Mexican craft beer may still only have 3% of the national market, but it is crushing it in Mexico City.

Folks are clamoring for local beer, and while there has always been an abundance of breweries in cities like Guadalajara and Tijuana, until recently not many breweries were actually located in the heart of CDMX.

These breweries have braved the traffic and chaos to bring capitalinos beer right down the street and around the corner and here is where you can find them.

Cerveza Cru Cru

Callejón de Romita #8, Colonia Roma

Making beer was just the hobby of a few of the Cru Cru partners until they banded together to open their microbrewery in the Colonia Roma. They now have a production area and a small taproom in a 19-century mansion in La Romita (with lots of intrigue sprinkled throughout the house’s pre-brewery history).

Cru Cru always has four of their standard beers on tap as well a few innovations or collaborations behind the bar if you ask nicely (the gose made with worm salt is fantastic). Their most popular beer is the pale ale (it makes up a whopping 70% of their production), but founder Luis de la Reguera says his current favorite is the Cru Cru porter.

While they don’t have a full-service taproom and bar just yet, which is what they are working towards, for the time being if you want to visit you can join my craft beer and taco tour (MexicoCityStreets.com), or join the twice weekly Craft Beer Turibus tour on Fridays and Saturdays, or come by the brewery on Thursday at 7:00pm for salsa class (no, you don’t have to dance in order to try the beer, it’s just when the brewery is guaranteed to be open).

Falling Piano Brewing

Coahuila 99, Colonia Roma

Started as a crowd-funding project, Falling Piano Brewery in the heart of Colonia Roma has 45 investors and two founding partners. In March of this year their set-up will be complete and downstairs will be the production area where you can get a tour and some beer-making 101.

For now, upstairs is a warehouse-style taproom with space for about 100 people. The kitchen is a rotating pop-up — each month a new chef or restaurant is invited to create the menu. They have 15 beers on tap, all the Falling Piano brand, with classic Mexico City names like tu perro está ladrando (your dog is barking), an IPA, or the tusci pop, a fruit beer inspired by a traditional Mexican candy.

These are some of the same folks that brought you HOP: The Beer Experience (see below), dedicated to bringing delicious beer to the masses of Mexico City. As founder Diego Lara likes to say, beer makes good moments better and bad moments bearable.

Cervecería Reforma

Calle Laura Mendez de Cuenca 21 A, Colonia Obrera

Officially opened in 2015 and selling beer since 2016 the Cervecería Reforma is a high-tech set-up where you can get a hyper-detailed tour of the processing room and learn how they make their three styles: a gose, a porter and an Irish red ale.

They are currently working on a fourth style so stay tuned. The name Reforma obviously refers to the city’s grand avenue but also, according to the brewery’s founders, the union of Mexico’s two strongest cultural influences – Europe, represented by Chapultepec castle at one end, and its indigenous roots, represented by the Templo Mayor at the other.

These two sides of the Mexican psyche are represented in their beer as well. This cervecería doesn’t have its doors thrown open wide to the public (that is their next step), but is part of the city’s Craft Beer Turibus tour on Fridays and Saturdays and offers its space for group tastings and tours with advance notice.

HOP: The Beer Experience

Avenida Cuauhtémoc 870, Colonia Narvarte Poniente

Ok so HOP is not a brewery, but the three city locations are great places to get craft beer. HOP 2 in Colonia Narvarte has 52 beers on tap, more than anywhere else in the country! They started out as a craft beer store and then slowly evolved into craft beer bars and beer gardens that import hard-to-find-in-Mexico craft beer from around the world.

HOP 1 in Juárez is a cozy little beer cave, HOP 2 in Narvarte is a massive rollicking beer garden and the new HOP in Polanco is somewhere in the middle and a little more fancy, as you would imagine.

One more round

A couple more spots for tasting craft beer: the relatively new Principiabrewing from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, in Colonia Del Valle (Magdalena 311) currently has 12 beers on their menu, with a little over half the bar’s own brand.

The Tasting Room (Chiapas 73) has also become a cult classic, their brand is Morenos and in addition to that they have a lot of United States craft beers on their menu.

The tiny Beer Bros in Narvarte (corner of Luz Saviñon and Juan Sánchez Azcona) also has a wide range of craft beer from Mexico and around the world.

Lydia Carey is a freelance writer based in Mexico City.

The capital of this ancient nation was Teuchitlán, “The Place of the First God,” located within the shadow of the Tequila Volcano, 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city.

Inhabitants of the modern-day Teuchitlán knew there was something special about a group of large mounds just over a kilometer north of town, but had no idea how important they once were. They called these mounds Los Guachimontones.

I paid my first visit to this site in 1985 before any sort of development had taken place. Upon reaching the edge of the little town of Teuchitlán, I stared in disbelief at the “road” leading to the Guachimontones. I was driving a Jeep, but that so-called road was such a mass of ruts and churned up rocks that I simply parked and went on foot.

All I could see were tall weeds and cornfields but, by good luck, I found a farmer out there who pointed to a hill covered with heavy brush. “That is a Guachimontón,” he said.

Just getting through the corn to the base of the Guachimontón was difficult enough, but now I had to push my way through thorn bushes, cacti and irritating nettles to finally reach the very top of the hill — which did appear to be man-made. “This is an unusually tall heap of rocks,” I thought, “but that’s all it is, just a heap of rocks.”

