Vietnam's Growing Craft Brewery Culture. 08:00-09:00a ET
COREN: Welcome back. You'll be interested to know that beer is big business in Vietnam. And now it appears craft breweries are on the rise. Krsitie Lu Stout has this report.</s>KRISTIE LU STOUT, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's Monday night in Ho Chi Minh City and friends are meeting for beer. The post-work activity is a national pastime in Vietnam. Last year the Vietnamese downed almost 3.8 -- (voice-over): -- billion liters of beer, making Vietnam the biggest market for the beverage in Southeast Asia.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's so much more to beer culture in Vietnam now than just that particular image. The story about craft beer has really taken off in the last couple of years.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): Today, the streets of Saigon are buzzing with IPAs, ghosis (ph) and other small batch brews from brands like Heart of Darkness and Winking Seal.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As Vietnam has continued to experience income growth, that's where craft beer has really come in. The taste and the preferences of Vietnamese consumers are changing and evolving. And there are lots of people trying to rush to that market.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): More than two years, John Reid, an America, bet that Vietnam's fondness for beer could extend to craft.</s>JOHN REID, BEER ENTREPRENEUR: We wanted to create something in Vietnam for them to have a local craft beer brand but not an American brand. We wanted a Vietnamese brand that we started here. And everything was local and it was created from Vietnam.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): Picking up international awards and recognition Pastor Street (ph) Brewing Company is available nationwide in Vietnam as well as in Malaysia and Thailand.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've got a lot of fun stuff in the tanks right now.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): This year, the company started exporting to the U.S. market.</s>REID: About a year into it, about 10, 15 breweries started opening up and we didn't see any decrease in sales for our taproom or our distribution. It just all grew. So it just showed that all these breweries are opening up, all helping to build the culture together.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): State-produced beer and multinational brewers still fill the glasses of most Vietnamese. But craft breweries hope that better quality and taste can lure customers despite the higher cost. For Loc Truong, founder of East West Brewing Company, one sip is all it takes.</s>LOC TRUONG, EAST WEST BREWING COMPANY: A lot of people, they didn't know that there's so many different flavors in beer out there. Once they tried craft, they never went back.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): In a move to educate the public, this taproom's beers are made onsite.</s>TRUONG: We cannot really show what craft beer is when you don't have a craft brewery to really guide them through.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): This year, the Southeast Asia Brewing Conference is being hosted for the first time in Ho Chi Minh City, a toast of sorts to the growing influence of Vietnam's microbreweries</s>TRUONG: I think aside from maybe owner of Ferrari, owning a beer company is the next best thing. The market is still so open and the possibilities of what you want to do, how you want to shape the market, it really depends on yourself.</s>LU STOUT (voice-over): Kristie Lu Stout, CNN.</s>COREN: Well, that is News Stream. I'm Anna Coren. Thanks so much for your company. World Sport with Alex Thomas is coming up next. END