Region & History

Order a beer in Porto and you'll almost always get a Super Bock. The brand belongs to the Super Bock Group, headquartered in Leça do Balio, a district of Matosinhos on the northern edge of the city. It's considered Portugal's largest brewer.

The company dates back to 1890, when it was founded as Companhia União Fabril Portuense, or CUFP for short. It was restructured in 1977 and renamed Unicer. It has carried its current name, Super Bock Group, since November 2017, named after its best-known beer brand.

Porto is known first and foremost for Port wine, whose cellars line the opposite riverbank in Vila Nova de Gaia. The city's beer came later. Today it's just as much a fixture on café tables along the Ribeira as it is in the bars of the outer neighborhoods.

The group has been linked to Carlsberg since 1992, when Unicer began brewing and distributing the Danish brand in Portugal. In December 2018, Carlsberg acquired 28.5 percent of Viacer, the company that holds 56 percent of the Super Bock Group. Since then, the Danish conglomerate has held an indirect stake in the Porto brewer.

There's no EU protected designation of origin for Portuguese beer. No Portuguese name appears on the list of protected beer origins, which means Super Bock is a brand rather than a regional style like Kölsch.

Alongside the big corporation, a small craft scene has been growing since the 2010s. Among its members is Musa, a Lisbon brewery founded in 2015 that runs the bar Musa das Virtudes in Porto.