beer!!!

Last week, we toured FEMSA. This company owns just about every beer that you can get in Monterrey, with the only exception of Corona (no one drinks that crap here anyway...hehe). It's flagships are Tecate and Tecate Light (which boasts less calories AND less alcohol - whats the point?!), and it also brews XX Lager (green bottle - yesss!), Bohemia, Carta Blanca, Noche Buena (a seasonal brew that I fell in love with here), Modelo, Sol and a few others. Yes, I was allowed in/near/in the vicinity of a brewery...

The tour was a little lackluster, since we didn't actually get to see the brewing process or the like. We did get to see the bottling process from a room on the second floor that looked out over the entire factory floor, which was cool. In Mexico, they reuse glass bottles, so there's a washing step, a quality-control check of the bottles (they fly under this little camera that takes a pic and decides if the bottle is worthy of reuse. If not, into the recycle bin it goes), and filling and capping steps. We also got to check out a separate little factory where they make bottle caps out of aluminum sheets, which was actually pretty rad. They create millions o' caps a day and bottle a butt-load o' brew (very technical term).

Best part of the tour: free cervezas at the end! (yes, that's why I attended...act surprised) I'm not sure FEMSA was expecting us to drink quite so much, given our short time between tour and bus departure. The T-bird population of 40ish killed 15 cases of beer in about 15 minutes...whoops! : ] We weren't allowed to take pics in any of the buildings, and I wasn't feeling so hot, so I took one. One whopping pic. Here she is:

Rob enjoying the beauty of Noche Buena in FEMSA's beer garden