[HANOI] Beers and Bands

All Photos credited to Effa

The bands were rocking, and the beers were flowing yesterday, Sunday the 16th of October. It was Hanoi's 2nd craft beer and music festival held by Time Club, making it the 3rd one in the city. Held in Hanoi Creative City in the skatepark, you could hear and see it as you came down Luong Yen with the big circus like tent hovering over the venue. It was a definite improvement, this time around as there were now six breweries representing their brands.

Furbrew was there, of course, being the big boy of craft beer of Hanoi. They had built a special beer
truck to lug and serve the impressive fifteen beers they were to have available. It was likely a stretch for them as with only four open at a time they were not selling as quickly as they wished and I was not able to try some of the new ones they would have available. Still what I did try was good as always. Next to them you had Phat Rooster, a brewery from  Ho Chi Minh City. They had a pale ale and IPA, and considering this was the free beer I was quite surprised and impressed. As in the previous craft beer events, the free beer was just Tiger or Halida. After them, we had Fuzzy logic, named after the computer term and another Saigon brewer. Which is the one thing I tend to like about craft beer guys, and the real hardcore types, not the beer bro kind is they all tend to be a nerd in some way. Even the brewer of Phat Rooster was originally an engineer. Fuzzy Logic had a pale ale as well since that seems to be the beer you do when introducing craft beer to the Vietnamese. It was a good nice citrusy pale, and I look forward to more from them. Then

we had Pasteur Street of course with four beers on tap. Their ever popular IPA, my personal favorite the Saigon Saison, the hop forward double IPA, and a new one for me to try a summer ale. After them, we had Platinum which had an unfiltered version of the pale ale and is a vast improvement over the filtered one. They also had the recently reviewed on this site the golden ale and an autumn release ale that had such an IPA like aroma, but the bitterness was mellowed by a subdued sweetness. Finally holding up the other end of the beer section was Barett with their three flagship beers on tap. Which of course, were great as usual.

I did find it funny that the two Hanoi breweries were on either end with the Saigon ones in the middle. It was wonderful to talk to some of the brewers and owners of the different breweries. They were all friendly and open to talking about their beers and breweries. I will not be going into detail here as that will be saved for when I make a visit

down south and visit their neck of the woods. There was one absence I was sad about, and that was that C-Craft was not there. Either it was an unfortunate oversight of the event organizers or the brewer was not able to show. It would have been good to have a Vietnamese craft brewer at the beer event since it is an evolution of the market with us expats bringing in our drinking culture and the locals adapting for themselves.

The food was much improved this time around as well with The fat pig offering a slow roasted pork sandwich, the Kafe with some good food, Bancong Deli serving their delicious savory pies and Corto with lakeside pizza. The one thing that I still feel they failed on was no one selling tacos and it is not like there is not a choice of places in Hanoi to set up a booth at the festival.

The music was a good mix of different bands, and it gave a liveliness to the beer festival earlier in the day as most just sat around and drank. The music may have been a little too loud at some points, cause even across the area when trying to talk to one of the brewers it was hard to hear him, even though we were far and away from the speakers. Of course, it was not a mood breaker because most of the time it was nice just to have some rock and pop blasting.

Overall it was a fun time, and you surely missed a good event if you had not shown. There will likely be another, so stop by and have some good beers and food while listening to some good local acts. Please enjoy some photos from the event below.