Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico there was fermentation: corn was transmuted into tesgüano, agave into pulque, and honey into tepache.  Soon after the conquest the first Mexican brewery was founded in 1542 by Don Alonso Herrera, but the modern genre generically known as “Mexican beer” largely emerges after 1821 and the Mexican War of Independence, the product of German and Austrian immigrants combining their techniques with Mexican ingredients.  The popularity of the beer in America’s sibling to the south particularly grew during the reign of the Austrian Maximilian I, the brother of Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria-Hungary.  Put on the throne of the Second Mexican Empire by the French Napoleon III in 1864, Maximilian ruled only briefly before he was removed from the same in 1867 by Mexican Republicans – or more accurately, a firing squad – but his courtiers influenced the Mexican alcohol market permanently.

In 1884 a German gentleman by the name of Wilhelm Hasse immigrated to Veracruz where, thirteen years later he would found his own brewery.  His brewery soon produced Siglo XX, a nod to the emerging 20th Century, but eventually his brew would come to be known by the two Xs themselves, its memorialization forgotten by most consumers. 

In fact, most consumers today, at least in the US and Canada, are more likely to identify the beer with as the higher end of Mexican beer in taco joints and with an American of Jewish Russian heritage whose career was built on his work in television Westerns and action flicks, a man most folks know as the most interesting man in the world, a man whose ad campaign single-handedly doubled sales of Dos Equis in the United States between 2006 and 2011, and tripled it in Canada in a single year, 2008.

Hoy, en Huevos Encurtidos y Cerveza Fría, estamos hablando de Dos Equis Lager Especial.

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