When we were in Ho Chi Minh City we were relieved to taste some proper Vietnam beer at Pasteur Street Brewing, after a month of lager elsewhere.
When we were researching our trip to Vietnam, we already knew that craft beer was becoming very popular in this country. Ho Chi Minh City seems to be the source of the good Vietnam beer. So after a month of drinking (I’ll be polite) ‘refreshing lager’ in the form of Hanoi, Saigon, Larue, 333, Huda and Tiger, let’s face it we were dying for a proper beer by the time we got to the end of our trip.
We dropped into the original Pasteur Street Brewing location to satisfy our craving. I went immediately for the 7.2% Saigon Saison (you had me at ‘Belgian style’ and ‘lemongrass’) and Kim with his taste for sour beer chose The Salty Dragon:
Gose is a traditional German beer that is brewed to be sour and salty, like a jaded taxi driver, only tastier. This kettle-soured delight is a feast for the senses. Pink, but a manly dark pink, this beer beckons the drinker in with a visual siren’s call. Hints of coriander and lactobacillus (the sour stuff) waft to the nose.
What I liked about Pasteur Street Brewing is that you can chose between a 175ml taster (costing around 40,000d -1.51 EUR), a half pour or full pour. I figured that after a month of no strong beer, hitting a full pour of the saison might be a bad idea, so opted for the cute taster which did the job and made me feel slightly better about spending already twice as much on a beer as we had done in the rest of the country.
There are more craft breweries in Ho Chi Minh City, some of which we got to try: Primeval Forest Pilsener by Heart of Darkness Brewery, Belgo Blond by Belgo and Te Te Electric IPA by Te Te Brewing. There’s a few discoveries to be made here! One of the places where you can do this is the Rogue Saigon bar, which has some 10 beers on tap.