Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — Filipinos love beer. Despite the rising popularity of other alcoholic choices, the presence of beer at gatherings and drinking sessions is showing no signs of dwindling to a trickle. And this, for the most part, has to do with Filipino drinkers’ being not a particularly picky lot. For the longest time, our alcoholic flag-bearer pretty much stood alone until its diet counterpart hit the scene in the late 90s, along with the fruity variants that followed. Other brands had very minimal offerings too. To us, beer came in weak, strong, and stronger, and that was that. Until craft beer came along, that is.

Along with my indoctrination into third-wave coffee, I began enjoying craft beer almost regularly. As with coffee, regardless of quality, it’s always great to have beer. It makes days better — but craft beer almost makes everything feel a little more special. In some ways, it became easier for me to love craft beer because picking a favorite type of beer comes with less stress than picking a favorite coffee blend. With coffee, your only option for deciding what to try was the kind of coffee you wanted. With craft beer, you could try based on what kind you usually drank, how cute the bottle was, or which beer had the best label and wittiest name. I ended up falling in love with India pale ale (IPA), which was usually a bit more expensive, but at 7-percent alcohol, it was a great way of stretching out a buck.

I remember finding out about Filipino craft beer this time four years ago. My father had just died, and to make me feel better, a friend of mine sent me a picture of Katipunan Craft Brewery’s Indio Pale Ale. “It’s not a real IPA, which makes it even funnier,” said that friend. It was the only craft beer out at the time, or at the very least it was the only one we knew. Still, it was a very good start.

Fast forward to four years later and we have Brewfest, a craft beer festival held over the weekend in Century City Mall, Makati. This year’s iteration featured 13 brewers and more than 50 different types of beer. I hadn’t followed a lot of brewers between the time of initial discovery into the Philippine craft beer scene and this festival. I’m by no means a connoisseur, but I was very excited that the little thing I saw brewing four years ago had blossomed into a beautiful baby of craft beer culture.

Thirteen brewers isn’t a lot, compared with developed “beerocracies” in the U.S. with 4,000 and even Japan with 200. But as young as it is, the scene is already vibrant. At the festival, each brewer had a minimum of five variants on offer, ranging from pale ales to the darkest English-style brown ales. The variants even diverged into different types for each color. You could even conscientiously loosen up with a variety of beers brewed in solar-powered breweries.

Of the breweries present at the festival, nearly half of them are based outside Manila. And their influences are evident in their brews. There are Visayan breweries whose beers are made with local muscovado as brewing sugar. There are beers inspired by local folklore and some named simply after local destinations.

I ended up trying only five new beers out of the 50 available. There were some beers at the festival that I had already tried and loved and regularly drank (within budgetary limits, of course). And even though the festival ran for three days, the challenge of trying all of them still seemed insurmountable. There’s always next year.

There’s no right or wrong way to enjoy craft beer — except probably drinking it over ice cubes (but even that is just a personal bias). Craft beer is an industry born of the desire to make things your own. It’s a product of constant experimentation and refinement. The time poured into trial, error, and even just making a second perfect batch amounts to an exercise in delayed gratification — so much so that even to the point of drinking the beer, it feels almost sacrilegious to chug.

I don’t consider craft beer an alternative to drinking more commercially brewed beer. There is no replacing the 50-peso household staples in our hearts — even if new craft favorites make their way into our fridges. On the surface, craft beer is the perfect alternative to drinking a cocktail at a bar when you’re feeling fancy or if you need your beer of the night to be a little more celebratory. But for me, at least in the context of the Philippines, patronizing our craft beer scene makes me realize how good even our local, mass-market beers are. Maybe that’s why we drink so much of it already. And perhaps one day, these baby breweries would grow up into making new household staples themselves.