Jan. 2026

It may come as a surprise to some alert readers (ARs) to read that the Amazon River (also AR) used to flow from east to west. I am not making this up. Sometime around 15 million years ago the Andes Mountains started to emerge on the west side of South America, blocking the river’s path to the Pacific. About ten million years later this geological reversal was complete, causing all of the river’s water to flow into the Atlantic.

This factoid was among the many things I learned during a recent trip to Chile, a long skinny country whose borders are mostly defined by the Andes and the Pacific. It has an average width from west to east of slightly over 100 miles and a length from north to south of 2,670 miles, which is long enough to extend from Los Angeles to Boston; from Canada to Spain; or from Norway to Nigeria.

I also learned an interesting factoid about guanacos, which Ulrike and I saw in abundance while hiking in Patagonia. As some ARs may already know, these are large herbivores whose diet consists primarily of shrubs and grasses. Like camels they can survive a long time without water.

The main threat faced by guanacos comes from pumas, one of which I saw from a distance of about 25 yards during a morning hike. I carefully retreated to our hotel, which was about a quarter mile away, very aware that even with a 400 yard head start I couldn’t get there faster than the puma.

To me the most interesting factoid about guanacos has nothing to do with their diet or with pumas, but rather with their courtship habits. The males service harems of up to a dozen or more females and establish their dominance through brutal fights that typically involve biting off the testicles of their rivals. I am not making this up. These vegetarian mammals, despite not eating meat, use their teeth to emasculate would be suitors of the females they want for themselves.

One component of the guanaco diet that I sampled in Patagonia was calafate berries, which are indigenous to the region. I had calafate jam on toast for breakfast and calafate beer later in the day. The latter would more or less correspond to Berliner Weisse or Framboise, two styles with which some ARs might be more familiar. I also tasted some calafate pisco sours, a Patagonian variation on the South American drink made with a spirit distilled from fermented grape juice.

Summer in Antarctica.

From Patagonia we continued south until we reached Antarctica, the seventh continent each of us has now visited. Because we were there during the Antarctic summer, the sun was out during all of our waking hours. An AR named Oscar Horan, a retired pilot with whom I went to high school, had urged us to look at the nighttime sky in the southern hemisphere, including the Southern Cross. The problem was that the nights were so short we were never awake to see it.

Interesting factoids about Antarctica include that it’s the fifth largest continent, bigger than both Europe and Australia. It’s also the driest continent, since the cold air holds very little moisture. The McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica, where it hasn’t rained in about two million years, constitute both the coldest and driest places on earth.

While much of Antarctica is below sea level, because of a sheet of ice that’s almost three miles thick in some places, it’s also the highest continent with an average elevation of about 8,200 feet above sea level, which is higher than the town of Vail, Colorado. The elevation at the South Pole is even higher, at 9,300 feet.

Ironically, Antarctica, the driest of all continents, contains about 70% of the world’s fresh water, most of which is permanently frozen and never flows into any ocean. The Amazon, on the other hand, contributes close to 20% of the flow of all fresh water into the world’s oceans.

Visiting Antarctica was something Ulrike and I had talked about doing for a long time before we started planning our trip almost a year ago. The advice we would give to all ARs is not to stay frozen in one place like an Antarctic glacier, but to go out into the world like water from the Amazon.

Sample other beverages like Chilean wines, pisco sours and calafate beers from Patagonia. And then come home to Schlafly.

Tom Schlafly
Chairman
Schlafly | The Saint Louis Brewery