Beer is extremely cheap in Vietnam. I haven't traveled everywhere just yet but it is by far the cheapest place I have traveled to as far as the suds are concerned. There is one aspect of small businesses that you can always count on in this country and that is if the idea draws in any customers, this idea will quickly be copied by everyone. This is probably frustrating to the people that own the businesses, but for the consumers it is a big win since all of them now have to compete on quality and price levels.
Craft beer is a little bit more difficult to get into the industry with because I would imagine the equipment is quite expensive to initially purchase but this hasn't stopped a bunch of places from doing exactly this sort of thing.
This is one we went to recently and to give you an idea about how cheap this is 1 USD is around 25,000 VND, so most of these beers as you can see are just over $1. This is pretty special when you consider that craft beer is normally quite a bit more expensive than the mass produced lagers that exist all over the world. If I have a craft beer back in the USA for example, I expect to pay $6 for it. If you charged that much for it here nobody would buy it regardless of how good it was.
This is another spot we went to not that long ago. They had 4 beers total and nothing else. Every beer was 30,000 VND per 330mil glass. I like that they keep it simple so you don't have to think about the prices.
I have no idea what these containers cost to produce and purchase but if you are charging just $1.50 per glass of beer, I hope that they are selling a load of it every day because otherwise I can't imagine how they pay the electric bill, the staff, the rent, not to mention the fact that all that equipment cost has to be made up as well and the ingredients that go into a beer aren't free either.
I'm not really a true fan of craft beer but I have noticed one thing about drinking them: They tend to bring on a much milder hangover than the traditional mass-produced lagers such as Saigon Special, Larue, or Huda.
Perhaps this could be another reason for someone to visit this fine country though because although the nature and everything is wonderful, it would probably appeal to a lot of travelers if they knew that they could get craft beer for so cheap. One thing to note for anyone that doesn't live here is that these places with the cheap craft beer do not exist in tourist areas. I guess the rent is so expensive at those places that they have to charge much more to break even.
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Take this place for example. The East West Brewing company opened on the beachfront about a year ago and initially people were excited but then we went there and saw that they were basically charging western prices for drinks there. If you go inside this place you will notice a very real lack of Vietnamese people in there that do not work there. There are plenty of relatively wealthy Vietnamese people but since they know the lay of the land they are not going to pay $6 for something they know they can get a few blocks away for half that much or 8 blocks away for 1/6 that much. I have only been here a few years and speak no Vietnamese but even I know that the further you get from the beach, the cheaper stuff gets. The things on or near the beach are for tourists and this is true all around the world.