The BeerScribe Video Beer Minute(s): Saigon, Vietnam…

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During my recent round-the-world trip, I made a series of short videos of the various beer establishments my brother Myk and I visited. I took the videos on my digital camera mainly because I wanted to document our travels but also to capture a little bit of the local spirit. Having gone through them, I’m not sure how much they really convey but as there is a serious dearth of information about beer in some developing countries, and I don’t really know when I’ll get to write about Cambodia and Vietnam, I thought I’d post a few, town by town.

Our first stop in Saigon, having been blown away by the city’s character and how different it was from our shell-shocked week plus in Cambodia, was the Hoa Vien Brewery. A chain operation, Hoa Vien takes its beer very seriously. You can even catch the locals clinking their glasses, as they all do before every sip.

The next day we visited the cavernous Lion Brewery, thankfully indoors. A big Disney-esque beer hall with the oddest beer quote on the wall that I’ve ever seen…

Our final stop is Big Man Beer, another chain operation and a bit out of the tourist areas. You’ll catch Myk laughing in this one because several members of the staff just directly next to out our table waiting for us to order more of something and they were completely confused by my video.

We offer no videos for the Adlerbrau brewery because the beer was absolutely wretched and seeing me spit it back into the glass just isn’t appetizing. I did, however, score an absolutely sick video of a half-dozen local Vietnamese with a guitar singing a killer if garbled rendition of More Than Words from Extreme. Rock!

Now on to Hoi An…

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