Eating and Drinking Around Vietnam and Thailand

beer

This story was originally published in Penthouse in 2012.

As a freshman at leafy Ohio University, I spent Wednesday eves at sticky-floored dive the Greenery, drinking suds from a plastic cup. That the saloon served underage students was scarcely unique; what made Wednesdays special was that 25 cents bought about 12 ounces of watery beer. That night, a couple crinkled dollars purchased a portal to an intoxicating new world, one filled with falling—both on the ground and into strangers’ beds. As with sex, all good things come to an end. Eventually, the cops shuttered the law-flouting bar. The late nineties were the last time I chugged such inexpensive beer.

            “Beer can be even cheaper in Vietnam,” my friend Lauren, a fellow food writer, told me one recent afternoon. She spent several months living in Hanoi, a city smitten by the rice-driven, low-alcohol lager bia hoi, a.k.a. “fresh beer.” Come morning, watering holes receive their daily allotment of the unfiltered, preservative-free draft beer, which declines in quality as the day drags on. Thus, Bia hoi is quaffed early and often—an easy task, when mugs cost as little as 20 cents.

            “Baby,” I told my wife when planning our annual winter trip, “we need to go to Southeast Asia. I’ll buy you as many massages as you want.” Those words won her heart. We booked flights to Hanoi, then on to northern Thailand’s Chiang Mai and Bangkok, in the south. My mission was to sample as many cheap beers and spirits as possible. Could quality match cost? For this drunk, inquisitive penny-pincher, it seemed like paradise. But as I discovered, even paradise has a dark, boring side.

            ***

After more than 24 hours of transit, jetting across a dozen time zones, we arrived in Hanoi as strung out as speed freaks. Sleep would’ve been the smart, but I’m rarely the brightest light bulb. “I’d like a beer,” I told my wife, who begrudgingly grabbed her bag and followed me into the cool, crazed night. Smog-cloaked Hanoi is barely controlled chaos, with rivers of honking motorbikes coursing down the Old Quarter’s cramped streets. The sidewalks are equally clogged with vendors serving steaming noodle soups to patrons contorted into teensy plastic chairs suited for six-year-olds. Yet I craved different liquid sustenance, searching out corner hangouts where the sooty awnings announced several words: bia hoi.

            “That looks like a nice spot,” I told my wife, hustling to a bar—well, a dented silver keg surrounded by stools, knee-high plastic tables and the bartender: a fiftysomething woman holding a foamy plastic tube. “Bia?” she asked. I nodded, passed her 5,000 dong (about 25 cents; dong is Vietnam’s unit of money) and received a smudged glass filled with golden beer. It recalled Bud but drank much brisker, with a subtly floral nose and an appealing effervescence. In minutes, I disappeared my first mug, then my second. The old boozehounds beside me nodded in approval. I wanted more beer. “But we need to go to bed,” my wife said, beckoning us back to the hotel. “There will be more tomorrow.”

            Following an afternoon buying bootleg sneakers and devouring grilled pork, we moseyed to Bia Hoi Corner. Each corner of the Old Quarter intersection feature casually decrepit bia hoi joints circled by tiny chairs commandeered by tourists, expats and chain-smoking locals, everyone united by quarter beer. I glugged four glasses while snacking on herbaceous omelets prepared by a sidewalk vendor.

            “What do you think?” I asked my wife, passing her my beer. “I like the eggs,” she announced diplomatically, wrinkling her nose. Bia hoi is not for the picky connoisseur, but the cost compensates for the lack of flavorful nuance. Indeed, I could’ve spent my entire trip happily sipping bia hoi, but our itinerary demanded we depart to the Gulf of Tonkin’s Halong Bay, which is studded with some 1,600 limestone island protruding like craggy thumbs.

            In preparation for the two-day cruise, I bought a three-buck bottle of Vodka Hanoi. (The carafes of booze entombing fanged cobras clutching scorpions were tempting, but not so conducive to an afternoon of seafaring imbibing.) Whereas vodkas are typically distilled from wheat, corn or potatoes, this nearly 80-proof spirit relies on rice. The hooch has a sweet aroma backed by a slick, somewhat greasy aftertaste. The vodka would be best ice-cold, but in-room freezers, as well as extra toilet paper, were lacking on our “luxury” cruise. Instead, we mixed hooch with the sugary juice availably on board, creating a pleasantly palatable cocktail.

            “More, please,” my wife commanded, extending a glass with a bendy purple straw. I refilled her cup, before departing to the bottom deck to visit the floating convenience store bobbing beside our vessel. Industrious locals stock their boats with candy bars, chips, bottled water and cans of Bia Hoi Hanoi, selling goods to captive tourists. I nabbed a beer, finding it thin and metallic, a far cry from fresh bia hoi.

            Disappointment continued in Chiang Mai, a city filled with Buddhist wats, or temples as stunning as the suds were subpar. Massive, buck-fifty bottles of lagers such as a Leo, Singha and Archer were largely forgettable and interchangeable, save for the elevated alcohol content of Chang. Seeking a new inebriant, I hit a 7-11 (one of thousands found across Thailand, sometimes two on every block) and purchased a cold SiamSato (a sort of sweet “rice beer”) and rice wine adorned with a cobra image. “It’s...very hot,” the clerk warned me.

            Hot wasn’t the half of it. The cobra booze drank like flaming rubbing alcohol, the fumes assaulting my nose like gasoline. To eradicate the taste, I opened the SiamSato. It smelled sweet, rotten and sour, with a tangy flavor like apple cider spiked with artificial sweeteners. Needless to say, I slumbered sober that night. And the ensuing night. On the beachy island of Ko Samet, my wife and I broke the streak by drinking nearly a dozen bottles of strong Chang beer. Come sunrise, we paid the piper with hammering hangovers.

            “You got Chang’d,” my friend Matt Groves told me days later at his apartment in Bangkok, where we wrapped our trip. The ex–New Yorker and craft-beer drinker had spent three years teaching in Bangkok, lamenting the lack of good brews and wine. Excessive taxes, he explained, make decent wine expensive, “and you never know if it’ll be ruined by the heat.” He sometimes splurged on imported Belgian brews, but he gave up on most Thai beer, save for crisp Phuket lager. This sameness would drive me nuts. In fact, after two weeks of travel I was daydreaming about drinking hoppy IPAs.

            “Well,” Matt started, “I do have a few beers you may like.” He led me to a small fridge hidden in a side room. He opened the door. As in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson cracks the mysterious briefcase, I was bathed in a glorious light. Inside, Matt had secreted bottles of Belgian sour beers, homemade mead and Beerlao Dark. “Try this,” he said, pouring the Laotian brew into a tall glass. The nutmeg-brown beer smelled of sweet roasted malt and caramel, backed by flavors of toasted malts, cocoa and a gentle bitterness. After weeks of drifting through a lager-filled desert, Beerlao Dark was like diving into an oasis. I sipped it slowly, staring outside into the hot Bangkok night, savoring the comforts of home far from it.