Mega Motorcycle Trip Day 3: Episode Twenty-Five
Get lost in the jungle with Chelsea and Kinsey as they continue their motorcycle tour through Vietnam. Also, if you thought there were massive ...
In Vietnam, traveling an unlikely beer trail
THE setting could have been any typical Central European beer garden. There were long rows of wooden tables stained in dark, rich hues; half- and full-liter beer mugs hanging from metal racks; and two beautifully crafted brass decoction tanks used for mashing traditionally brewed beer. But on this warm afternoon in November, I wasn’t in Plzen, or Munich, or Bruges. I was at the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
The humid air buzzed with conversations in melodiously tonal Vietnamese. This, too, surprised me. Considering that Hoa Vien’s founder is an honorary consul of the Czech Republic (that is, a noncareer diplomat), I had envisioned throngs of expatriates knocking their glasses together. But the crowd was made up of young Vietnamese men in slacks and button-down shirts — lanyards with key cards still dangling around their necks — and couples chatting under large, shady trees. All part of Vietnam’s growing generation of hip, young professionals.
At the beginning of a beer odyssey through this long, slender country, I savored the unexpectedness of it all as I sipped two draft brews made on the premises, carrying Hoa Vien’s Hoavener label. The crisp, freshly poured bia vang (yellow beer), what we would call a golden lager, had a bitter hops flavor somewhere between a typical Czech pilsner and a Munich-style lager. The bia den (black beer), a dark lager, was more intensely bitter, and had just enough bite to balance a beautiful malt-caramel flavor. Both were wonderful.
For the first-time visitor to Vietnam, the variety of local and regional beers can be surprising. It seems each city has a beer named after it (Bia Can Tho, Bia Thai Binh, Bia Saigon, Bia Hanoi, Bia Hue, and so on), and the best of the bunch depends on whom you ask and where you’re asking. But in recent decades, Vietnamese beer culture has morphed, adopting traditional European styles as well as embracing a uniquely ephemeral home-grown brew called bia hoi. The latter is so popular that to many of the roughly four million people who visit Vietnam each year, drinking bia hoi on the streets of Hanoi is as emblematic of a trip to Southeast Asia as ordering pad Thai in Bangkok.
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