OUR STORY
Mountain roots, family heart.
Cervecería Cedral was born more than eleven years ago. But its story with this land began long before that.
The land
The brewery came later.
This land has been in the family for generations. Marilís's grandparents lived here, and later Carlos, Marilís and their children grew up here: a house, a stable, the school down the mountain. In time the family moved to San José and the farm stayed behind, waiting.
The tree on the label did not come from a drawing. There are three Spanish cedars on the farm. The oldest is close to a hundred years old, and it is the one on the label. It was here long before the first beer.
Where that stable stood, Cervecería Cedral stands today.
The beginning
Before it was a brewery, it was a way of being together.
It started in the kitchen at home, in San José. There was no business plan: there was curiosity and a good reason to spend time together. The first batches were almost pure foam; you could not even taste them. They brewed again, waited again, tried again.
Later the family opened Impar, a restaurant that set out to be exactly that: different, one of a kind. Its name was built from the five odd numbers —1, 3, 5, 7 and 9— arranged until they spelled the word. It served other people's beers, until the question came up: why not make our own?
The restaurant closed. The beer did not. When Carlos and Marilís went back to the farm, Impar came back with them.
There was never a day when they decided to become a brewery. They became one, batch by batch.
The names
The names of the house ended up on the bottles.
The names here did not come out of a branding exercise. They came from people, places and stories that already meant something to us.
Calín is Carlos, the founder: the nickname his mother gave him as a boy. Ita is Marilís, as her grandchildren call her. A red beer with something of her character: warm and strong-willed.
Impar you already know: first a restaurant, then its beer, and when the restaurant closed, the recipe stayed.
The fingerprint
A part of the founder stayed on every label.
The first bottles carried Carlos's actual fingerprint. Over the years the design was refined, but the fingerprint you see today still comes from that original one.
The names changed from one bottle to the next. The story behind them did not.
THE LEGACY
It began with being together. And that has not changed.
The first beers came out of curiosity and a family that wanted to make something together. Eleven years on, Cedral has grown. The reason to keep going is the same.
The river, the spring and the forest are as much a part of Cedral as the brewery: twenty-five hectares of protected forest, the panels on the roof that cover the brewery's electricity, and the wastewater treated before it returns to the river. Not because that makes for a better story. Because we want Cedral to go on having one.
All of this fits in a bottle.
The land. The family. The attempts. The craft. The years.
That is Cervecería Cedral. And we are only getting started.
