Cariapa believes that if a brewpub can sell 150 litres a day, it becomes a viable business. “People are willing to pay a higher price for this beer and you save traditional expenses on the bottle, cap, carton, which work out to about 50% of the cost of bottled beer,” he says. “Once the first brewpub is launched, you’ll see a number of units coming up. I’m sure it’s going to be a big success,” he says.
Cariapa should know. He’s been creating beers since 1974 when fellow students worked long weekends to “prove their research, experimenting with different raw materials”. Now he’s got a dozen or so recipes he can’t wait to try out on the customers of the country’s first brewpub. I tell him I found his light beer too light and his dark beer too sweet. “It’s meant to be for light easy drinking,” he chides. “And the dark is meant to be sweet, it’s caramel, not burnt malt. If I make it like a stout, it will be too bitter and that’s not acceptable.” One thing is clear: Beer will soon be a favourite conversation starter.
(Shoba Narayan contributed to this story.)
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Beer makes the world go round
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”
-- Abraham Lincoln
“24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?”
-- Stephen Wright
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
-- Benjamin Franklin
“Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.”
-- Dave Barry
“I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.”
-- Shakespeare, Henry V
“Make sure that the beer—four pints a week—goes to the troops under fire before any of the parties in the rear get a drop.”
-- Winston Churchill to his secretary of war, 1944
“We old folks have to find our cushions and pillows in our tankards. Strong beer is the milk of the old.”
-- Martin Luther King
“I work until beer o’clock.”
-- Stephen King
“He was a wise man who invented beer.”
-- Plato
“Fermentation may have been a greater discovery than fire.”
-- David Rains Wallace
“Fill with mingled cream and amber, I will drain that glass again. Such hilarious visions clamber through the chambers of my brain. Quaintest thoughts—queerest fancies, Come to life and fade away: What care I how time advances? I am drinking ale today.”
-- Edgar Allan Poe
“Give me a woman who truly loves her beer and I will conquer the world.”
-- Kaiser Wilhelm II
“How much beer is in German Intelligence?”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Quotes compiled by the folks at Geist beer)