It's a good time to be a beer snob in the Caribbean

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Photo by: Opena

I’m a cheap date. I’ve never been one of those hollow-leg drinkers who order beer by the pitcher. One or two cold ones, and I’m happily fuzzled. Quality matters more to me than quantity, so I’m a bit of a beer snob. That’s not to say a popular Caribbean brew — Red Stripe, for instance, or Medalla — can’t go very well with jerk chicken or mofongo. But when given the choice between a big-brewery beer and a small-brewery beer, I’ll almost always opt for the latter.

So I’m excited to see microbreweries popping up in the Caribbean. A few small operations, places like Bay Island Brewery, in Roatan, Honduras, and St. John Brewers, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, are making some genuinely fine — and uniquely Caribbean — craft beers. And that, for a beer snob, is news.

A recent adventure in Puerto Rico provided my first opportunity to sample the acclaimed beers of Old Harbor Brewery. This 30-person outfit crammed into a former bank building near the cruise terminal in Old San Juan bottles a regular menu of four beers, with a fifth in seasonal rotation. The Lager Pilsner, in particular, is as good as any I’ve tasted. Old Harbor also operates a busy restaurant right in the middle of the beer-making apparatus. Brewery workers arrive each night as the diners leave and work until morning. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta brew it. Har.

And over on Jost Van Dyke, in the BVI, our good friend Foxy Callwood has set up his own little brewery out behind Foxy’s Bar, from which he turns out four versions of Made ’Ere beer — “truly Caribbean draft beers always served at a frigid 36 degrees.” Yes, it’s a good time to be a beer snob in the Caribbean.

One last thing: I never learned how to open a beer bottle in a way that doesn’t involve an actual bottle opener — using a wedding band or my armpit or what have you. So it’s more than a little frustrating to be thirsty and caught without. My iPhone, however, rarely leaves my side (for better or worse). Wouldn’t it be great if ... Behold, the Opena Case. Designed for Apple’s iPhone 4 and 4S, the Opena (available in black or white) integrates a sturdy protective case with a slide-out bottle opener. It’s the brainchild of two guys from Australia, Chris Peters and Rob Ward (pictured here), who sought cash for the start-up via the online funding platform Kickstarter. It’s $40, with free shipping to the United States. Buy yours at openacase.com.

Cheers.

Follow Matthew Phenix on Twitter.