Ganbei! A glimpse at beer culture in Taiwan

You can’t tell the story of beer in Taiwan without a brief foray into the country’s colonial history. Beer first became readily available on this small Pacific island under Japanese imperial rule (1895-1945) when brewing was monopolised by the state. This remained the norm post-WWII, with change coming only in recent decades, following Taiwan’s democratisation and entrance into the World Trade Organization. Since then the island has seen an independent beer boom led by pioneering breweries like Taihu and Sunmai, which happily lean into the local taste for light, thirst-quenching, fruit-forward tipples. 

Despite the success of these breweries —Taihu now has 11 sites and employs over 200 people — craft beer remains a niche concern across most of Taiwan. The country’s most popular alcoholic beverage by some distance is the state-brewed lager, Taiwan Beer. In canteen-style restaurants and roadside eateries across the island, you’ll find families sharing 600ml green bottles that flash its iconic logo. Typically, they’ll be sipping from tiny glasses known as 143 beer cups, invented by the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Company during the Second World War so that bottles of beer would stretch further when material shortages were severe. 

Today, material concerns continue to shape how the Taiwanese engage with beer. Craft beer is expensive here, often as much as 250 NTD (around £6) for a glass, which can put off regular punters, especially considering you can buy a huge, delicious lunch for around half the price. While Taipei and its surrounding area hosts a number of popular beer spots, they’re spread out across the capital, and not exactly easy to stumble across or crawl through. Other cities like the historic food capital Tainan have some great local spots — at Mizuho Bar I sample a great West Coast IPA brewed by Tsai’s, and find a crisp bottle of St Austell Tribute. This, however, is an outlier, and travelling across the country it's evident that beer isn’t a huge part of the wider cultural fabric. Most of the people driving the scene are motivated to bring what they’ve experienced in Europe or North America to Taiwan, and inject it with a local twist. This tends to involve the use of ingredients like tea, pineapple or lychee, or the incorporation of traditional local fermentation techniques into the brewing process. 

What is slightly lacking is an abundance of sociable and organic-feeling drinking spaces in which these creations could thrive. Taiwan is absolutely packed with warm, family-run restaurants and cafes that fizz with life and smack you in the face with flavour. It’s an energy that could help the Taiwanese beer scene explode, if harnessed and coupled with the clearly visible drive for innovative, boundary-pushing flavours. In my experience, it remains difficult to find drinking spots that shift away from the classic American craft taproom atmosphere and into something that feels more homely and authentic. As the charming story of the 143 cup demonstrates, beer in Taiwan has strong foundations, rooted in community and tied inextricably to the nation’s incredible food culture. Today, independent beer remains on the periphery, but if those leading the scene can play to Taiwan's strengths, then the sky’s the limit.