Brewing Beer on the Futaleufú
Building a Micro-Brewery at a River Rafting Camp in Chile
by Jakob Foley
The Futaleufú River is one of the best Class V rivers in the world. If you’re a kayaker, big water rafter, or even an avid fly fisher, you probably know of it. Being none of those things, I had never heard of it until I agreed, in a fit of adventure-seeking and likely influenced by a few beers, to go there to start up a brewery. Tucked away in the northwest corner of Chilean Patagonia, where the tops of the Andes exceed 6,500 feet, Futaleufú (the town and the river) are a 12-hour drive, including three ferry rides, from the nearest commercial airline destination in Chile. Located 15.5 miles outside of town, right on the river, is a camp run by Bio Bio Expeditions. It was through meeting one of the owners, Lorenzo, in the summer of 2013 that I found myself leaving a rather comfortable life doing IT work in Truckee to brew beer 9,000 miles away.
In all fairness, this wasn’t entirely a spur of the moment, beer-fueled decision. For months prior, not only had I been wanting to travel more, but I’d been more seriously entertaining the pipe dream of opening my own brewery. So when Lorenzo suggested I come down and start a brewery at camp for him, it seemed like an opportunity that I shouldn’t pass up.
Lorenzo had always wanted the camp to brew its own beer, in part because he wasn’t a fan of the mass market beers available down there and in part because he wanted to cut back on waste. There is a limited recycling program in Chile, so over the years the cans and bottles had really piled up, and the brewery was at least a partial solution to reducing waste. He asked me to come down, bringing equipment from the States that we would supplement with whatever we could find in Chile, and brew beer for a season (December to March, the South American summer, is their rafting/kayaking/fishing season).
I left in mid-December 2013, dragging along 50 pounds of clothing and gear and another 50 pounds of equipment and brewing ingredients, including hops (which I worried would be seized at customs). Three commercial flights and 12 hours of bus rides later, I found myself, with all my stuff miraculously intact, in one of the most beautiful river valleys I’d ever seen.
The river is less than 1,000 feet wide in some places, and 4,000' ridges rise directly up on either side, while 6,000' glacier-capped peaks jut out just beyond. Just north of the Magellenic temperate rainforest, year-round rain and snow keep the slopes below the snow brilliantly green. Even the grasses on the valley floor never seem to turn brown. Small farms are scattered about the valley, a legacy of early 20th century efforts by the Chilean government to consolidate its territorial claim by clearing the forest and sending its citizens there to homestead.
Of course, the main attraction is the river. The Futaleufú (“Big River” in the language of the indigenous Mapuche) starts in Argentina, but the fun begins in Chile, just outside of the town of Futaleufú. Boosted by major tributaries, there are 26 miles of Class III, IV, and V rapids before the river empties into Lago Yelcho. For rafters and kayakers, it is some of the most exciting white water on the planet, and for fly fishers, it is one of the few places where you can fish a section of flat water all morning, then pack up and run a Class V rapid to get to the next fishing hole.
It was in this amazing environment that I was lucky enough to set up my first brewery—Fubrew. I started out in the boat barn, a large open-sided structure that held rafts, bikes, and kayaks. It took many wheelbarrows filled with rocks from the unpaved main road to get me and my equipment out of the mud, but by Christmas I was brewing my first 5-gallon batches, and by mid-January I was trying to figure out how to get 10- gallon batches out of the tiny 12-gallon brew setup I’d started with.
It was the first batch of stout out of this tiny system that really got Fubrew’s reputation started. An imperial stout that checked in at 8.5%, it was the strongest I’d brewed to date. I released it one evening in the middle of a 5 day stretch of cold rain, and the staff and most of the guests promptly started putting away pints of the stuff. Toward the end of the night, the camp chef decided to drive himself up the hill to the cabins for internet access. After getting one truck stuck in the mud, he then jumped in an old Nissan pickup and made it up the hill. An hour later, one of the guides, who had walked up from the bar, decided to take it back down to camp for him, but failed to negotiate the sharp turn at the bottom of the driveway and rolled the truck over a small embankment. He was fine, but the truck landed upside down in some thick brush. All of the trucks at camp had names, and that Nissan was named “Felix.” And so, in recognition of the stout’s contribution to the incident, it was thereafter known as “Felix Stout,” available today in Willits at Northspur Brewing.
My first season in Patagonia ended up being the first of five trips there. We constructed a building and patio for the brewery and expanded every season except for season four, when the local police decided we were selling illegally outside of camp (we weren’t) and confis-cated some of our equipment along with full kegs of beer. I spent most of the rest of that season brewing on the deck of a small cabin hidden away up the hill from camp and well away from the main road. In season five, we finally received our commercial license and started selling West Coast-style IPAs to town and to other resorts in the area. But by then, my wife (whom I met in camp my first season there) and I had already started the paperwork for what would become Northspur Brewing in Willits.
In November of 2017, at the Mendocino Homebrewfest in Ukiah, my wife and I met Greta and Chris from the Book Juggler in Willits. They were interested in getting a brewery in Willits and knew a property owner who wanted one as well, so by the time I left for Chile that season, Northspur Brewing was already beginning to take shape. Between that build-out and COVID, I didn’t make it back to Chile until this past January.
The brewery is still there, and I spent just about every waking minute of my short trip brewing beer, rafting the Fu, and sitting at the riverside camp bar looking out over the blue glacier melt rushing past below me. I also had a little time to reflect on all the pieces from my seasons in Chile that got me to Northspur Brewing. From figuring out how to shift my life and career from IT to brewing, to the experience that comes from five or six brew sessions a week, to brewing in a difficult environment (water system failures, limited hardware supplies, broken equipment, sheep raiding our malt stash, and plenty more), to meeting the woman I’d be lucky enough to marry, I will be forever grateful to the mighty Fu and the valley it calls home.
Sample the brewing talents of Jakob Foley at:
Northspur Brewing
101 N Main St, Willits
(707) 518-4208 | NorthspurBrewing.com
Open Tues & Wed 3 -9PM, Thurs 3 - 10PM, Fri & Sat 10 - 2PM, Sun 12 - 9PM
Photos courtesy of Jakob Foley
Jakob Foley is the brewer at Northspur Brewing Co. in Willits, a harebrained venture he started with his wife, Sarah, in 2019. When not brewing or drowning in brewery chaos, Jakob can be found brewing and drowning in brewery chaos.