Brahma

No beer owns a serving format the way Brahma owns the chopp — the draft pour that fuels Rio de Janeiro's corner bars. Brazil's old stalwart pale lager stands at No. 7 on Kantar's 2026 ranking of world beer brands, carried there by sheer Latin American scale.

A Swiss immigrant named Joseph Villiger founded the brewery in Rio in 1888, and the name has been shorthand for Brazilian beer ever since; the flagship is still sold as Brahma Chopp, a tribute to a drinking culture that prizes draft beer under a thick collar of foam.

One detail rewards knowing: Brahma is the seed of the world's biggest brewer. Its company merged with rival Antarctica in 1999 to create Ambev, and Ambev's dealmakers went on to build InBev and then buy Anheuser-Busch itself. The empire that owns Budweiser traces a straight line back to this Rio brewery — which is why the brand's paperwork now runs through São Paulo and Leuven at once.

Bright gold and lively, with a thin, fast-falling head from the bottle — but at its best as chopp, drawn with a thick cap of creamy foam that Brazilian bartenders treat as mandatory. The flavor is light grain sweetness, a faint corn note, and mild bitterness, served brutally cold. In Rio heat, the temperature and the foam are half the pleasure.