Cobra turns out to be the only problematic animal. This also seemed like the most common type of ruou; it was displayed prominently by vendors everywhere. According to Earnest, if a snake even looks like a cobra, it is illegal to export it. Luckily I had thus far refrained from buying a bottle of cobra wine. Everything else, he said, is okay. Trade in pangolin, rhino and tiger is also problematic but apparently they don’t use those in Viet Nam.

The Micros
In Ha Noi, we headed for a few of the ten or so brewpubs that have sprouted up in the last decade. Somewhat to my surprise, the customers in these pubs are almost exclusively Viet Namese. The phenomenon was explained to me as follows:

Many communist Viet Namese had been to East Germany and other beer drinking countries during the communist era. When these types returned home they couldn’t find the kind of beer they had come to enjoy. When the free market started gung ho in Viet Nam, the untapped market for European beers burst wide open and more than a dozen brewpubs opened in quick succession. The market shook out a little and is now more or less stable at about eight or nine brewpubs in Ha Noi.

Legends
We had a hell of a time finding these places. They weren’t listed in phonebooks, and asking around produced no results. Finally, we stumbled upon Legends, which apparently was the first brewpub on the Ha Noi scene. A German man named Werner Jung oversees brewing, but the company is, like all the other brewpubs, owned by a Viet Namese. Werner only brews lagers, including a standard pilsner, a dark lager, a weizen, and a Christmas bock, all brewed with imported German malt and hops.

Werner was generous with his beer, and his time. In fact, he confided, he really doesn’t have much work to do these days. After establishing the recipes and getting the system set up and in good running order, he trained a local staff person to conduct most of the brewing. Nowadays his job is mostly quality control. And so we sat and chatted and checked the quality of his beers.

Their business is doing well and expanding. They opened location number two in 2001 at a prime corner location in the heart of the Old Quarter. Between the two existing locations they can seat more than 500 people and they are opening location number three any day now.

Red Beer
Another brewpub nearby within the Old Quarter is, in what must be an intentionally ironic marketing ploy, called Red Beer. The place is painted red and features a strapping young man raising a pint designed in a style reminiscent of communist propaganda posters. The pub had only one beer on offer during our visit, called, of course, Red beer. Billed as a Belgian style red ale, it tasted more like a medium-bodied lager to me, with just enough caramel malt to lend a reddish hue. It was served at near freezing temperatures which made it difficult to tell just what it really did taste like. The communist style mural entirely covering a two-story wall made it a worthwhile 15 minute pit stop.

Painted ostrich egg lights adorn the bar at King Pilsner.

Tennis with King Pilsner
Easily the most exciting of the three brewpubs we visited was King Pilsner. The brewer, another German, was wintering in Japan, but company chairman Mr. Binh was more than happy to spend the afternoon giving a tour and drinking liters of beer with us.

Binh raised a nest egg doing food and liquor import-export and used this seed money to open a fine two-story, multi-building brewery-restaurant-tennis court-office building complex. He describes his motivation for opening a brewery as a combination of dissatisfaction with the quality of beers available in Ha Noi and an analysis of market readiness.

Tennis and beer . . . why not? Binh’s philosophy behind this unusual pairing is that start-up restaurants need differentiation to succeed. His hope is that people will come for the tennis and wind up trying the food and beer. It was hard to tell how well this was working. The two tennis courts had waiting lines, while the restaurant was nearly empty on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand he has fifty employees, so something must be working.

We didn’t have time for a meal, but the all-Viet Namese menu looked tempting. We did taste the beer though, and it was fantastic – certainly the best I tasted in Viet Nam.

Binh calls his trademark product King Pilsner. That may sound a little boring, but this is no ordinary pilsner. King Pilsner is really more like a bottom-fermented porter, a ruby-black, roasty creation with a caramel colored head, that drinks clean and snappy like a pilsner but clocks in at a healthy 5.6% ABV.

In addition to the trademark black-colored King Pilsner, Binh also serves a Marzen, a Dortmunder Export, and ‘fruit beer’. The language barrier prevented us from determining whether the latter was an ale or lager, but the cherries in it were understated and presumably it was the low 3.5% ABV that made Mr. Binh repeatedly refer to it as the ‘Ladies Beer.’

All the beers were excellent, and with Mr. Binh as our host, it was we who felt like Kings. His hospitality was abundant. Eventually we stood, somewhat unsteadily, to go, and loaded ourselves up with his brochures and promised that we would encourage our few Ha Noi acquaintances to visit his brewpub forthwith.

Bia Hoi
There are various levels to Viet Nam’s drinking culture. There is the ruou, which is traditional and used as much for its medicinal properties as its intoxicating effects. Then there is the recent brewpub phenomenon, concentrating on western style lagers and ales and catering to wealthy, world-wise customers. But the masses of Ha Noi’s male population seem to subsist on the product of a different kind of microbrewery: bia hoi.

I have heard that there are hundreds of bia hoi breweries in Ha Noi, and there are certainly many hundreds of bia hoi outlets, which are called simply enough, bia hoi. Literally, fresh beer, or morning beer, bia hoi is, from what I could gather, technically a lager, brewed with as much as 50% rice adjunct. And while a handful of foreign beer aficionados might disdain such a brew, preferring to drink their more expensive all-barley beers nose held high in the air, Ha Noi’s populace has no such concern with beer esoterica, nor do most of the budget backpacker tourists. Indeed, it is hard to argue with a 20 cent liter of beer. It is even harder to argue with 5 liters of beer for a buck. So no one does. Instead, they drink it with gusto.

This ‘fresh beer’ is so called because it is delivered in plastic kegs each morning to retailers where it is drunk until it is gone, to be replaced with a fresh keg the following morning. The kegs are dispensed with the simple help of gravity. A hose is attached near the bottom and out comes the beer, unless a thumb or some other obstacle prevents the flow.

