Pablo, our beer guide at La Pintada in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Mexican beer still wallows where American suds once languished: weak, low-alcohol piss with no flavour or buzz, unless imbibed in quantity.

That still seems to be the case south of the Rio Grande, where shelves are brimming with bottles of Pacifico, Corona, Dos Equis and Modelo. All containing thin, indistinguishable liquid, the only merits of which are “cold” and “wet”. Best guzzled, not sipped and considered.

A typical thin, flavourless Mexican beer

Can you imagine squeezing a wedge of lime into a bottle of unfiltered west-coast ale to lend it some flavour? Didn’t think so.

The label was more colourful than the contents

Thus on a recent early-winter sojourn to the resort community of Cabo San Lucas, I made it a mission to find some good Mexican craft beer. Well, more of a quest than a mission, as by the time the daily beer thirst hit, it was rather hot to be roaming the dusty streets of downtown, where any craft beer was to be found.

But I was in luck, mostly because of a newfound friend, who had done most of the scouting for me. It turns out that arguably the best beer hall in Cabo was only 10 minutes away from our resort, via a mostly shaded, narrow sidewalk and a quick final dash across a busy street.

Our destination, La Pintada, has some good food, featuring thin-crust, stone-oven pizza, grilled fish and Mexican dishes like my flavourful organic chicken mole enchiladas. But the real draw was a list of some 10 craft beers on tap at the restaurant bar, called Ramuri.

The stone-oven pizza was mighty fine

Some were from Baja Brewing, a few blocks away. But the highlights were pints of IPA from further afield; great, complex stuff, especially on a two-for-one happy-hour deal.

One was Perro Del Mar, a pungent, unfiltered beer (7% alcohol, 80 IBU) from Cerveceria Wendlandt, a brewery way up north in Ensenada. Another, Lycan Lupus (5.7%), from Fauna Brewery in Mexicali.

But we were here for the craft beer, including this excellent Perro Del Mar IPA

We topped things off with a shared bottle of potent Astillero—an Imperial IPA, from Agua Mala in Ensenada, weighing in at 7.1%. We then staggered home in the late-afternoon heat for a siesta.

A list of the beers on tap and in bottles

La Pintada
Corner of Camino Real and Boulevard Lazaro Cardenas, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
Daily 1 pm-10 pm, except closed Monday