There's a train that leaves Curitiba at eight fifteen in the morning, and the people on it are already drunk by nine. This is not a tragedy. This is the point. The train is called the Beer Train, run by a brewery called Bodebrown, and it descends the Serra do Mar of Paraná, Brazil, on tracks that engineers and workers laid down a hundred and forty years ago, while you fill a personalized mug with craft beer and watch the Atlantic rainforest pass by your window like a green hallucination.
I want to be honest with you. I've been on a lot of trains. Most of them are just metal tubes that take you from a place you wanted to leave to a place you don't want to be in yet. This one is different. This one has a destination but the destination is not the point. The point is the descent. The point is the beer.
The route was designed by the Rebouças brothers in the 1880s. Designed by the Rebouças brothers, the first Black men with university training in Brazil, the railway between Curitiba and Paranaguá was seen as one of the most daring engineering works in the world. Two Black engineers in a country that had just barely stopped enslaving people. They cut tunnels through the Serra do Mar with hand tools and dynamite and probably a lot of dead workers nobody ever named. Nine thousand workers participated in the construction, in challenging conditions: the area was swampy and prone to flooding, and there was no road to facilitate transport. The line still runs. A hundred and forty years and the line still runs. Most of what humans build doesn't last forty.
In 2009, a guy from Pernambuco named Samuel Cavalcanti and a woman from Paraná named Andrea Cordeiro Pinto opened a brewery in Curitiba and called it Bodebrown. Bodebrown is an internationally awarded brewery located in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. Founded in 2009 by Samuel Cavalcanti from Pernambuco and Andrea Cordeiro Pinto from Paraná. They went on to become the official brewery of Iron Maiden in Brazil, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to write but here we are. The brewery is known for being the official brewery of Iron Maiden in Brazil, having beers in partnership with Bruce Dickinson such as Trooper Brasil IPA, Aces High Hoppy Ale, and Mandrake Jambu Ale. Bruce Dickinson, the man who flies his own 747, has his name on a bottle in Curitiba. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
In 2012, somebody had the kind of idea that only happens after the third drink: what if we put the beer on the train. And that's how the Beer Train was born. The Beer Train, maintained in partnership with Serra Verde Express, had its first edition in 2012, and the journey through the Serra do Mar has been voted one of the ten most beautiful train rides in the world by the British newspaper The Guardian.
What actually happens on the train You show up at the Curitiba bus and rail station at seven thirty in the morning, hung over already if you're doing it right, and they hand you a kit. A personalized mug. A tasting set. Maybe a bag with cheeses and breads in it. Check-in is at 7:30 in the morning at the Curitiba rodoferroviária with the delivery of the Individual Kit: personalized mug, tasting kits and much more. At 8:10 we depart toward a serious sensory experience.
At eight fifteen the engineer pulls the whistle and the train moves. The first round of draft beer happens around 8 in the morning, as soon as the engineer whistles for the start of the trip. From then on it's just joy.
Eight in the morning. Beer. Technically, a breakfast. The beers come in order. They start light and end heavy. The harmonization begins with lighter beers and moves to stronger ones. The trip lasts three hours and there's no way to come away wanting less. They pour you a Perigosa Baby session IPA at 3.4 percent because nobody dies on the first round. Then a Blanche de Curitiba, a wit beer at 5.5. Then a Cerveja do Amor, which is Belgian Tripel and 8 percent and the name translates to "Beer of Love" because Brazilians don't have time for subtlety. Then the Cacau IPA, a collaboration with Stone Brewing from California. And finally, if you're still standing, the Atomga, a Russian Imperial Stout at 10 percent ABV that they pour because they want to see what you're made of.
Five beers. Three hours. Descending a mountain on tracks built before your great-grandfather was born.
The rock and the accordions The thing I love most, the thing that makes this train different from every other tourism gimmick on this planet, is the music. In the cars there's a lot of rock and heavy metal playing, and then a duo with an accordion player and a Scottish bagpiper appears, dressed as Scotsmen with kilts and everything, to liven up the beer drinkers on the beer train.
Read that again. Iron Maiden on the speakers, then a Scottish bagpiper in a kilt walks through the car. In the middle of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. While you drink Imperial Stout. While monkeys watch from the trees, probably wondering what species of mammal would do this to itself.
This is not curated. This is not Instagram-friendly. This is somebody's beautiful demented vision and they committed to it and it worked.
Morretes, where the train ends and the food begins The train arrives at Morretes, a colonial town on the coast of Paraná, around eleven in the morning. Our destination is Morretes, on the Paraná coast, for a typical lunch: Barreado is a beef stew with spices that spends hours upon hours in the perfect union of the clay pot with the fire.
Barreado is a stew. That word doesn't do it justice. It's beef cooked in a clay pot for ten or twelve hours until the meat forgets it was ever a cow and becomes something else. Something tender, dark, salty, unstoppable. You eat it with rice, with farinha, with banana. Yes, banana. Don't argue with the banana. The banana works.
You're now full of beer and stew, in a colonial town that feels like time stopped, and you have a few hours to walk through casarões centenários, century-old mansions that have probably seen worse versions of you stagger through their streets. At three in the afternoon you board a bus back to Curitiba. The bus, not the train. The train is for the descent, not the climb. Going down is romantic. Going up is just transportation.
The 140-year beer Last May, Bodebrown launched a special beer called Ferrovia 140, brewed to commemorate the railway's 140th anniversary. The Ferrovia 140 years is a Belgian Grisette Ale made with white grapes and a limited edition. The drink is a tribute to the 140th anniversary of the Curitiba-Paranaguá Railroad.
It's a grisette, a style from Wallonia, Belgium. Grisette is a type of beer originating from the Wallonia region in southern Belgium, and it became known as the beer of miners and metallurgists. The name grisette also has an interesting story: since miners were generally covered in gray soot, the beer they used to drink ended up being nicknamed "grisette," which means grayish in French.
A beer for miners. A beer named after the gray dust that covered the men who built the world. They brought it back, in Brazil, with sauvignon blanc grape must in it, to honor a railroad built by two Black engineers in the nineteenth century. The world doesn't always make sense but sometimes it makes a kind of poetry, and this is one of those times.
Why you should care You should care because this is what tourism should be. Not a bus full of selfie sticks. Not a buffet where everything tastes like cardboard. A train. A mountain. A clay pot. A bagpiper in a kilt. A beer named after the gray dust on a dead miner's face. You should care because Bodebrown does this only four or five times a year, and the spots fill up months in advance. The trip happens between four and five times a year, between Curitiba and the historic city of Morretes, in Paraná. The window opens, the window closes. You either book or you don't.
You should care because somewhere in your life you should have done something completely ridiculous and totally beautiful, and getting drunk on Imperial Stout while a train descends through the Atlantic Rainforest with Iron Maiden playing in the background qualifies on both counts.
The next train leaves whenever Bodebrown decides it leaves. Curitiba is a flight away from anywhere in Latin America. The trip costs less than a weekend in São Paulo and gives you ten times the story.
I'm pouring another. To the Rebouças brothers. To the men who laid those tracks. To Samuel and Andrea, who decided the best place for a beer was a moving train. To everybody who ever looked at a mountain and said: yes, but with beer.
Cheers.
