Metallic or Tin-like in Beer Land!

Brewery work meant mashing in on brew days or cleaning and packaging on other days. I implemented a production calendar in half English/half Vietnamese. This seemed to keep everyone on the same page. Around noon (no one really kept the time) we would break for lunch. Lunch was usually soup, rice and stir-fried meat and vegetables.

Then, back to work for a bit; clean some more, finish the brew. In the afternoons it got super-hot, so this was lazy, hammock time. After the work of the day was completed, the boys took turns taking showers before dinner. Dinner was more soup, rice again, better meat, usually fish, and beers. In addition to the beers we made and drank, Vietnam has their own large macro beer brands too. We drank a lot of Bia Saigon. There are other Asian macro brands like Tiger Beer which comes from Singapore. Heineken is everywhere in Asia, including fast food restaurants. You can get a beer with your combo meal!

After dinner, it was time for more beers, video games and projector movies. Then it was bedtime. There was a small front loader washing machine for laundry. There was no dryer, so everyone's underwear got hung on the line right next to each other's. I probably didn't need to know that much about these people in this working environment, but welcome to Vietnam.

I had my own room in the far back corner of the house. There was a desk and chair, a set of bunk beds with just a mattress on the bottom. There was an old grey recliner in the corner. The room had an aircon unit and a heavy iron and glass door with a curtain for privacy. The room was a touch musky, but it would do. I used the top bunk as a wardrobe of sorts. Mike gave me a nice blanket to use. It was comfortable.

There was a master bedroom for Mike and Mai, although Mai mostly stayed in the city and only came to the brewery on special occasions. Off the master bedroom was a smaller bedroom for Khoai tay and Thu, who spent quite a bit of time in the countryside.

We were lucky to have the RO water system at the brewery as you cannot drink the tap water in Vietnam. RO water is clean to drink but lacks the minerals your body needs to absorb the hydration. Most people stick to bottled water but that can get expensive and creates plastic waste. The Vietnamese solution to this is cha da. Literally meaning, ice tea, cha da is everywhere in Vietnam.

In Can Gio, we had a cha da “bucket” that sat on the kitchen table. It was a small, circular, yellow, insulated cooler. Kien would make the cha da by boiling RO water and adding the tea bags to the bucket. Once the tea was brewed and cooled, he would go to the freezer for the ice.

Ice in Vietnam is a commodity. We don't really think about ice like that in the Western world but there, it is a bit different. Its very hot and lots of places don't have refrigeration. Most food is sold in wet markets that rely on ice to keep everything cold and safe. It was common to see men driving down the road with giant ice blocks strapped to the back of their bikes.

Kien made ice in Can Gio by filling metal kitchen prep bowls with the raw water and putting them in the freezer. Mike pointed this out to me one day. It's interesting because the thought philosophy there is that the cold temperature will kill the germs, so ice is essentially clean. As a microbiologist, I knew this was not how things worked however I didn't have the vocabulary to be able to explain this in Vietnamese.

Kien would then take the giant ice chunk out of the metal kitchen prep bowl and then plop it into the bucket of tea. There was one small metal cup that sat on top of the bucket lid that everyone would then use to dip into the bucket and drink the tea. It was like the office water cooler, except it was iced tea, and everyone used the same cup.