you are not chasing beer specifically. The streets around Rua Voluntários da Pátria and the Humaitá edge carry a density of good small bars, restaurants and music rooms that the Zona Sul beach neighbourhoods do not, and it is where cariocas go out when they are not going out for tourists.

Santa Teresa and Lapa also stock craft beer widely, with the difference that there you are drinking it inside an existing nightlife scene rather than at a beer destination. If you want samba and a decent IPA in the same evening, that is the pairing.

What to actually order in Rio's climate

Brazilian craft brewing went through the same IPA-dominant phase as everywhere else, and the shelves still lean that way. In Rio's heat, that is frequently the wrong choice, and the beers that work best here are not the ones the scene is proudest of.

Drink in the heat: pilsner and lager done properly, which several small breweries now do very well; witbier, which the humidity suits; sours and fruit beers, which Brazilian brewers make with fruit you will not have had in a beer before — jabuticaba, cajá, acerola; and session IPAs rather than the 7% versions.

Drink in the evening, or in winter: the hazy IPAs the scene is known for, stouts and porters, and the barrel-aged things that appear on taprooms' special boards. Rio's winter nights are cool enough to make a stout sensible, which is not true in February.

A practical note on serving: craft beer here comes in smaller glasses than chope, and that is deliberate rather than mean. A 300 ml pour of an 8% double IPA is not the same drink as a 300 ml chope at 4.5%, and the heat makes the difference land harder than it would at home. Pace it accordingly.

And on price: craft beer in Brazil is expensive relative to the rest of the eating-out economy, because of the tax structure as much as the brewing. A craft pour can cost several times a chope. That is normal, it is not a tourist markup, and it is worth knowing before the bill arrives.

Buying beer to drink elsewhere

Rio's drinking is substantially outdoors — the beach, the kerb, the praça, the kiosk — and craft beer fits into that less easily than chope does, but it fits.

Supermarkets in the Zona Sul now carry a reasonable craft selection, including the bigger Brazilian independents. Zona Sul and Pão de Açúcar supermarket chains both stock it, usually in a dedicated fridge away from the stacked crates of lager.

Dedicated beer shops — empórios — exist in Botafogo, Copacabana and Tijuca and will sell single bottles and cans, usually with someone behind the counter who will talk you through what is good this month. That is the fastest way to work out what you like before committing to a bar list.

Drinking in public is normal in Rio and not an issue in the way it is in many countries. What matters is glass: the beach bans it in practice and the kiosks serve in plastic, so buy cans rather than bottles if the beer is going to the sand. Our beach-etiquette guide covers the rest of the conventions.

One thing craft beer does not replace: the cold chope at a boteco on a hot afternoon. Rio has a drink for that, it is perfect, and no IPA is going to improve on it.

Fitting beer into a Rio trip

A half-day: late afternoon on the Rua da Carioca beer street in Centro, after a downtown walk, ending before the district empties.

An evening: Botafogo. Start at a taproom, eat somewhere on Voluntários da Pátria, finish in a bar. This is the most normal good night out in Rio and it costs a fraction of a Leblon equivalent.

A combined night: Lapa. Craft beer early at one of the bars that stocks it, then samba. The music is the point and the beer is the warm-up.

What not to do is organise a whole trip around it. Rio's beer scene is genuinely good and genuinely young, but it is not São Paulo's and it is not the reason to be here. Treat it as an excellent alternative to another beach sunset, not as the itinerary.