Portuguese Craft

Porto is of course known mainly for Port wine, but if you look hard enough you can also find some craft beer, or Cerveja Artesanal as they say. "Sovina" is a beer brewed by Os Três Cervejeiros in small quantities and available at a fair few places around town, although it's not something you'd come across accidentally.

The entire range is unfiltered and includes an IPA, but when I popped round Mercearia das Flores they had just the witbier and the stout - the others had sold out.

It's got all the lemony zesty spicey type stuff you'd expect from a good witbier.
As for the stout: many stouts are bland. This one isn't by half. It's got an enormous burnt coffee taste that is a whisker short of being overpowering - the most interesting stout I've had in a long time.
Good show Sovina.

Gourmet?...

What do you do when your regular product is called "super" (even though it's not), but you want to have one product which is more "super" than the rest? Well, declare it "gourmet" of course.

"Super Bock" is a cruddy range of beers available all over Portugal, advertised with idiotic nonsensical English slogans, which in its regular form is your average adjunct filled lager. The "gourmet" version however boasts that it is 100% malt (presumably only gourmets don't want maize in their beer), and the "Abadia" denotes that it is supposedly imitating a Belgian abbey beer.

I was surprised by the colour, quite a fruity amber, and the decent head. There's definitely something in there, and compared to the piss that the rest of their beers are, I wouldn't mind making this a regular if I lived in Portugal. Buy it in a pack of 4 and it works out about 80 cents a bottle, so its price / taste ratio is not at all bad. They should drop the "abbey" claims though.
The thing is, you won't actually see it in a regular supermarket or booze shop - to get this, I had to go to El Corte Ingles, an upmarket Spanish shop, a bit like Galeria in Germany. So there you have it - piss tasting regular variety, available everywhere. Reasonable tasting variety, only 20 cents a bottle more, available hardly anywhere. Stands to reason really.

Portuguese Beer

The law of beer advertising states that the quality of a beer will be in inverse relationship to the amount that it is advertised. That's not to say that all beers that don't get advertised are good; rather that if a beer needs to be advertised it's probably crap.
After all, if your product is some revolting excuse for a lager that is bunged full of adjuncts and has a one day lagering time, it's not like people are going to drink it because it's any good. But sponsor some sporting event, bung it on TV every 30 seconds, maybe pay to get James Bond to drink it instead of Vodka Martinis, even drape it in a national flag, and people will be lining up to guzzle it with scarcely a care for that fact that it tastes like piss.
This law pretty much holds wherever you are. In Germany the few "national brands" that you see adverts for like Paulaner are renowned for being crap. Portugal isn't known for its beer, but there's a few home grown brews which pretty much reinforce the law.
"Super Bock" is advertised everywhere (there's probably a similar law for things that are sold as "super"), and comes in a number of varieties. Look on the ingredient list and it's adjunct city, predictably. This particular variety is called "Abadia" and lists sugar but no maize unlike the others. "Tagus" is another one that I encountered in a posh supermarket which I hadn't seen elsewhere, and seems to do without advertising - its label however proudly proclaims it to be an all-malt beer.
Any decent lager has an immediate crispness, and Tagus certainly does. It's nothing to get excited about, but is a perfectly pleasant drinkable brew with a lemony zest. "Super Bock" definitely lacks it - the contrast between the two is enormous. The bland, almost non-existent taste suggests that the budget went on advertising rather than lagering time.
There was also a Super Bock stout. It wasn't very interesting.