Beer Journal | Mikkeller Bangkok “Once a beer-lover, always a beer-lover.”

Mikkeller Bangkok

“Once a beer-lover, always a beer-lover.”

By Tracy Chenxi Wang

May, 2014

Right after I landed in the fascinating country of smiles and endless cilantro seasoned dishes, I headed directly to the legendary craft beer bar of this 18 million people megacity, the Mikkeller Bangkok. As the first and only Asian outlet of acclaimed Danish beer brewer Mikkel Borg Bjergsø’s Mikkeller, it opened on January 29th in 2014.

  

After getting away from the bustling main street, onto a tranquil soil, a yard of a small side street, I found it in a green residential area, the teal-colored sign of the Mikkeller Bangkok. Stepping on the lawn of a stylish functionalist house built in the 1960’s washed away all the irritation of the hot weather. There is a huge garden with a few tables on the patio outside. The interior is in a bright Scandinavian style with bright wooden floors and furniture, accomplished with a lot of white. The food menu only has a few items for now, but the management will add more, once the bar becomes busier.

Here I met with Jakob Mørkenborg Rasmussen from Denmark and his Canadian co-partner Mike MacDonald. They both share enthusiasm for beer and love being innovated. Jakob had been importing foreign beers and holding numerous tasting events that Mike, a self-described beer connoisseur, attended regularly. That’s how they met and became business partners. Jakob’s short full beard makes him look to me like a typical Dane. Mike smiles a lot and his outgoing funny ways make him the people’s person of the two. After travelling in South Asia for some years, Jakob felt a growing love for Thailand and moved there in 2004. His fascination for beers got matched by finding work at Carlsberg Thailand, giving him a deep insight of this industry and also the local drinking demographic.

“We really wanted to build something that we would go to every night.”

Most beer-lover would ask why with a lot of curiosity, why would a Danish legendary gypsy brewery locate in Bangkok?

“There are a lot of beer bars in Bangkok and Thais have a really strong beer drinking culture, but what most bars compete with is the amount of beer signage or who has the most number of taps, even though they are serving 50 pale light lager tasting very much like the other”, said by Jakob,

Since the market was dominated by domestic staple Singha, Chang and Leo, Jakob and Mike decided to open a bar to showcase beer of many styles on tap and bottled. “We want to serve beer with respect. My partner and I are both in this business not so much from a financial perspective but more so from a beer culture perspective. We wanted to bring in a different kind of quality than people are used to in this part of the world. The beers may be much pricier than the conventional brands, but we believe they offer a whole different experience in taste,” Mike MacDonald said. “We really wanted to build something that we would go to every night.”

Speaking of the customers they want to attract, they hope to get people who are genuinely interested or curious about great tasting beer. “With most people not being able distinguish between two beers like a Mexican chili beer and Mikkeller American Dream, we want to educate the Thai beer drinking crowd what good craft beer really is. A part of that is having beer tastings with an educational scope as well offering beer tastings in our Imperial Tasting Room.” The staffs are also hardcore beer-lovers with passion. They are ready to educate the customers about craft beer culture, the stories behind the beers, and how to serve and enjoy craft beers. They want to provide a complexion of beer, service and atmosphere which will attract people. “Once a beer-lover, always a beer-lover”, Mike preached.

There is a reason why the bar is a bit away from the busy streets of Bangkok in a much quieter place, they explained, “A requirement from Mikkel was making this bar a destination and I think we have managed just that. It’s not a place you just drop by; you’ve probably made up your mind coming here, well before actually coming here. With the garden we’re able to offer plenty of outdoor seating, people love that.”

I happened travelling in Thailand during the period of political tensions; there was national curfew between midnight to 5am every day, which damaged tourists industry and local food and beverage industry a lot. Mike told me that this (policy) is one of their biggest obstacles for now. Thailand has a lot of festivals and “No Alcohol” days, which adds up to four to seven days a month the bar has to stay close. A sudden feeling of deep dark sadness, dampening my mood, soggy, miserable everything but what Thailand is, fell over me! Mike and Jakob rushed to the bar and poured me 2 pints of their finest each. It took me almost 5 minutes to down them and the world become bright again.

Talking about the theory that they run the bar, “quality is number one; we’re not competing with price. We’ll have no happy hours or discounted days.” They wouldn’t compete with the biggest selection of imported beers, or cheapest beers. “For example, the reason of people going to the wine bar is not because it has the biggest selection, but a unique selection. Another kind of customers go to the nearest bars, they don’t care what kind of beers they are drinking.” With the mission of providing the finest craft beers to the customers, Jakob started his own beer distributing company, Hopsession. Now he imports Danish beers from Nørrebro Bryghus and Bøgedal but also Mikkeller. They only want to build a different place where the customers can keep drinking with their friends. “Every time I came to Bangkok, I’d spend every night here, and I love the atmosphere here”, said an American Sam Craig who was on his business trip here. Since Mikkeller Bangkok was opened less than half a year, it already made it way on the list of Top 10 Best Beer Bar in Asia by CNN.

