Isoamyl Acetate in Beer Land!

When Mai and Mike first began selling his beers in the taproom, craft beer had not really existed in Vietnam. As I sort of explained earlier, there are no indigenous ingredients and also no regulations or taxes. But things change very quickly over there and once the import lines were opened, people began making and selling a lot of small batch beers.

This is one thing I really came to appreciate about the Vietnamese culture: their industrious nature. Because there is less bureaucracy, if you get an idea for a business, you can just execute it. Stateside, we have to wait for licensing and permits but in Vietnam, this wasn't the case. This was intriguing to me.

As a result, store fronts would change over night. For most of my time in Vietnam, there was a popular franchised convenience store right across the street from the taproom. I went to go work in the countryside for a few days and when I came back, the convenience store was gone and a cafe was in its place. The walls had been painted from red to bright green, counters and refrigeration units had been removed. A kitchen had been installed. The cafe was packed full and looked like it had been there for years at that point. All in a matter of four days. Try to get that kind of turnaround in America. Ha!

Mike often made comments about how Mai didn't feel comfortable unless she had a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. He explained to me, over beers in the countryside, more about her life. Mai was born during the war in Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon, when she was a little girl, her parents left her with her aunt and fled the city. They never made it out.

As is often the case with orphans, Mai left her aunts care and took to finding her own way. At some point, she was adopted into another family. A larger, more powerful family of people who ran all sorts of businesses in the post war chaos that was Ho Chi Minh City in the 1980's. This is where Mai learned to be a business woman.

She learned to protect herself. She learned to save her money. She learned to turn that money into more money. She learned the rules and the laws and how to follow them and how and when to break them. She knew who she could trust and who she couldn't. Momma Mai knew the city, the people in it and how to run a shop.

I think to be a successful business woman in any county, flexibility is a must and this is where those lack of regulations regarding craft beer come into play. Where as other leisure industries in Vietnam, such as the legal prostitution, were highly regulated, craft beer was a grey area. Mai saw this opportunity and took it.

“I like your beer, Alissa” she said to me once. “It does not require health checks by the government.”

It did however, require having weekly meetings or “drinks” with the local police. Once craft beer began to catch on, establishing these relationships, in this way was how things worked over there. It was how you stay protected. I remember one occasion where we were all enjoying time in Can Gio. The whole family was there, Mai, Mike, Khoi Tay and the nanny (along with the boys and the dogs.) Mai had to leave to go back to Saigon to have drinks with the police and she wanted to stay and relax.

I had been in Saigon long enough by then and was beginning to understand how the game was played. I offered to go in her place so she could enjoy time with her family. She laughed at me with her huge, smile. “No Alissa. Anyone but you can go” she said. She protected me as well. I appreciated that.