I was reading the last chunk of Against the Day a few weeks ago, freshly home from Mexico, and I found a passage containing a couple of drinks that I’d entirely missed recording on The List. Page 990 brings us to a cantina called “El Quetzal Dormido,” where Frank is drinking “either maguey brandy from Comitán or the at first horrible but after a while sort of interesting local moonshine known as pox.” You can imagine my horror at reading these words mere days after having left Mexico, back in a country not exactly conveniently located vis-à-vis proximity to Latin America. How I missed recording such juicy liquor cabinet entries I’ve no idea. I must have passed page 990 in a stupor on my first reading. But we’ll get them drank one way or another!

Anyway. This post is not about maguey brandy or pox, but another drink I forgot to drink in Mexico. It’s a passage we’ve visited before:

In the Capital, at a dark, out-of-the-way restaurant near the train station, Frank ran into Günther von Quassel, whom he hadn’t seen since Tampico. Günther was drinking imported German beer in a stein. Frank ordered a bottle of the local Orizaba product.

Against the Day, p. 986.

I mentioned the Orizaba beer back when we drank the imported German beer, actually saying it might have to wait until I found myself on Orizaba soil. Of course I entirely forgot about that, and didn’t get anywhere near Orizaba. Happily though, Orizaba beer turns out to be a category including Sol, a Mexican lager readily available even at this distant remove.

A-and hey! Sol’s more than just a lazy stand in for Frank’s Orizaba suds. According to the website of Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma, the brewery responsible for Sol, it’s been around since the 1890s. It was originally called “El Sol”, but dropped the article pretty early on. El Sol started out at a brewery called “El Salto del Agua”. When that operation was purchased by Cuauhtémoc in 1900, production was moved to Orizaba. So Frank’s Orizaba beer may very well have been a Sol!

What would Sol have tasted like in Frank’s day? The very first Mexican lager, according to a great write-up here, was brought about (in extremely Against the Day fashion) thanks to the construction of a railroad between Texas and Mexico in the early 1880s, allowing the importation of Mexico’s first brewery refrigeration. Whether the beers they were making at the time were mostly malty Vienna lagers or lighter styles featuring rice and corn in the grist seems to be a point of controversy. Frank’s Sol may have actually been not so different from mine.

The early beer industry in Mexico had one big enemy: pulque! Just when I was starting to like them. Casket Beer quotes a 1901 publication titled One Hundred Years of Brewing describing pulque as “unwholesome.” The 1901 authors go on to write “let us hope, then, that our precious barley-juice may soon be established as the favorite drink of the Mexican, and that the death sentence be pronounced on pulque.” As the writer at Casket points out, beer was apparently one more frontier for European imperialism. (Sorry to see Frank siding with the imperialists in his beverage choice here, but I guess he’s got kinda heavy associations with pulquerias.)

It seems also worth mentioning here that Cervecería Cuauhtémoc expanded in very Scarsdale Vibe vertically-integrated production machine fashion, birthing subsidiaries to malt grain, print labels, make glass, roll steel sheets, and more. By the 1950s, only the Mexican state-owned railroads and the oil industry were bigger business than Cuauhtémoc. Anyone else notice how often looking into the tiniest detail in a Pynchon book tends to unveil further details of real history that seem, well, pretty Pynchonian?

The beer itself — what is there to say about the contemporary Mexican lager? It’s pleasant cold fizzy refreshment, about as low on flavour as possible but no less enjoyable for it. Certainly a more sensible choice than Gunther’s. But get back to the pulqueria Frank!