Top 10 Breweries in Vietnam
Vietnam is Southeast Asia's biggest beer market by volume, and bia hơi (fresh draught lager served from kegs at street-corner stalls) is one of the world's great everyday beer traditions: a staggeringly cheap, lightly flavoured lager drunk by the glass on plastic stools at the roadside. The craft beer movement that took off in Ho Chi Minh City in the mid-2010s represents a completely different tradition: American and European craft conventions adapted to Vietnamese ingredients and the extraordinary food culture that surrounds them. The result is some of Southeast Asia's most creative and technically accomplished craft beer.
1. Pasteur Street Brewing, Ho Chi Minh City
Pasteur Street Brewing is Vietnam's most internationally acclaimed craft brewery, founded by American John Reid, a long-time Vietnam resident, with brewmaster Alex Violette, formerly of Colorado's Upslope Brewing. The first batch of its flagship Jasmine IPA was brewed in November 2014, and the original taproom on Pasteur Street in District 1 opened on 2 January 2015. The brewery's signature approach — Vietnamese ingredients alongside American hop varieties — shows in that Jasmine IPA, a Citra-led IPA with a floral overlay from jasmine flowers that is both unexpected and perfectly coherent. Passion fruit, pomelo and salted-lime beers fill out a range that earned Vietnam its first World Beer Cup medal, a gold for a chocolate stout in 2016. Taprooms across Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, including one in Hanoi's Old Quarter, have expanded access.
2. Heart of Darkness, Ho Chi Minh City
Heart of Darkness was founded in 2016 by John Pemberton and friends, with a production brewery in an industrial park in neighbouring Binh Duong and a flagship bar on Ly Tu Trong street in District 1. The taproom pours a long, rotating list of hop-forward and Belgian-influenced ales, and its central location gives it plenty of tourist traffic alongside a growing Vietnamese craft audience.
3. BiaCraft Artisan Ales, Ho Chi Minh City
BiaCraft operates multiple Ho Chi Minh City locations, from District 2 and District 3 to the outer districts, and has built its identity on breadth: its bars pour a huge list of Vietnamese craft beers alongside guest taps and imports, and it offers on-the-spot canning so you can take home almost anything on tap. That accessible, neighbourhood-bar format has made it a common first step for local drinkers moving from bia hơi to craft.
4. Tê Tê Craft Beer, Ho Chi Minh City
Tê Tê (Vietnamese for "pangolin", the endangered, heavily trafficked mammal the brand campaigns for) is a Saigon-based craft label founded by Spanish brothers Rubén and Luis Martinez with Michael Rowland and Tobias Briffa. Its recipes are deliberately light and sessionable for Vietnam's climate, from an Irish-style Mellow Red to beers built on regional Vietnamese flavours, and its first taphouse opened in an alley off Nguyen Van Thu street in District 1 (Vietcetera).
5. Hoa Vien Brauhaus, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi
Hoa Vien is Vietnam's Czech-heritage brewery, widely described as the country's first brewpub, with venues in both Saigon and Hanoi. It grew out of the strong Vietnamese-Czech ties of the communist era, when many Vietnamese studied and worked in Czechoslovakia, and in 2001 it installed a brewhouse built with Czech expertise; its founder serves as an honorary Czech consul. Unfiltered pilsner and dark lager in the Plzeň tradition, served in a beer-hall setting, represent the Central European lineage alongside the American-influenced majority of the Vietnamese craft scene.
6. East West Brewing, Ho Chi Minh City
East West, founded by Loc Truong, has built a distinctive identity around beers that bridge European, new-American and Asian brewing traditions, often with locally sourced ingredients. Its brewpub, with the microbrewery on site, lets you watch the brewers at work from your table, and Vietnam's national tourism board has showcased it as one of the country's leading craft brands.
7. Lac Brewing, Ho Chi Minh City
Lac Brewing, one of the home-brewer brands that established themselves early in Saigon's craft scene, is based in the Phu My Hung neighbourhood of District 7, about 25 minutes from downtown. Its list leans toward IPAs and lighter ales, and its best-known beer is a mango IPA made with a generous dose of fruit from the brewer's family farm.
8. 7 Bridges Brewing, Da Nang
7 Bridges launched in April 2017 in Da Nang, "the city of bridges", and has become one of the best-known names in Vietnamese craft, with taprooms in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as well as its home base. It has collected multiple golds at the Asia Beer Championship, including Champion Medium Sized Brewery of Asia in 2019, and puts unusual emphasis on sustainability with a "zero waste" mission.
9. Turtle Lake Brewing, Hanoi
Named after Hanoi's Hoan Kiem ("Turtle") Lake but located in the West Lake (Tay Ho) neighbourhood, Turtle Lake opened in 2018 as an expansive brewpub built around a glass-encased brewery. It has become one of the capital's most popular gathering places, with quiz nights, charity events and a beer list that runs from lagers to IPAs and fruit-driven ales (Vietcetera).
10. Standing Bar, Hanoi (taproom)
Not a brewery but an essential stop: Standing Bar, on Truc Bach island with a balcony over the lake, pours around 20 taps of Vietnamese craft beer with no ties to any single brewery. It is one of the best places in the north to taste across the national scene, from Pasteur Street and 7 Bridges to smaller Hanoi producers, in one sitting.
Explore on the map
Vietnam's craft breweries are concentrated in District 1 and the surrounding districts of Ho Chi Minh City, in Hanoi's Old Quarter and West Lake area, and in Da Nang. Our map does not yet cover Vietnam, so use the breweries' own sites to plan a route, and open the map to explore the countries we do cover. For more of Asia's craft scenes, see our guides to China's breweries, South Korea's breweries and the Japanese craft beer scene.