Presidente Roberto M. Ortiz 1827 (between Guido and Quintana), Recoleta

[Also has a downtown pub location at Paraguay 428]

The Buller brewpub in Recoleta is one of the few places in Buenos Aires where you can get a proper pint of beer. By ‘proper’, I mean two things. Firstly, served in a traditional pint glass. That is key. Beer just tastes better that way. But secondly, and far more importantly, the BEER MUST TASTE GOOD, and not like the mass-produced cats piss that is served in the majority of bars across the world, and is especially prevalent in Argentina, where Quilmes, high on preservatives and additives but low on any kind of taste whatsoever, prevails.

In fact, at first look it seems so difficult to get decent beer at a reasonable price in Buenos Aires, that you might just give up. I know I did… I tried for a while, then decided I would just have to forget about this great drink that is so close to my heart for the duration of my stay in Argentina. But then I took a trip home to the UK at Christmas, including a pilgrimage to the Fuller’s brewery (makers of the finest beer on the face of the planet), and reignited my passion for the real drink of the gods. And so, once back in Buenos Aires, I decided to start a series of posts that will go under the grandiose name of…

The Great Buenos Aires Beer Hunt

I mean, what would life be like without good beer? It just doesn’t bear thinking about…

A Short Introduction to Beer in Buenos Aires

Asado Argentina wrote an excellent introduction about beers that are available in Argentina, although it doesn’t make for great reading for a beer fan like myself… there is not a whole lot of flavorful beer to be found easily here, and most of the time you will have to make do with the usual suspects of Quilmes, Isenbeck, Brahma (from neighbors Brazil), and some ‘international’ beers that are actually made under license in Argentina and are closer to Quilmes than anything else: Heineken, Warsteiner, Budweiser and Stella Artois. In fact, in think Quilmes does brew most or all of those in Argentina!

There are fortunately some far better beers to be found in Buenos Aires, but you are going to have to hunt them down. An excellent starting point for such a search is this beer ’scooping’ report on Buenos Aires (apparently scooping means finding new beers to tick off your list… like a beer version of train spotting), which shows that there is a large amount of small breweries and brewpubs dotted around Buenos Aires, waiting to be found… but also that many are closing, I guess due to lack of business (this is not a beer city).

Anyway, Buller, being a few blocks from my new apartment, is as good as any to start… although I am expecting things to only get better from here on out in this series of beer posts. As you can see from this following photo, it looks like I am in for a long, hard, arduous slog to discover decent beer in Buenos Aires…

The things a man has to do in the name of investigative blogging!

Buller: The Beer

I went along to Buller with my new friend Ken and his lovely wife Helen, a norteamericano couple here for six months to learn Spanish. Fortunately Ken wields a mean pen and notepad, and he jotted down all of our tasting notes and posted them up in his blog, Un Ano Sin Primavera, reviewing six different beers in all; the full Buller range. No, we didn’t both drink six pints (although it is tempting), instead we had the sample taster that Buller do for AR$17, with cute little quarter pint (maybe smaller) glasses, as seen in the pictures above, and this one too, with names shown on the table placemat underneath:

The Winner: Honey Beer

As you will note from Ken’s posting of our over-the-top tasting notes, the best beers at Buller are the refreshing Light Lager, the deceptively alcholic and complex Honey Beer and the coffee-chocolate Dry Stout, with the ‘Cotton Candy’ Oktoberfest not far behind. Really the Cream and Indian Pale Ales were nothing special, and did not contain anything like the level of hoppiness that beers in that style should.

However, the beers were not of exceptionally high quality. Don’t get me wrong, they are great in comparison with Quilmes, but nothing there knocked me off my feet. The closest to doing so was the Honey Beer (not just because of its 8.5% alcohol content!), which will be my drink of choice when I return to Buller (it is basically my local pub, after all). Being a worthy winner, it deserved another pint, and a picture all to itself, as can be seen to the right of this text.

However, I have a feeling that other pubs here will bring greater beery delights: in fact I already know there are better beers at Antares in Palermo, which will probably be the next post in this series, and the scooping report suggests there are far better beers out there I have yet to try. Oh, but I will. And how!

Buller: Recoleta Location, Recoleta Prices

The pub is located in the ‘tourist strip’ of bars, clubs and restaurants that runs along calle R. M. Ortiz, right in front of that most famous (and fascinating) of Buenos Aires tourist attractions, the Recoleta Cemetery. However, I think it is probably one of the most pleasant places along this strip, almost completely due to the nice patio area it has out the front. I guess it is quite fitting for a pub that sells an Oktoberfest beer to have its own beer garden - I would say you could close your eyes and imagine you are in Munich, but really the beer isn’t anywhere near that good. Here is a shot of a parasol in the beer garden, with another photo soon after showing the lovely green surround:

All the same, I can’t imagine many better things to do on a hot Buenos Aires evening that to sit in the beer patio at Buller and have a few Light Lagers, or a couple of Honey Beers… oh OK then, make it a few of those too, seeing as I live within staggering distance home
The thing that always put me off Buller before was the prices. At AR$12 to AR$15 a pint, it costs at least two to three times as much for a pint as you would pay for a whole liter of Quilmes elsewhere. OK, so maybe it does taste two to three times better than Quilmes, but it is still way overpriced.

Happy Hour, How I love Thee So

But fortunately, the old ‘happy hour’ comes to the rescue. Buller stretch theirs from 6pm to 9pm EVERY DAY, at which point the beers cost from AR$7 to AR$9 a pint, which is far more reasonable, although still a little bit much by my book. Obviously being the cheapskate that I am, happy hour will almost certainly be the only time I return to Buller for my hit of Honey Beer. You can drink a suprisingly enjoyable amount in three hours if you really put your mind to it…

Buller Pub and Brewery: The Verdict

• Bar Rating:   (4/5) A very nice beer garden, some very decent beers, pretty good american style pub food on offer, authentic brewery vats visible in the window (see photo below), and a great location for visitors to the city - an all round good performer in the bar stakes.
• BA Authenticity:  (2/5) Beer is certainly not a Buenos Aires specialty, and the beers and garden at Buller are more German in style. However, the fairly slow service is very authentically BA, so they get an extra mark for that, whether they want it or not!
• Value:  (2/5) Buller would get a 3/5 during happy hour, but it is a 2/5 at all other times.. very expensive beer by Buenos Aires standards, but nothing exceptional in return for this extra cash. Once again, you are probably paying extra for a prime Recoleta location.

Buenos Aires Argentina Guide Special Tip

I would recommend going in the happy ‘hour’ of 6pm to 9pm, when the prices are more reasonable, and if possible, on a balmy summer evening at this time, when the beer garden is a great place to sup a few pints in. Drink up!

And another quick tip for beer fans… make sure you keep checking back to this blog for more pub reviews as I attempt to track down the best pints of beer in the city of Buenos Aires… next up, I think, is Antares in Palermo…