Last reviewed 2026-04-17 · How we pick bars
Brazil's craft beer movement arrived with characteristic Brazilian intensity — within fifteen years, what began as a handful of homebrewing hobbyists in São Paulo has become a national industry producing some of Latin America's most interesting beer. Rio came to it slightly later than its inland rival, but with the same enthusiasm. Today, the city hosts dozens of dedicated taprooms, neighbourhood cervejarias, and bottle shops stocking small-batch production from breweries across the country. These are the Rio de Janeiro craft beer bars worth travelling for.
Cervejaria Carioca
Cervejaria Carioca brews in a converted colonial warehouse in Santa Teresa, visible through a glass partition behind the bar — a practical statement of transparency that extends to their ingredient sourcing. All 24 taps pour house-brewed beer, with the lineup rotating constantly around the year's seasonal ingredients: a passion fruit wheat beer in summer, a dark stout brewed with café do sítio (estate coffee from Espírito Santo) in the cooler months, and a permanent tropical IPA built on hops from Brazil's small southern hop-growing region.
The food programme is built around beer pairing rather than as an afterthought: smoked pork ribs glazed with the stout, battered shrimp served with the wheat beer, a charcuterie board designed to move through three tasting flights. The space opens onto a cobbled courtyard with views down the hill towards the bay, and on weekend afternoons it becomes one of Santa Teresa's most pleasant places to spend several hours.
Chopp da Ilha
Getting to Chopp da Ilha requires a forty-minute ferry to Ilha de Paquetá, the car-free island in Guanabara Bay where residents still travel by bicycle and horse-drawn cart. The effort is repaid in full. The bar occupies a terrace directly on the island's western shore, with plastic chairs, palm trees, and the unlikely combination of refrigerated craft beer taps and an unobstructed view of Rio's skyline across the water.
The selection focuses on independent Brazilian producers: a rotating selection of eight craft taps, all served in chilled dimple mugs with the generous head that Brazilians consider non-negotiable. The kitchen does one thing well — grilled fish caught that morning by the island's fishermen — and the combination of the setting, the beer, and the food has made this one of the most talked-about day-trip bars in Rio. Go on a weekday; weekends see long queues for the ferry.
Own a craft brewery or bar in Rio? Reach readers actively planning Brazilian trips who prioritise authentic drinking experiences over tourist-track destinations.
Explore sponsorship →Boteco Beleza
Boteco Beleza is Rio's most comprehensive craft tap room, housed in a wide Leblon storefront with a walk-in cold room visible through a glass wall, stacked floor to ceiling with kegs from breweries across Brazil. The forty taps span every style currently being produced by Brazilian craft brewers — from light hoppy lagers to dark wood-aged imperial stouts — with a particular strength in tropical and fruited styles that make use of Amazonian ingredients unavailable to brewers elsewhere in the world.
The staff are fluent, enthusiastic, and entirely unpretentious about helping you navigate forty options without making you feel inadequate for not already knowing what a kettle sour is. The petiscos (snacks) are a cut above: fresh-made pão de queijo, excellent cured meats, and a daily changing selection of bar food drawn from whatever the kitchen finds good at the Leblon market that morning. One of the best beer bars in South America, with none of the self-consciousness that qualifier might suggest.
Lapa Cervejaria Artesanal
Set in an industrial space under Lapa's famous aqueduct arches, Lapa Cervejaria Artesanal has become the neighbourhood's answer to the question of what happens when craft beer and samba collide. The brewery produces six core beers and a rotating seasonal programme, all served from gleaming copper taps mounted on a reclaimed timber bar counter. The brewing tanks occupy one half of the space; the stage occupies the other.
Thursday through Saturday, live bands play from 10pm — a mix of samba, pagode, and jazz-inflected choro that keeps the space going until 3am and beyond. The beer programme stays serious even at 2am: the session IPA and the maracujá (passionfruit) blonde are designed to sustain long evenings, and they succeed. One of the few bars in the world where you can watch a brew team beginning a morning batch through a window while finishing the previous batch in a glass.
Also drinking cocktails in Rio? Read our guide to Rio de Janeiro's best cocktail bars, or explore all bars with our complete Rio neighbourhood guide.
Explore Rio →Garagem Santa
Garagem Santa occupies a former garage in Botafogo — the exposed brick, steel joists, and concrete floor are original — and has become the neighbourhood's most trusted destination for people who take their drinking seriously without taking themselves seriously. The front half is a bar with sixteen taps focused on small-production Brazilian craft; the back half is a bottle shop with the city's best selection of natural wine and imported European craft beer.
The team here curates with a genuine point of view: they bring in new producers based on what they are personally excited about rather than what sells reliably, and the regulars have come to trust that enthusiasm. A Tuesday beer focus night features a single brewery's entire range with the brewer present; monthly natural wine evenings do the same. The kitchen is small but excellent — slow-braised short rib sandwiches and crispy chicken skins with house hot sauce are both non-negotiable orders.
Tijuca Brew House
Tijuca Brew House is the neighbourhood locals' secret — a two-storey brewpub in the residential Tijuca district that most tourists never reach, which is precisely why the regulars prefer it that way. The ground floor houses six brewing tanks producing the house range; the upper floor serves the beer alongside a menu built for the Sunday afternoon feijoada tradition that the owners have successfully merged with craft beer culture.
The house Tijuca Pale Ale (tropical, dry-hopped with local varieties) and the Floresta Stout (smoky, bitter, built for the cooler Rio evenings) are the workhorses; the seasonal rotation introduces a new small-batch every six weeks, often incorporating ingredients sourced from Tijuca National Forest's edge vendors. Sundays bring a full Brazilian buffet — feijoada completa, farofa, collard greens — paired explicitly with the week's recommended beer. A genuinely local experience in a city where those are increasingly rare.
Barra Malt House
Barra da Tijuca's most serious craft beer destination takes the format of a sprawling American-style beer hall and elevates it with a genuinely impressive fifty-tap selection that rotates constantly with Brazilian craft production. Screens broadcast matches from the major Brazilian and European leagues; on Flamengo match days the bar fills to capacity hours before kickoff with supporters who understand that watching football with craft beer is categorically superior to watching it with the big industrial brands.
The food programme is designed for sporting occasions: massive burgers on brioche buns, slow-smoked brisket carved to order, buckets of crispy chicken wings with a dozen house-made sauces. The beer selection is carefully curated to include styles that work in a noisy sports context — crisp lagers, session IPAs, wheat beers — alongside the more contemplative offerings for those occupying a quieter corner. A proper beer bar that also happens to do sports exceptionally well.
Copacabana Bottle Shop
Copacabana Bottle Shop occupies a corner unit three blocks from the beach with the hybrid model that has made it one of the most visited destinations for beer tourists in Rio: every bottle on the shelves can be drunk in-house at retail price plus a small corkage. The collection spans over 400 labels — Brazilian, Belgian, American, British, German — with particular depth in the styles that Brazilian craft brewers have pushed hardest: NEIPAs, barrel-aged stouts, and the sour / kettle sour category where local production has genuinely caught up with the global benchmark.
Eight rotating taps handle the draft programme; the staff make considered recommendations without condescension. On Friday evenings, the shop hosts informal tastings — three pours, an expert, sixty minutes — for around R$80. The events calendar is posted weekly on the door and on the shop's social media, where it reliably fills within hours of posting.
