Honduras Beer

I was a heavy beer drinker for about 28 years, of course I occasionally drank rum whiskey or some other liquor but what I really liked was beer. I used to drink about 4 days a week so in my drinking days I did drink a lot of beer because I wasn't a social drinker I used to drink to get drunk, the I don't remember how I got home kind of Drunk.

Luckily here in Honduras we have always had reasonably good beer, and I have tried beer from a lot of countries including Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, el Salvador, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Australia etc. And of course a few of these were better than the local beer but I do think the beer produced in Honduras does well compared to that of other countries.

I don't know about now because the local brewery which has a monopoly on beer production has been sold a couple of times and apparently the current proprietor also owns breweries in Guatemala and El Salvador and the production process has been standardized with that in those two countries, so I don't really know if the quality is the same.

We have 4 different brands of beer here, Salva Vida which is the oldest and I have been told the name comes from the joining of the first syllables of the name of a banana company's founders who also set up the first brewery, Salvatore Vaccarro and Vicente D'Antoni, could be, it also means Life Saver in Spanish so I don't know, the other three beers are Imperial, Port Royal and Barena.

We used to have Nacional beer which was sold in a transparent bottle, but it was kind of weak and was considered a woman's beer. It's production was stopped because supposedly the transparent glass made the beer go bad.

Of course, apart from this monopoly we also have home brewed beers, you can find these for sale in different parts of the country, I have a friend in Olanchito who produces one, and these are apparently very good, he has offered me a taste but frankly I haven't had a drink in 12 years why jeopardize this?

The most expensive beer I have ever had was once I went to Wilmington, Delaware and I went to a Mall, so I bought a Heineken and it cost me $7.00, which to me was a lot for a beer, here in Honduras a beer costs less than a dollar. The worst hang over I ever had was one time in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala around 1996, I spent the night at a night club called Marino's, it had about 36 women who danced naked, I watched a lot of them so I must have had at least 20 Gallo's (the Guatemalan beer), the day after I really had an awful time, I was told they use a lot of chemicals to make this beer, probably a lie, I just drank too much without eating.

As an anecdote, the next day which was a Sunday I hopped on a Taxi and there was this woman on board, maybe about 55-60 and when she saw me she said she liked me and was taking me to her home in Flores, Peten, she was carrying a lot of big boxes in the trunk of the taxi so I think she must have been in some commerce setup, but she sure scared the crap out of me, I got off at the next corner, she did pay for my taxi, and just ran away from there.