Without realizing it, I had drawn a conclusion similar to what many archaeologists of the time thought about the nature of ancient west Mexico and — like them — I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Unknown to me, two local researchers, archaeologist Phil Weigand and his wife Acelia, an art historian, had looked beneath the surface at Teuchitlán and had discovered that the textbooks were wrong. An amazing civilization — unique in many ways — had once flourished in those weed-covered hills.

Twenty some years before my visit to the Guachimontones, Acelia Weigand happened to be visiting a natural spring located just east of Teuchitlán. “It was in 1962,” she says. “The kids were diving near a huge fig tree in a small, natural pool when I saw these shiny pieces of glass under the water. I told them to be careful because there were broken bottles down there and they could get cut.

“So the kids started pulling these shiny things out and they said, ‘No auntie, they’re not bottles, they’re knives!’ Well, all of them were long, sharp, prismatic blades of obsidian and I brought 13 of them back to our house in Etzatlán. But I couldn’t get Felipe to pay any attention to them for seven years. Seven years it took for me to lead him up to the obsidian workshop from which those blades had washed down to the swimming hole!”

This ancient obsidian workshop led the Weigands to the ruins of the pyramids now known as the Guachimontones. Phil Weigand later recalled: “I stood on the largest pyramid, looked around and thought, this is unexpected.”

It turned out to be an understatement. The Weigands set aside a summer to explore the pyramids they had found and ended up spending the next 29 years documenting a complex, highly organized society which had begun in western Mexico in 1000 BC and had reached its apogee around 200 AD.

I had no clue what the Guachimontones represented until one day in 1997, when I heard rumors about an American archaeologist living in the town of Etzatlán, 26 kilometers northwest of Teuchitlán. Tracking down a foreigner in a small Mexican town is easy and this is how I first met the Weigands.

One of the many endearing characteristics of Phil Weigand was his total lack of pretentiousness and his willingness to share his discoveries — at length, I might add — with anyone who would listen, and I do mean anyone, even the humblest rancher or laborer.

“Look at these clay models of people gathered around the Guachimontones,” he said. “I’ve just had them made. Each one is a faithful copy of a 2,000-year-old original found right here in this part of Jalisco. Aren’t they amazing?”

“Amazing” doesn’t do justice to those clay models. They are full of life. We see dozens of people socializing, chatting and jostling one another or perhaps linked arm in arm, performing the cadena (chain dance), while listening to groups of musicians. Around this walkway, on evenly spaced, terraced platforms, the local VIPs gazed out the doorways of buildings that to western eyes might look typically Chinese.

These structures had tall, pointy, gabled roofs which, along with their wattle-and-daub walls, were carefully plastered and beautifully painted in bright colors. The VIPs chatted with the people in the milling crowd, perhaps discussing the latest score of the ball game taking place in the court located alongside the largest pyramid. Directly to the north, a huge crowd of onlookers may have watched the events from a steep, terraced hillside.

Get Directions

Teuchitlán

Everyone, of course, was anxiously waiting for the main event of the day to begin. A sturdy pole had been set in the exact center of each steep pyramid. No one today knows exactly what its function was. The clay models show a “flier” balanced on top of the pole, probably representing Ehécatl, the Bird Man and, as the clay models show us, a crowd of people pushing on the pole caused him to “fly.”

It is also possible that ropes were wound around the pole, as is still done today in Veracruz, and that fliers tied to the ropes and bedecked with feathers swooped through the air in ever-widening circles, soaring up and down like graceful birds, finally to land on the circular walkway around the pyramid.

This, however, is pure speculation on my part, as no archaeological proof has yet been found to back up the idea that the ritual of voladores originated here.

The size and proportions of the rings around the mound followed a deliberately chosen geometrical formula, and the diameter of the pyramid was always 2.5 times the width of the walkway. These proportions form the basis for Teuchitlán’s formal circular architecture which is unique not only in Mesoamerica, but in the entire world. Nearly 200 complexes employing this architectural style have been found in western Mexico, making it easy for archaeologists to trace the limits of Teuchitlán’s influence.

No one knows what these people called themselves. What we do know is that they revered Ehecatl, “the First God, who was known as the Night Wind and portrayed as the Bird Man, covered with feathers.” Ehecatl apparently didn’t need human sacrifice to satisfy his ego. Perhaps because of this, the people of the Teuchitlán tradition seem to have been peaceful souls in comparison with the Aztecs, who came much later.

The bright blaze of the Teuchitlán civilization began to dim around the year 450 AD for reasons so far unknown. Archaeologists tell us that a day came when every building around the circular pyramids was burned to the ground. At the same time, new organizational and political systems had sprung into existence and the ritual of the Bird Man simply disappeared. These changes were expressed architecturally in the form of rectangular buildings. Gone were the circular pyramids — forever.

For a while it was thought that the Teuchitlán people had simply vanished around 450 AD, but when the foundations were dug for a museum, now called the Phil Weigand Interpretive Center, numerous proofs were uncovered showing that Teuchitlán had been inhabited continuously for 2,000 years, from the pre-classical period right through to the post-classical. The enigma of this curious and industrious civilization is today inspiring a new generation of archaeologists to carry on the studies begun by the Weigands and to dig even deeper into the fascinating mystery of the ancient people of Teuchitlán.

More than 150,000 people from all over the world visit the Guachimontones ruins and museum every year. The site is open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9 to 5 and there is no admission charge on Tuesdays. An English-Spanish guide to the Guachimontones is available at the museum and can be ordered online.

The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for more than 30 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.