Suds: After decades as the exclusive stomping ground of Big Beer, Bangkok is developing a craft beer culture

Thailand’s first brewery had its market domination formalized in 1939, via a means typical to large-scale enterprises of the time: Royal Warrant.

The Boon Rawd Brewery, brainchild of Praya Bhirom Bhakdi, who had traveled through Germany and Denmark learning the day’s cutting-edge brewing techniques, served as Thailand’s sole source of liquor for most of the twentieth century. Its flagship beverage – Singha – remains one of Thailand’s two biggest beers.

Even though Thailand’s beer market was eventually liberalized (though fairly late in the game, by world standards), many of the restrictive policies that allowed Boon Rawd to dominate ported their way over into the country’s democratic legislation.

As a result, Bangkok has for the most part stood silently by during the past 20 years while the rest of the world undergoes a craft beer revolution. Those who, in the recent past, have begun bringing specialty beer into the Kingdom, still face a remarkable uphill battle.

“I know at least a dozen people who have come up to me and been like, ‘Man, I tried to import craft beers two years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago, but it just wasn’t worth it,’” says Aaron Grieser, an American environmental lawyer and co-founder of fledgling beer distributor Beervana. He adds with a morose shake of his head, “It is not easy, man. It is not easy at all.”

Here, Grieser may fairly be accused of understatement.

To this day, it is illegal to brew beer in Thailand for purposes of private consumption (a law that expat brewing forum Homebrew Thailand deftly flaunts). Those interested in getting into the commercial brewing game must apply for a license to operate as a “major brewery,” a legal category that demands applicants be equipped to pay taxes on a staggering 10 million liters of beer annually. This latter policy essentially forces foreign brewers to partner with Thailand’s major players in order to gain access to the country’s market. Danish brand Carlsberg found success in Thailand in the late ‘90s by inking just such a deal with Chang, but when that relationship went rapidly sour, it turned Carlsberg’s sojourn into a cautionary tale. The brand found itself exiled from the Kingdom nearly overnight, and was quickly usurped by Heineken.[1]

The only other option for aspirational brewers in Thailand is to open a “brewpub.” This legal designation allows for the brewing and sale of beer, but forbids that beer to pass outside the brewpub’s premises. Establishments such as the Londoner and Tawandang exemplify this latter category, but written into their legal genes is a concession that their brews will never grace the shelves of a Villa supermarket, or similar mass-market retailer.

Importing beer comes equipped with its own bevy of legal impediments.

According to Interactive Thailand, a law firm that specializes in importing goods to the Kingdom, spirits coming into Thailand are subject to three separate forms of taxation: customs duties, excise taxes and value-added taxes (VAT). Since these duties are owed to three separate government entities, they present not only a legal headache for potential importers, but also a barrier sufficient to price many would-be distributors out of the market.

At the end of the day, those looking to import alcoholic beverages to Thailand must pay taxes on their goods equal to nearly 400% of the products’ value.

In total, these regulations have served the de facto purpose of maintaining the Kingdom as a nearly closed liquor market.

That Bangkok is developing a craft beer scene at all, to say nothing of one so abundant, owes both to tidal forces within the market and to the sheer enthusiasm of a handful of quixotic importers.

Grieser, for instance, speaks about his company’s stock with the enthusiasm of a 12-year-old describing a newly purchased bike.

“We’re looking to always bring in new and interesting beers to the market,” he said, during a recent tour of Beervana’s southeast Bangkok warehouse. “There’s so much crazy stuff they’re doing with beers these days that we’re always able to choose new things.”

Later in the tour, he gave a gleeful aside: “This is my favorite room,” he said as he opened the inch-thick door leading to the company’s cold storage chamber.

For the gastro-enthusiast, it’s not hard to sympathize with Grieser’s point of view.

Occupying a far corner of the company’s southeast Bangkok warehouse, and maintained at a temperature 10-degrees colder than any comparably sized space in the city, the storage room houses a treasure trove of foreign concoctions: in its far corner sits a small pyramid of Dead Guy Ale from Oregon-based Rogue Brewery, hewed in by several cases of the Northern California specialty beer Boont.

Previous to the past four months, if these brands showed up in Bangkok at all, it was thanks to the efforts of desperate expats with a cavalier attitude towards customs. Now, however, that’s starting to change.

