Stay Safe in Beer Land!

I found that in order to successfully brew beer in Vietnam, one must have a detailed understanding that while the brewing process remains the same, the road to get to the end product is very different. Flexibility is a must. Temperature, cleanliness, education level and taste are very, very different in South East Asia.

Vietnam has no indigenous ingredients required to make beer and the tap water is unpotable. All ingredients must be imported through one of the most difficult and corrupt customs authorities in the world. Once the ingredients have arrived, considerations for the brewing process itself must be made.

I learned to brew in the imperial system of weights and measurements as most American brewers do. However in Vietnam, everything is done in metric. Luckily, I'm a scientist, so this conversion was easy for me. But this idea isn't completely foreign from a Western brewer perspective. European malts typically come in 25 kg bags, not 50 pounds. I couldn't imagine it going the other way though, learning in metric and having to convert to imperial.

And then the water. Because RO is a requirement, all water chemistry must then be calculated. It is kind of nice because from a recipe development stand point, we as brewers look at water as our blank canvas. If your water already has a mineral content, you could think of that as the canvas already having a hue to it. That hue might compliment a certain beer style, but might conflict with others.

The ion math can definitely get tricky. You add this mineral here and it changes how the other minerals are absorbed or it can affect your pH in a way that perhaps you hadn't thought. I found that doing my best to calculate all the numbers and then just trial and error worked best to develop the water recipes for the brews.

This was also very important in terms of the tannic quality that I experienced in the beers that first night. It turns out that grain handling is something we take for granted in the Western world. For starters, the brewery being built out of palm leaves, meant that critters were plentiful.

There was a grain storage room that we tried our best to seal, but pest control was mandatory. This is interesting because in the Buddhist Vietnamese culture, killing is wrong. Even insects. However, I learned that a caviot exists! Raid. It seems that while setting traps goes against Buddhism, but poison does not. The philosophy is that you present the poison and the organism chooses to ingest it. Or so I'm told.

This was also why there were so many dogs. Nine dogs to be exact. Dogs running everywhere. Happy dogs, sad dogs, big dogs, small dogs. They were all nice though. Every last one of them. And they for sure kept the rats at bay. We all took a special shine to Chewy. Small and copper colored, Chewy was smart. He had little tiny paws and he was a flirt! He did this side step little prance when as he trotted around the farm. Chewy knew he was boss.

It's also important that the grain be kept cool. Air conditioning the grain room is an added expense in the tropical climate that you wouldn't necessarily think about in America. I'll tell you first hand though, it makes a huge difference in contributing to the smooth texture and flavor of the final product.

We milled into plastic buckets using a home-brewers roller mill run off an electric drill. At 500L batch sizing, this worked well enough. I used google translate and pantomimes to explain to the boys about crush sizing. Mike managed to wrangle a set of seives from his home-brewing buddies as a visual aid. The boys were smart. They caught on quickly and I taught them to mind the mill gap and how to readjust it if the gravities started to sway.