Pride in Taipei

You can thank Mark Tung, head brewer at Taipei-based brewery, Ugly Half, for this brief history of beer and brewing in Taiwan, over the last 100 years. He just moved home to Taiwan in March of this year having spent the last three years in the UK, working at the revered and much-beloved DEYA brewery, in Cheltenham. He loved his time in the UK, but says he missed the Taiwanese way of always drinking beer with food. Soaking up pints with a bag of crisps doesn’t quite hit the spot when you’re used to vast and vibrant night markets, selling a variety of delicious mouthfuls, perfect for beer pairing. 

Taiwan’s immense food culture played no small part in attracting Ugly Half’s co-founders, Max Gilbert and Harn Sun, to Taipei. The now-married couple met in Shanghai, where they’d moved from their respective home countries of New Zealand and the US, and where Max was then working for an importer bringing Kiwi craft brands into China. As the couple’s passion for craft grew, the idea of opening their own brewery took up an increasing amount of space in their minds, until they began to take the prospect seriously. 

Shanghai was just too competitive a place to start out though. Being a major centre for global trade, a new brewery in the city would have to compete with beer being imported from everywhere. Max said what initially attracted him and Harn to Taipei was its amazing food culture. Taiwan’s capital is just a couple of hours away from Shanghai, and so the couple visited several times before finding themselves in love with the city. 

“As well as having an amazing food culture, Taipei has a really nice drinking culture,” says Max, of the city he now calls home. “People don't drink as much, but it is a really nice environment to have a few beers and great food. The people drinking tend to be in their 30s, and because there’s a really big international community there — usually of people on a working holiday, or who have studied abroad, or have family abroad — people in that age bracket tend to be pretty open minded, and we thought that would be a great consumer to try and go after. More than that, though, Taipei is just a great city and a lovely place to live. So it was all these things amalgamating together that made us want to put down roots here.”

Max says that it’s easy enough to set up a brewery in Taiwan; acquiring alcohol and brewing licences are by no means a barrier to entry, though Mark points out that with food being such a central part of beer drinking culture, it’s not enough for bars to sell great beer. Venues have to also serve food, and that food has to be able to compete with surrounding restaurants. He says that even karaoke bars — where a lot of beer is consumed — the food offering has to be good. With so many components to get right, Ugly Half doesn’t have a bar in the city just yet, though they’re hoping to open one in the next year. 

Breweries in Taipei have to operate within the city’s industrial zone, right on the outskirts of urban life. Max says that while people are welcome to visit the on-site taproom for a pint straight from the tank, you can’t expect or count on people making that journey out to the middle of nowhere. As such Ugly Half currently relies on the city-based bars and restaurants that stock its beers to deliver the face to face interaction that’s so helpful when introducing drinkers to unfamiliar flavours. For Max, the importance of that interaction cannot be overstated, especially when the brewery’s mission is to introduce drinkers to the “ugly half” of brewing, where the quality of the product is decided. 

“You know, a lot of brewing is some pretty unsexy stuff, and that work going on in the background doesn’t get a lot of recognition even though, without it, we wouldn't be anywhere,” says Max. “I think we have a very good reputation for quality, and have been really dedicated to that. I think that’s something you have to work to build an appreciation for, but which will pay dividends in the long run. It would have been easy to cut a few corners and score a few cheap points early on, because the market is very small and the consumer still might not be as fluent in craft beer as we think they will be in the future. We wanted to make sure we set the standard right from the get go, and I think that’s already done a lot for us in terms of our reputation.”

Ugly Half was by no means the first craft brewery to set up shop in Taiwan, though Mark says you can still count the number of craft breweries on two hands, and a notable number of them focus on making craft lagers, fruit-forward IPAs, and cocktail-like sours. He says it’s understandable that they do so; the intense heat of Taiwan lends itself to the refreshing sweetness of fruit-heavy beers, as well as light, crisp, easy-drinking lagers. However, under the unavoidable influence of Max’s penchant for New Zealand hops, Ugly Half has taken the road less travelled, and decided to meet drinkers in a space that’s at once familiar and challenging.

It goes without saying that the Taiwanese palate is complex and sophisticated, but intense hoppiness still takes some getting used to. To bridge the gap between local tastes and international influences, Ugly Half makes a hopped cider, using the fruity base of the drink as a dry, crisp platform for Nelson Sauvin. Similarly, the brewery makes an amber lager, Toastea, using the crusts from a local breakfast shop. “Taiwanese breakfast shops sell these little sandwiches that are always crustless,” says Max, “and so we thought, well, what's happened to those crusts? We found a place close to us that actually makes all these loaves of bread and trims the crusts off in-house, and so we went in, got all these bread crusts, and replaced 5% of our grain bill with them.”

Mark would later add that, beers like this not only add something recognisable to local drinkers who might be unfamiliar with a given beer style, but they also represent something of Taiwan, to international drinkers. “Using the amber lager as an example, breakfast is a big thing in Taiwan,” says Mark, “and so we want the beer to be related to that kind of culture, and to represent part of the Taiwanese culture, or art, or all the habits of drinking and eating together. We find a story to make our core; it's the storytelling and the beer together that makes it successful. We’re trying to sell the culture of Taiwan, the design of Taiwan, the pride of Taiwan. That’s what makes our beers stand out as valuable on the shelf.” 

And it’s working. Ugly Half has recently become a hit in many of LA’s Asian-fusion restaurants, and also in Japan, where the brewery’s distinct identity is inciting interest and curiosity around the rich culture of Taiwan. Max and Mark are quick to acknowledge how difficult the industry is for everyone, globally, these days, and while I agree that the future is fraught in so many more ways than concerns beer, I can’t help but deeply admire the brewery, and feel excited about its future.