Beer lovers brew a niche of their own

Updated: 2010-08-20 07:16

By Christopher DeWolf(HK Edition)

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 Beer lovers brew a niche of their own

For Pierre Cadoret, experimenting with different malts and hops is part of the craft brewing process. Christopher DeWolf / For China Daily

Beer lovers brew a niche of their own 

CitySuper buyer Stanley Ho observes that craft beers are enjoying a slow but steady growth in popularity. Christopher DeWolf / For China Daily

Creative entrepreneurs seek to expand local tastes away from mass market suds. Christopher DeWolf reports.

Last month, in Kwai Chung, journalist Jeff Boda unloaded 280 cases of beer from the back of a truck and made the leap from beer-lover to beer distributor. These were no ordinary brews: They were some of the best craft beers in the world, made in small batches by Rogue and North Coast, two renowned microbreweries in the United States.

A few islands away, on a sleepy street in Mui Wo, Cathay Pacific pilot Pierre Cadoret went one step further and actually brewed his own beer. Fed up with the paucity of good beer in Hong Kong, he rented a small shop, installed large brewing vats and started making English-style "real ale": unfiltered, unpasteurized beer that has no preservatives, no additional carbonation and plenty of complex flavors.

Every year, Hongkongers drink more than 100 million liters of beer, the vast majority of which comes from major breweries like San Miguel, Carlsberg, Heineken and Tsingtao. Increasingly, though, beer enthusiasts like Boda and Cadoret are joining distributors, bars and retail stores in weaning Hong Kong drinkers off the fizzy, yellow lagers they normally drink and onto craft beers that come in a bewildering array of flavors, aromas and textures.

"There's more to beer than getting drunk in Lan Kwai Fong on a Friday night," says Boda. "There's beers that go well with food, some beers you want to drink on a cold winter night, others you drink on a beach with friends."

Boda was first introduced to craft beers in 1993, when he was a student intern at a small-town newspaper.

"I grew up drinking the usual beer and this just opened up something more," he says.

 Beer lovers brew a niche of their own

Jeff Boda invites bar owners to taste beers from Rogue and North Coast, which are considered to be among the best breweries in the United States. Foreign Devil / For China Daily

When he started working as an editor at the Chicago Tribune, he became the paper's beer critic, writing about the surge of good beers that have emerged in the United States over the past twenty years.

In 2006, when Boda moved to Hong Kong, he had to leave all of his favourite beers behind. Every time he took a trip home, he would return with two suitcases full of beer. When he found out that some of his favourite breweries could ship their beer overseas, he and a photographer friend, Christie Johnston, founded a company, Foreign Devil, to bring them to Hong Kong. Their first shipment of Rogue and North Coast arrived last month. A few weeks ago, they received some cases of beer from Baird, a small Japanese brewery run by an American expat.

Boda has already begun selling beer online and he hopes to soon start supplying some local bars and shops.

"We'd love to grow a market," he says, pointing to the US market as inspiration.

In recent years, overall beer sales declined by 2 percent, but sales by craft brewers, of which there are now more than 1,000, surged by 9 percent. It's a similar situation in Japan, where many drinkers have shifted their attention from large brewers like Sapporo to dozens of innovative small brewers that have emerged in recent years.

"People are curious to try new things," says Roberto Cioaca, business manager of Liquid Assets, which imports and distributes around 50 Belgian, American and British beers. "If you think about boring beers, as we call them, you could blind taste them and hardly tell the difference." Craft beers, he says, "have a wide range of flavors and strengths," from the floral hops of Brooklyn Lager to the hints of fruit and biscuits in Fuller's Extra Special Bitter - two of Liquid Assets' top sellers.

"If you have one of those for the first time, you'll want to try another beer to compare," says Lois Wan, the company's marketing manager. "There's big potential in the Hong Kong market for people to learn about these beers, what they taste like and why they are special."

While the elimination of all import duties on wine and beer in 2008 led to an explosion of interest in wine, beer has been relatively slow to follow. Still, there has been a noticeable change, according to Stanley Ho, the beer buyer for CitySuper, an upscale grocery chain that imports many of its own beers.

"My observation is that many new brands have been introduced to the market (since the duty was abolished]), brands that are not well-known in Hong Kong at all," he says.

 Beer lovers brew a niche of their own

Tired of missing his favourite American craft beers, journalist Jeff Boda decides to start importing them to Hong Kong. Foreign Devil / For China Daily

Without having to pay taxes on the beer they bring in, importers can afford to take more risks. Ho is currently testing two beers by I due Mastri, an Italian craft brewery, to see how well they sell.

"Italian beer is not well-liked, but now the trend is towards smaller breweries that offer more interesting styles, like this one," he says.

Pierre Cadoret takes this surge of interest as a sign of encouragement. When he first launched Typhoon Brewery last year, he knew he was making a gamble. Hong Kong's hot climate makes it a difficult place to brew most types of beer, and that's especially true for the real ale that Cadoret wanted to produce. Since it is not pasteurized and it is stored in a special temperature-controlled cask, rather than a pressurized keg, it must be consumed within a week or it will spoil. After his beer is brewed, Cadoret ages it in a back room that must be constantly air-conditioned.

It's worth the trouble, he says. Real ale is known for complex flavors, some of which come from the secondary fermentation that occurs when the beer ages in its cask. To create his signature beer, the T8 English bitter, Cadoret experimented with a variety of English malts and hops until he achieved exactly the kind of beer he wanted: one that smells fruity while tasting somewhat like digestive cookies and burnt toffee.

"We're going for the role of the artisan brewer rather than the scientific brewer," says Cadoret. Trial and error is part of the process of making a great beer.

"Brewing is not a big problem - we've brewed some very good beer," he says. "But it's an uphill battle trying to sell." Luckily for Cadoret, he found a patron in Toby Cooper, the owner of the Globe, a Central pub with a focus on good beer. Cooper helped Cadoret refine his recipe before installing a T8 cask behind the bar. It is now one of his most popular beers - Cooper sells more than 80 liters of it every week. "It's a fantastic product," says Cooper. "Whether it can be absorbed into the market is another thing. Pierre doesn't have a lot of other outlets."

Though the Globe has a large and frequently changing selection of craft beers, its two top-sellers remain the mass-market lagers Stella Artois and Budvar.

"The market for craft beers is growing but it's not expanding massively," says Cooper. "There's more interest but there's a lot of other beers out there."

The high cost of producing craft beers puts them at a disadvantage.

"Some of these beers cost me HK$50 a pint just to bring in the door," he says. That, coupled with high rents, dissuades many bar owners from selling anything but standard fare.

Recognizing the logistic difficulties of selling real ale, Cadoret hopes to start making pasteurized beer that he can sell in kegs by the end of year, which will give Typhoon's ales a chance to be sold in bars that don't want to deal with a special cask and fickle beer. He is also looking at bottling his brews, he says.

Jeff Boda has big plans, too. If he can sell enough Rogue, North Coast and Baird, he hopes to cultivate the kind of craft beer culture he remembers from home by offering beer tastings and beer-and-food pairings.

"The whole point is to make people happy, to have fun, to expose people to this whole world of beer out there," he says.

 Beer lovers brew a niche of their own

Pierre Cadoret examines Typhoon Brewery's T8 English bitter in the chilled storage room where he ages his beer. Christopher DeWolf / For China Daily

 Beer lovers brew a niche of their own

Roberto Cioaca and Lois Wan import more than 50 specialty beers from Belgium, the UK and the US. Christopher DeWolf / For China Daily

(HK Edition 08/20/2010 page8)