Free Beer Stories: Jesse from Paraguay

Editor's Note: Today marks the publication of our first "Free Beer Story" from outside the United States. Normally we get stories and pictures from Americans promoting American soccer, but in this case we have an American using Paraguayan soccer to get Americans interested in the sport. And free beer, of course! This week's story comes from Jesse, a sports-fanatic-but-not-soccer-fan-turned-soccer-fanatic-turned-free-beer-mover, who we featured in an interview a few months back.

Got your own "free beer story"? Send us it at freebeermovement @ gmail (dot) com and get a FREE Free Beer Movement sticker!

Some of the teachers here in Paraguay are big fans of one of the local soccer teams called Guarani and regularly attend games. Their excursions usually involve large amounts of beer being consumed prior to the games so I figured that this would be a perfect fit with the ideals of the Free Beer Movement.

We gathered two other teachers and another friend who had not been to a game yet together at the house of one of the fans before the game for the free beer part of the evening. We imbibed some imported Nut Brown Ales, Red Ales, and Golden Ales from Argentina to wash down a nice asado consisting of a large chunk of beef and some spicy chorizo. Having just discovered that these beers were imported they went over especially well as a change of pace from the national beers which all taste suspiciously like Budweiser.

Full of beer and meat we hopped in cabs and made our way to the stadium for the game between Guarani and the defending champions Nacional. Unfortunately for the superfans, Guarani came up on the short end of a 1 - 0 final despite dominating most of the game and having multiple good scoring chances.


Even with the loss, the new recruits had a good time watching the game, listening to and observing the "hinchatas" (crazy supporters groups that some might call gangs), and drinking beer. It was an overall successful night as evidenced by a quote from one of the recruits, "I think I just associate soccer games with being drunk at this point. This is fun, why don't we do it more often?"

Got your own "free beer story"? Send us it at freebeermovement @ gmail (dot) com and get a FREE Free Beer Movement sticker!