Not only Beervana, but also Hopsessions, BrewDog, Hitachino and Yona Yona have, within the past year, started bringing specialty beer into the Kingdom.

Brewpubs, long the centers of Bangkok’s brew culture, have recently witnessed an explosion in local enthusiasm for beer.

“If you go back eight years and look at the beer shelf at Villa or HOBS,” says Tom Curran, manager of the Londoner, “it’s about eight or 10 brands. Now you go to a Villa and you see a pretty good selection. “

If you talk to the importers making this selection a reality, they speak of a global sensation, of which they passionately serve as the Southeast Asian advance guard.

Jakob Rassmussen, a Danish expat and co-founder of beer importer Hopsessions, as well as a former employee of Carlsberg, looks at Thailand as a late adopter for this globe and decade-spanning trend.

“If you look at the pattern,” he says, “it started in the States, craft brewing, about 20 or 30 years ago. Then it came to Denmark, just with a 10-year delay. And then if you look at Thailand, it’s a 20-year delay. It’s the way the market works.”

Bangkok’s recent proliferation of beer distributors certainly seems to bear this logic out. Whereas previous to 2011 the city offered few choices beyond the Belgian bonanza at HOBS, today, craft beers from at least six different nations have carved out their piece of Bangkok real estate. Start-up delivery service Wishbeer will even bring these brews directly to your front door.

“There is demand [for craft beer],” says Rassmussen, “there is money in it, but more than that, I think it’s something that I really miss, from Denmark. I believe that I’m not the only one missing craft beer, so why not import it?”

So far, the audience for craft beers in Thailand consists primarily of people like Rassmussen and Grieser – gourmand expats desperate for their homespun luxuries. And at prices that regularly exceed THB250 a bottle, craft beer in Bangkok definitely qualifies as a luxury good.

Head to Brew, Bangkok’s premier craft brew bar, or Smith Bar and Restaurant, where Beervana recently held a party in celebration of its importing deal with Singaporean label Brewerkz, and you’ll find that the audience is mostly farang, mostly higher income and almost entirely male.

“Craft brews don’t have the biggest appeal here, because if you’re a tourist going to Thailand you don’t go to drink American beers,” says Rassmussen. “So, it is more expats living here and higher-income Thais who are drinking craft brews.”

In their efforts to import these luxury goods, distributors have also found themselves serving as de facto missionaries for craft beer culture. Introducing the Thai pallet to the hoppy bitterness of Northwest pale ales has served as a challenge for Beervana (which imports mostly American beers), whereas Rassmussen has found Thais unusually responsive to the sugary taste of meade – a honey-based liquor viewed as a novelty in most of America and Europe.

Then, beyond the problems of creating a high-end market from scratch, Thailand’s beer importers also have to deal with the fact that Thailand’s lack of a craft beer culture has left it lacking in craft beer infrastructure as well.

Because craft beers don’t employ pasteurization, they tend not to travel well. In order to bring a bottle of Rogue beer from the West Coast of the United States to Southeast Asia, an end-to-end chain of cold storage shipping containers is required, meaning that from the moment the beer leaves the factory, until the moment it’s served, it has to be refrigerated. Most Thai restaurants, even those catering to a higher-end crowd, simply don’t have the infrastructure necessary to provide continuous cold storage.

“We actually had to design a kegerator,” says Grieser, “in order to keep the beers cold in restaurants. We built one with kegs from Germany and it will have wheels on the bottom, so you can wheel it around.”

However, despite these impediments, Bangkok’s beer scene has gained a toehold, thanks to the collective enthusiasm of the city’s beer drinkers. Every beer distributor I talked with expressed faith in the industry’s future based on the fact that Bangkok doesn’t have one craft beer purveyor, but many.

“Imagine if you only had one bottle of wine on the market,” says Rassmussen. “You wouldn’t have a market of wine drinkers. I’d say [Hopsessions’] greatest benefit is that we’re not the only ones importing craft beers.”

This fraternity of distributors, similar and in many cases overlapping with the fraternity of drinkers, has served to open Thailand’s beer market by gradual increments. Though Hopsessions won’t officially launch until March, importers such as BrewDog, Yona Yona and Beervana have already met with surprisingly positive responses.

“We’re growing too fast, actually,” says Grieser. “We basically had to create a moratorium on new clients for February.”

With a yard-long grin he adds, “This is great, man! We started this company because we wanted a better beer scene, and now, there’s a better beer scene!”