The bar quenches the thirst of craft beer lovers with a selection of 30 beers on tap, 20 of them are brewed by Mikkeller, and 10 of them are changing guest beers from other craft beer makers. A large selection of bottled beer completes the collection. There’s no cheap beer here, all beers on tap are in the range of 200-350 Baht (￥40-70)per glass, and bottled ones are 250-1500 Baht (￥50-300), on the street you find a local commercial beer for just 50 Baht (￥10).

There are four other venues among the world in total, other than Mikkeller Bangkok, there are two located in Copenhagen, the third is in San Francisco and the fourth is in Stockholm (opened in March of 2014).

Mikkeller Bangkok

Address: 26 Ekamai Soi 10 Yaek 2, Ekamai Road, Bangkok 10110, Thailand

Tel: +66 2 381 9891

Website: www.mikkellerbangkok.com

Here is the list of Top 10 Best Beer Bars by CNN:

Mikkeller Bangkok (Bangkok, Thailand)
BrewDog Roppongi (Tokyo, Japan)
Goodbeer Faucets (Tokyo, Japan)
Smith Street Taps (Singapore)
BREW – Beers & Ciders (Bangkok, Thailand)
Brewerkz – Riverside Point (Singapore)
TAPS Beer Bar (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

 --------

This article was also publish on Precis magazine on issue seven. Free downloading here: http://issuu.com/istech24/docs/precis_issue_seven_4_30_2015

Beer Journal | Beijing Autumn Craft Beer Festival 2014

October 16, 2014

When I woke up and dragged the curtain in the morning on October 10^th, I almost thought I was blind, because I couldn’t tell was the pollution so severe or just was it just because of the green net covering the whole residential building, blocking my eyesight. Well, it’s the fourth day in a row with PM2.5 index over 350. Everyone on the street looks so dead inside.

I was struggling whether to open the windows and let the PM2.5 kill my lungs or just keep the windows shut and be suffocated from the thick CO2. Thanks to an article I read the other day, in a bedroom without new air, the CO2 can reach 1000ppm (from 200ppm) over night.

Stretched a little and headed to East Hotel at 3pm.

And the organizer (not saying slow boat) knew how to make a 5’8’’ girl feel she’s a dwarf, when I was standing on a table and still couldn’t reach the top of the tent to zip down the zipper. Thanks to Ollo and Jeremy, they easily pulled that little bastard down without any struggle or shakiness. Trust me, whenever you feel you’re tall, put yourself surrounded by Germans, all of a sudden you’ll find the feeling of you’re an adolescent again among those senior buddies, no need to run all the way and burn a lot at the Disney Lands. With those gentlemen’s help, the tent was ready.

It was good to see all the people who are as much beer lover as the person right next to them.   

[From 4 to 10pm…

Let’s start from the Calvin Beer, Calvin went to Hefei as an exchange student and started to brew. His father and grandfather all brewed…Calvin tried his best to express his charisma to attract people to the untraversed area, he brought three beers. I gave this b-day boy a T-shirt as a gift. His assistant put his hands up and shouted out “Welcome to Calvin Beer!” every ten minute, looks like people in sacred rituals. They use Speidel equipment, should be very stable flavor, Bourbon Barrel Porter tasted thick.

Then Nbeer Pub, I like their ideas about the name. “NB” means bad-ass in Chinese. And Nbeer also reminds people of new beers. Oatmeal Stout out of five other beers has lower ABV and IBU, which is good to drink a lot during the day.

Slow Boat is also the organizer of this festival, which brought eight beers here; two of them were sold out at the first day. Personally I like Double IPA and Imperial Pumpkin Stout very much.

Great Leap Brewery had four beers on tap; Beat the landlord barley wine was very impressive, with ABV over 11.2%, but very smooth and sweet with hardly noticeable sense of ethanol, it was so drinkable that you wouldn’t know until you got drunk already. Kevin told me they only sell this 310ml cup at the tap house. I’d say we should put a sign of “Danger” with this beer. I tried Three Door Tripel before, it also looks like a hard candy with such fresh sweetness, citrus aromas and light body, but believe me; you won’t survive from three whole cups. 

Harvest Brewing Co. from Chengdu has a famous brewer who used to be a DJ in Beijing. They brought four beers here. At the second day, all the tents were ready except them, Gao Yan pretended to be the bartender and sent out their beers for fun.

