From Cerveza India to a light beer named for a medal.

Medalla Light is brewed by Cervecera de Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, the city on Puerto Rico’s west coast where the company was founded. The company says it was founded on 2 November 1937 by three brothers, Alfonso, Sabino and Ramón Valdés Cobián, and it describes itself as a 100% Puerto Rican company. English Wikipedia adds that the brothers were following the example of their father, Ramón Valdés, who had founded the Mayagüez Light, Power and Ice Company in 1910, and that the brewery was known for decades as Cervecería India before it took back the name Compañía Cervecera de Puerto Rico in October 2009.

The first product was a beer, not a light beer. The company says it launched Cerveza India in October 1938 and the malt drink Malta India a year later, and that it added the soft drinks Orange Crush and Old Colony to its portfolio in 1941. English Wikipedia says that by the late 1970s the brewery needed a lighter, lower-calorie beer to sit alongside India.

That beer was Medalla Light. The company says it added Medalla Light to its lineup in 1980 and describes it as the first light beer produced in Puerto Rico; it also says the name was inspired by the Pan American Games held on the island at the time. The 1979 Pan American Games were held in San Juan, and Beverage Industry reported in November 2019 that Medalla Light was then celebrating its 40th anniversary, so the launch is dated 1979 in some accounts and 1980 in the company’s own history. The word itself is Spanish for “medal.”

The company has stayed in the founding family. English Wikipedia says Camalia Valdés served as president and chief executive from 2002 to 2017 and was succeeded in 2017 by Grace Marie Valdés. A company release carried by Brewbound in June 2012 described Cervecera de Puerto Rico as a family-owned business founded in 1937.

A medal, a blue can and an island’s artists.

The name carries the brand’s story: the company ties it directly to the Pan American Games held in Puerto Rico. English Wikipedia describes the beer as a pale lager, and the company’s 2012 release gave its strength as 4.2% alcohol by volume.

The beer comes in several formats. When Medalla Light entered New Hampshire, Tennessee and Wisconsin, Brewbound reported in October 2021, the company listed it in 10 oz cans, 12 oz bottles and newer 7 oz bottles known as Medallita Light.

The can has also served as a canvas. For the brand’s 40th anniversary, Beverage Industry reported on 11 November 2019, Medalla Light released limited-edition cans decorated with the work of the Puerto Rican muralist Alexis Díaz, and the company said Díaz was the first artist to put his designs on the Medalla Light can. The company also said Díaz paints his murals with brushes and Chinese ink rather than spray paint, and that part of the proceeds from a line of T-shirts and caps based on his designs would go to the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan. The Dieline described the series in November 2019: one design shows a creature that is half jíbaro, the Puerto Rican country farmer, and half rooster; another shows a figure that is half woman and half octopus, dancing to son.

Advertising has leaned on sound as well as sight. Campaign reported in May 2021 on “Sounds From Home,” a campaign by DDB Latina Puerto Rico in which Medalla Light recreated the song of the coquí, the small frog native to Puerto Rico, on supermarket shelves in the United States, and filmed the reactions of Puerto Ricans with hidden cameras in a grocery store in Reading, Pennsylvania. For its first push into Florida in 2012, Brewbound reported, the company had hired the multicultural marketing network The Bravo Group and the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.

Design and documentation.

The seven beers in this group come from Latin America and the Caribbean: Polar, Cusqueña, Pilsen Callao, Brahma, Medalla, Kalik and Banks. Several have long histories. Pilsen Callao was first brewed in 1863 at a brewery that Federico Bindels founded in the Peruvian port of Callao, Spanish Wikipedia says, and Brahma was first made by a Rio de Janeiro brewery founded in 1888, according to English Wikipedia. Cusqueña goes back to a branch of the Arequipa brewer Günther & Tidow opened in Cusco on 1 October 1908, Spanish Wikipedia says. Cervecería Polar began brewing at Antímano, west of Caracas, on 14 March 1941; Cervecería India, now the Compañía Cervecera de Puerto Rico, was founded in Mayagüez in 1937 by the Valdés Cobián brothers; and Banks (Barbados) Breweries opened at Wildey in September 1961, all according to English Wikipedia. Kalik is the newcomer: English Wikipedia dates the Bahamian lager to 1988.

Their ownership has gone in very different directions. Two are still made by companies based in their home markets: Polar belongs to Empresas Polar, the privately held Venezuelan group whose president is Lorenzo Mendoza, and Medalla Light, which English Wikipedia dates to 1980, is made by the Compañía Cervecera de Puerto Rico, run since 2017 by Grace Marie Valdés. Brahma has been part of Ambev since the company was created in 1999 from the merger of Brahma and Antarctica, and Ambev is now a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, English Wikipedia says. In Peru, Backus and Johnston bought 62 per cent of the Compañía Nacional de Cerveza, the maker of Pilsen Callao, in 1994, and Cervesur, the maker of Cusqueña, joined the Backus group in 2000, Spanish Wikipedia says; Backus was part of SABMiller from 2005 and has belonged to AB InBev since AB InBev’s takeover of SABMiller in 2016, according to English Wikipedia. Kalik is brewed in Nassau by Commonwealth Brewery, which its 2011 financial statements describe as a subsidiary of Heineken; they record that Heineken’s purchase of the shares held by its Bahamian partner took effect on 17 May 2010, and that the company was listed on the Bahamas International Securities Exchange on 24 May 2011. Banks passed from Barbadian ownership to an Ambev subsidiary in December 2015, according to Ambev’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and since 31 July 2025 KOSCAB Holdings, a Coca-Cola bottler, has held the majority of SLU Beverages, which controls Banks Holdings, Nation News reported.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or moved its brewing. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the brewer says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels, cans and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An island beer on the US mainland.

Outside Puerto Rico, the company has aimed the brand at Puerto Rican communities on the US mainland. Brewbound reported in June 2012 that Medalla Light had become available in Florida for the first time, through Launch Beverage Companies, and quoted Camalia Valdés on the state’s appeal. The company later described a fresh arrival in Florida in 2018, Beverage Industry reported in 2019, and English Wikipedia says a new distribution agreement for Florida was announced that year. By October 2021, Brewbound reported, the beer was sold in 13 states on the US mainland, among them Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania; English Wikipedia says that by March 2023, with Ohio and North Carolina added, the count had reached 18.

Medalla Light sits inside a wider portfolio from the same Mayagüez brewery. The company says it added Silver Key in 2010 and the premium lager Magna after it, and launched the artisanal brand Del Oeste in 2018; English Wikipedia says the original Cerveza India returned as a limited edition in November 2019. Malta India, the malt drink of 1939, is still part of the range.

Online, the beer has its own address, medallalight.com, separate from the company site, cerveceradepr.com.

For a design guide, Medalla Light shows how a single word with a sporting meaning, a family brewery in one city and a can opened up to local artists can carry an island beer to drinkers far from home. Compare Presidente, the Dominican pilsner, and Kalik, the Bahamian lager named for the sound of the cowbell. For this guide we use Medalla blue, deep navy and medal gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Medalla Light’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.