Recently, we talked about drinking habits in Vietnam, and about beer consumption, and how vietnamese people love their beers on the rocks… Today, we’ll look into another trend in the beer business: Local Craft-Beer. As you probably already know, we call Craft Beer a beer that was made in a traditional way or non-mechanized way by a small brewery, also called micro-brewery. The interesting think about craft beers is that they became a worried trend almost at the same time in many countries in Europe and in Asia, including Vietnam. Vietnam saw its first craft beers coming into the huge beer market just a couple of years ago, and it’s now a gigantic phenomenon, with dozens of different local craft beers available in the country, and more and more dedicated venues popping up here and there.

It seems that the trend came from the expatriate community, but was very quickly understood and loved by the locals. Today, you’ll find small international teams crafting their own beers in small batches, but also bigger organisation, both vietnamese and foreign, starting to build small craft beer empires.

Craft Beer is not really competing directly with local industrial beer. As we mentioned it in another article, Vietnam is among the countries where the beer is the cheapest on the entire world. But Craft Beer isn’t cheap! You might consider it as a luxury beer, especially when seeing that a pint of this holy beverage is often at lest as expensive as a long drink, when you can buy a dozen of « Saigon beer » for the same amount of money.

Craft beer are often stronger in taste than industrial beer, which is especially light in Vietnam. In Craft Beer, there’s this bitterness and aftertaste that you won’t find in your usual Hanoi or Tiger beer.

Many of those small craft beer producers and micro-brewery are using very special ingredients, and very special marketing campaign with deep communication strategies. When visiting Saigon, you should really try a few of the Vietnamese-made Craft-Beer to be part of the trend, and to taste local delicacies !