A top-floor apartment in Taipei's swanky Da-an District might seem like an unlikely place to find a brewery, but stockbroker Hsieh Chin-fa (
"The problem is we can't keep up with how fast our family and friends are drinking it," Hsieh said. "As soon as they take a sip, they're hooked."
Hsieh was a student at a beer-brewing workshop held by Duan Kow-jen (
"I've been researching beer brewing technology since 1993 in anticipation of Taiwan's entry into the World Trade Organization," Duan said.
"We knew when that happened the strict laws against private interests brewing and selling beer would be liberalized," Duan said.
Duan was right, but the regulation change took almost another decade.
In 2002, the Taiwan Tobacco & Wine Monopoly Bureau's monopoly on fermenting alcohol was broken, allowing businesses to apply for licenses to brew and sell beer and legalizing home-brewing for non-commercial purposes.
However, for beer brewers at least, legalization only removed one obstacle.
"Beer brewing is a highly specialized process and all the ingredients have to be imported," Duan said. "A lot of my students want to start their own breweries, but only a handful are still in business."
"It doesn't help that we have one of the highest taxes on beer in the world," he said. "There is a tax of NT $9 on every 330 milliliter bottle of beer."
For Hsieh, however, brewing beer is a labor of love. Pronouncing most light lagers on the market "tasteless," Hsieh devotes much of his spare time to the exacting hobby.
"I brew with malt, water, hops, yeast and nothing else," he said. "That's the way it is by law in Germany."
Hsieh first discovered that there's more to beer than lager in Ghana, where he worked as an accountant for a tissue paper factory after graduating from college.
"There were several German-owned breweries there," Hsieh said. "It was like nothing I had ever had in Taiwan."
Even after taking Duan's workshop, problems continued to dog Hsieh's quest to recreate the brews he remembered from his youthful stint abroad.
"We learned we had to swaddle the brewing container with a comforter in order to keep the yeast warm and active when it's cold in winter," Hsieh said. "And when it's hot in summer, we would wake up to the sound of exploding glass bottles when too much carbon dioxide had built up in the bottles."
"The challenge is part of the appeal," he said. "Every batch is a little different."
Not including his own labor or the cost of specialized equipment such as temperature-controlled brewing chambers converted from chest freezers, Duan estimates that his beer costs more than NT$30 for a 700 milliliter bottle.
"I don't brew to save money," Hsieh said. "I brew because I love beer."
Another student who attended Duan's workshop has started a commercial brewery. Wen Li-guo (
"It's a difficult business," said Wen, who estimates that there are only seven independent breweries in business nationwide, all of which are small operations.
"For most Taiwanese, `beer' still means `Taiwan beer,'" he said.
"They are so used to the product and the brand that even multinational companies like Tsingtao cannot dent their business," he said.
Wen said he markets his beer as a specialty product in bars, restaurants and boutiques at department stores.
"Winning over consumers is a problem, obtaining ingredients from abroad is a problem and of course the high tax is a problem," he said. "We hope to succeed by appealing to young people who want to try something different."
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,