There’s another shining star of this festival--the Boxing Cat Brewery, just look at the badges and awards on the background. The Brew-master Michael Jordan with his team came from Shanghai and brought six beers with them. I tried Mao Mat Lager, the body was light and strong aroma of lemon grass which reminded me of days in Thailand. I had sushi with Kyle who is the brewing assistance of Michael, we found that Mao Mat matched this well.

Master Gao played yo-yo around the tent, which made the tent was surrounded by a lot of people.

Jing A always knows how to be creative and get attention, they brought their egg cart here with keg of airpocolypse beer on it, and it worked. They also released the Guizhou smoked chili porter which was co-brewed with Huoli from Beijing Homebrew Society.

No. 18 Brewery carried the metal frame from Wuhan, and all the decoration was mystery with all black-and-white style, which reminded me of Taoism or Tai ji. The Break Stout was with strong notes of coffee and baking breads, which is definitely my kind of breakfast. Karl told me they used imported malts, which was worth. They also had the temporary tattoos “無啤不欢”(means no beers, no friends), which made them became one of three tattoo places at this festival. (The othr two were Jing A and Calvin Beer both using their logos as tattoos.)

Then we tried the Strong Ale Works from Qingdao, their Shuangku IPA was worth to try.

That’s Beijing and the Beer Link were the only two media tents. At the Beer Link tent, we tried to ask people scan the QR code and got free raffles for T-shirts, badges, cups or even growlers. But sometimes it turned out that the lucky draws were slaughtered by guards here. They pushed each other with bashful but greedy grins, came up to the stool, brazenly kept on asking more chances to have a draw.

Last but not least were two tents of Beijing Homebrew Society; actually half of it should belong to iBrew. Other than devoting ciders and perries to lovely girls, by any random chance or maybe the German guy Brandon think he MUST also devote his tent and share with the society, he just did. It was so crowded in front of BHS tent. Those home-brewer were so funny, some of them even displayed grapes and apples. And Huoli shared his original Chili porter with me, cough cough, it contained more than three times of chili than Jing A version. (He used Xiaomi chili, which was considered one of the spicies chilis here.) I also like Ollo’s Blackmail IPA, with strong smoky sense. Yob’s Orange Goblin was spicy as always.

Normally we also met a lot of interesting people during the festival. A man standing in front of our tent tried to give out a long speech; I asked my friend, “Do you understand what he said?”” No, did you?”” Not even a clue.” He used to be the first importer of all the soda beverages in China, now he imports Czech and sells them to Tsing Tao. As a person who has been in this industry for over 20 years, we newbies were so naïve in his eyes.

After 12 hours of standing and talking, I still felt alive; it must be, because beers are my true love.

When I was folding the lucky draw tokens, the pop music from next tent suddenly let a thought rush through my mind, “this moment is life”. With the friends around me, the beers and the music made it being here like in a dream, these are the reasons that I want to stay here. Even though in the movie “Spirited Away” by Miyazaki Hayao, there’s a philosophy A train in the sunset symbolizes the passage from life to death.

In the last 30 minutes of the festival, Ollo and I ended up sitting in the vacant tent in total silence, the only sign to show we were alive was my chest still going up and downs, and the red light of his electronic pipe was flickering. A lot of drunk people or trying-to-get-drunk people walked by, some of them stared at us, had a glance of the total vacant background behind us in the bright fluorescent lamp. I broke the ice, “they might think we’re doing performing arts”. After a slow exhale of the pipe, “we should charge them 5 yuan to watch us”, he said seriously through a rising cloud of some white smoke, reminding me of The Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. I am so blessed to hang out with people with a sense of humor. Ollo continues, “When will you start to brew?” Actually, I have no idea. Since I got the news that I had to say farewell to the city that I lived for nine years, every plan about future becomes so complicated. “You’ve tasted our beers; and you have to pay the debts back.” He said with the long face. True, that’s the debt I have to pay back. After an embarrassed laugh or two, I made my way with the materials into the dreamy haze.  /The End.

About Me

Who is Tracy?

Tracy Wang is a travelling foodie and passionate writer especially about craft beers and fine wines.

She's the executive editor for The Beer Link Magazine, contributor and associate editor for Precis Magazine and picked up homebrewing in 2014 (Don’t tell me you didn’t try the ladies-co-brew Tart Tomboy Ale and Golden Wave Amber Ales on Women’s Day at the Slow Boat for the Starfish Foundation). She’s ambitious on keeping track of every beer she samples with taken a photo of it and taking notes. Recently, she’s busying in preparing to be the only female beer judge and very first one to get hammered at Shanghai 2^nd National Homebrew Competition in June.

And she's still waiting for the alien mothership to get her home. If you meet her on any of the beer festival or in any craft beer bars, go on, buy her a beer!

2015-6