Peruvian drinking

As I mentioned in my previous ode to Pisco we rather fell of the wagon going around Peru, against all of our better plans.

Once we let pisco into our lives we wondered what other alcohol and beverages in general the Peruvians had we didn't know about.

Beer was an obvious thing to try, all through Bolivia and Peru each city had its own local lager. The names of these were things like pasceña (La Paz, also slang for a girl from La Paz), cusqueña (cusco) and arequipeña (arequipa). As you can see the start of each name denotes the city and the end of the name is apparently a colloquial way of saying "from the city of".

I tried most of these beers and found pretty much all of them were more than acceptable lagers although my judgment may be clouded by too much drinking fosters and carling as a young adult (all the ones i mentioned were certainly vastly superior to both these abominations).

As well as brewing from barley the Peruvians have been making drinks from corn at least since inca times, and probably much before that.

Some of these drinks are called chicha, of which we found a couple of types, which are quite different.

The first was Chica Morada, this is made from the red maize and contains no alcohol (but quite a bit of sugar). It looks a lot like ribena and probably tastes a little like it (although how much of that is because I associated the colour with ribena is still a grey area). It has become a favourite with both me and fiancée when we don't want water.

Chica De jora is a different matter. This was apparently a drink used by the inca priests. It is a cloudy grey in colour and tastes a lot more like you imagine fermented maize to taste like. There can be a lot of alcohol present depending on the brew and at restaurants you're not really sure how much as it just comes in a glass (in some cases they brew it themselves). The version we tried was very filling, with what I imagine quite a bit of crushed maize floating in suspension in it. I certainly think that drinking it with a big meal (as I did) was a mistake.

The final drink which is a Peruvian curiosity is Inka kola. This is the only local drink which continued to outsell coke once it had been launched in a country, and judging by the locals it is still their drink of choice. As you'd expect from coca-cola coming second isn't something they do well and so they bought the recipe and naming rights to the inka version and now they make and distribute it.

After seeing it everywhere I finally decided to give it a go and can tell you that it is basically iron bru but without the neon orange colour, a far more urine like yellow (it still has the unmissable glow of tartrazine).

Peruvian drink, like Peruvian food, is full of diversity and surprises. Even the Peruvian wine that doesn't make it into pisco is actually quite drinkable (although the Peruvian restaurants mainly serve Chillean and Argentinian wines).