I saw this procedure in action on my first day in Ha Noi. I picked a direction and started walking in search of a bia hoi. I was utterly incompetent in my lack of even the most basic phrases in Viet Namese, but I was only after a beer which I figured couldn’t be too hard.

A Handsome Pig
I wandered streets crowded with open-fronted shops selling everything from chickens and noodles to leather coats and dishwashers. The open market has hit Viet Nam with ferocity. Manufactured goods are plentiful and cheap. Cases of canned, massed-produced lagers filled many of the stores to their ceilings. I persevered through this marketing madness and after nearly an hour came upon a woman sitting just barely inside a room that opened out into the sidewalk. She sat on a yellow and green plastic keg and held her thumb over a plastic tube emanating from another plastic keg. A tray appeared in front of her and, removing her thumb, she deftly filled each glass with frothy yellow beer.

I found one empty stool in the noisy, crowded room and a glass of beer appeared immediately. From among the rambunctious crowd a man sitting nearby greeted me in English. He asked my name and nationality, and then told me how good looking I was. Then he asked my age, to which I replied ‘bah bah.’ The only Viet Namese word in my lexicon means three. I learned it by reading the guidebook’s advice on how to order one of Viet Nam’s main industrial beers called 333, or ‘bah bah bah.’ I thought he must not have been impressed by my linguistic attempt because he responded by saying “You are a pig.”

This was confusing. Was I an attractive pig? He must have noted the concern registering on my face so he explained that according to the Asian calendar, 1971 is the year of the pig, and hence I am a pig for being born in that year. He bought my round, I slurped it down hastily (for I was parched and slightly uncomfortable), and bid farewell. My first encounter with bia hoi was a bit overwhelming and I was ready for a nap back at the hotel.

Hide and Seek
The following afternoon I picked a different direction, hoping to find an area whose concentration of bia hoi establishments was better than one per hour. I lucked out, discovered numerous bia hoi and tested several of them. Eventually, after becoming lost in the back streets of Ha Noi, I stumbled upon a bia hoi production plant. Thrilled with my good fortune, I sat right down among dozens of men watching TV in a large open warehouse style room, and I waited for a beer. None came. Eventually a man sitting nearby waved to get my attention and motioned toward a kiosk against the far wall. I approached the booth and held out my dong (ahem, that’s the name of the currency in Viet Nam). The woman took what she needed and gave me a token. I returned to my chair amid the long communal tables and held the chip up high hoping some kind server would see it, take pity, and give me a beer.

My devious scheme went exactly as planned and I was swooshing down a ricey pilsner in no time.

As I swilled, a little girl, presumably one of the proprietor’s, was having fun shyly approaching me, putting her hands to her face like ‘hide and seek’, running away, and then returning to start over again. I could think of nothing better to do at this moment than enjoy the game, so I decided to repeat my own game – the token procurement one - relax a while, and hope that eventually I might figure out how to get a tour of the brewery.

After a couple attempts at conversation with anyone who would listen, I realized I was getting nowhere using English. I could just barely spy the brewery works through an open door in the corner of the room. Judging by the large, stark, red letters, I guessed that the words painted on the wall above the door were a warning something along the lines of ‘Woe to Ye Who Enter Here (especially nosey foreigners!)'. Feeling a bit out of my comfort zone with the huge language barrier, I took the cowards way out and just peered through the door a bit. It looked like a brewery. The yellow stuff in my glass tasted like beer. Given the previous day’s successful handsome pig encounter, I decided to just call it a day.

Icy Ricey Beer
I found a number of ways to enjoy bia hoi over the next two weeks. First and foremost I learned that it is important to drink it early in the day or else risk being disappointed later on. To bia hoi drinkers, freshness is crucial. No one wants to drink it if it is even a day old. So most shops only buy one keg per day. They know it will sell out before evening, but to buy a second keg would risk having some left at the end of the night, translating into a loss. And so people drink bia hoi early and often. Customers seem to have no problem drinking liters of it during breakfast and lunch.

Viet Nam also has dozens of industrial breweries. They churn out myriad lagers usually containing a high percentage of rice adjunct. The bottled results are plentiful and available everywhere. To my palate they were bia hoi’s lesser cousin. However, one must drink something with dinner, so I tried it the way locals drink it – with ice.

A nice glass of rice adjunct pilsner filled with ice cubes. Sounds like a beer snob’s nightmare. But that’s the thing I like most about drinking beer in foreign places – it’s foreign. Experiencing the unexpected broadens the mind as well as the palate.

My favorite way to drink iced rice beer is with a plate of snails, oysters, crabs and fried fish. To properly enjoy this, one must be seated on a tiny plastic stool placed on the sidewalk, the smell of fried food wafting from miniature grills strewn up and down the street in every direction. Piles of shrimp shuckings and various shells must lay in a heap dumped disconcertingly close by on the curb only a foot or two from the dining area. Iced rice beer is just the thing for circumstances like these.

One final worthwhile destination for the beer activist. Koto Restaurant is a showcase of culinary expertise developed by former street children. These kids were hawking newspapers and shining shoes until Koto took them in, trained them as chefs and professional servers, and employed them at their restaurant. Young people who graduate from the Koto training program are now highly sought after by top end restaurants around Viet Nam. The Koto Restaurant serves a range of Viet Namese beers and is well worth a visit. The walls are lined with pictures of famous people who have visited, such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

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* It has been explained to me that Viet Namese is a monosyllabic language and that Viet Namese prefer the written word to reflect that. Thus I have opted for this spelling of words as far as my knowledge is adequate to so do.