How do you like your beer?  Here’s how people in Teresina prefer it:

• Like a wedding dress  (Como vestido de noiva)
• Like a concrete worker’s leg  (Como canela de pedrero)
• Like a seal’s rear-end  (Como cú de foca)

Teresinenses expect their beer to be cold.  So cold, in fact, that it comes with a thin layer of frost on it, making it white like a wedding dress.  This, not flavor or body, is the mark of a good brew.

People in Brazil’s Northeast take pains to make sure their beer stays cold at the table too.  Large beer bottles are brought to the table in plastic or styrofoam covers to keep them insulated from hands passing them around.  Beer glasses are small for the same reason.

People in Teresina take this concern a step further by throwing out beer that gets too warm.  It’s common to see well-dressed diners at outdoor restaurants and bars tossing their drinks onto the ground.

The cool thing about this is that all beer drinking is a group activity.  Waiters bring one full bottle to the table at a time, lining up all the spent bottles on the floor.

Since I’m at the point where I’m missing my friends in the U.S. a lot, I’d love to be able to go out for beers with a big group of them.   At this point, though, it´d be strange for me to see everyone ordering their own bottle.