A lawyer’s family business turns to beer.

Cerveza Polar began in Antímano, on the western side of Caracas, in 1941. English Wikipedia says the brewery was the idea of Lorenzo Alejandro Mendoza Fleury, a Caracas lawyer whose family business, Mendoza y Compañía, had made candles and soap, working with Rafael Luján and Karl Eggers; its summary also names Juan Simón Mendoza among the founders. The first brewing kettle arrived from Europe at Christmas 1939, and the new company, Cervecería Polar, began operating on 14 March 1941 with Venezuelan capital, the same article says. The Gale International Directory of Company Histories tells a similar story: Mendoza Fleury sold an unprofitable soap factory he had inherited and opened a brewery in Antímano in 1941.

The beer was reworked early. In 1943 the Czechoslovak brewmaster Carlos Roubicek, who had emigrated to Ecuador after the German occupation of his country, joined the company and changed the formula to suit local taste, English and Spanish Wikipedia both say. Growth followed: a second brewery in Barcelona, in the eastern state of Anzoátegui, in 1950; a larger plant at Los Cortijos, Caracas, the next year; a brewery in Maracaibo in 1960; and a complex at San Joaquín, Carabobo, begun in December 1975 and opened in 1978. The Antímano plant was later closed and demolished, and a children’s nutrition centre now stands on the site, English Wikipedia says.

The brewery became the seed of a much larger group. A non-alcoholic malt drink, Maltín Polar, followed in 1951, and the precooked corn flour Harina P.A.N. in 1960. In 1991, the brewery’s 50th anniversary, the parent company took the name Empresas Polar, and from 1992 two members of the founding family’s third generation, Lorenzo Mendoza Giménez and Juan Lorenzo Mendoza Pacheco, took over its leadership. Cervecería Polar remains the group’s brewing company.

A bear, a blue sea and bottle nicknames.

The brand takes its name from the polar bear whose image appears on its bottles, English Wikipedia says. The Gale directory describes the company trademark as a polar bear looking across a body of blue water, and ties its emergence to the larger Caracas brewery of 1951. Spanish Wikipedia adds that the logo was altered in 2002 for the first time since the beer went on sale, and that a bear mascot called Pedroso was created for advertising.

Drinkers have their own names for the range, and several come from the bottles. English Wikipedia says the flagship Polar Pilsen is known as “Negra” or “Negrita,” Solera as “Verde” after its green bottle, and Solera Light as “Azul”; Spanish Wikipedia calls the small bottle the “Polarcita.” The line has grown to include Polar Light, Polar Ice and a non-alcoholic Polar Zero, and from 2012 a Solera collection called Placeres Maestros, which began with a Märzen and added a Schwarzbier and an Altbier in 2016 and an IPA in 2018.

Advertising has done much of the brand’s work. The Gale directory says Polar ran its own in-house agency, Cadesa, whose campaigns used patriotic messages, among them a short film, “Traveling with Polar,” that celebrated Venezuela’s scenery and cultural heritage. Spanish Wikipedia lists the slogans “La cerveza popular” in the 1970s, “Puro sabor, pura Polar” in the 1990s, “Polar sí hay” in the 2000s and, more recently, “Sabe a nosotros,” and records campaigns built around the “Chicas Polar,” Venezuelan models and presenters.

Beer, bottles and national identity.

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.

A brand that has lived through Venezuela’s crises.

The brand’s recent history is bound up with Venezuela’s economic crisis. On 29 April 2016 Polar stopped the last of its four breweries, at San Joaquín, Reuters reported; the company said it could not import malted barley because the government would not release the foreign currency it needed under exchange controls, while the government accused it of exaggerating its dollar needs. On 2 June 2016 Polar said it had secured a bank loan to buy barley, hops and steel for cans and would resume brewing in the first week of July, the German trade journal Brauwelt reported.

The beer also travels, and not always from Venezuela. English Wikipedia says Polar Pilsen has been distributed in the United States since 1985. In Spain, the trade journal Alimarket reported in June 2025, the group’s Spanish subsidiary, Alimentos Polar España, relaunched Polar Pilsen with a reworked recipe and a new label alongside a new Polar Prémium, both brewed in Spain; the company said the new look kept “the essence of the brand” and respected the cues traditional drinkers recognise. The group has also reached into Peruvian brewing: Spanish Wikipedia records that in the early 2000s the Polar group, led by Lorenzo Mendoza, held a large stake in Backus, the brewer of Cusqueña and Pilsen Callao, before Colombia’s Bavaria bought it out.

The name needs care online. This Polar is unrelated to the Finnish heart-rate-monitor maker or to the American seltzer brand Polar.

For a design guide, Cerveza Polar shows how one animal emblem, a blue field and a set of bottle nicknames can carry a national beer for more than 80 years. Compare Santa Teresa, the Venezuelan rum from a hacienda in Aragua, and Pampero, the Venezuelan rum of the rearing horse. For this guide we use polar blue, ice white and signal red with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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