Seat of Our Pants

Regular readers of seatsofourpants.com have been able to see us eat a whole bunch of different things (various street food, stinging nettles, worms), but everyone knows that you want to wash down your food with a bottle of cold, delicious local beer. So here is Martin’s Famously Incomprehensible First Installment of the South East Asia Brewski Review (MFIFISEABR). I would appreciate it if someone came up with a shorter name and posted it in the comment field.

We’ll start in Thailand. There are a handful of local beers you can get anywhere in Thailand: Chang, Singha and Leo. This bottle is, as the label implies, a Singha. It is by far the most drinkable of the regular Thai beers. Some would consider it the premium Thai beer, but personally I find it just average. It’s light but with a slightly rough edge – I guess it could be a quality issue when they brew the beer, but it could also be that they use a kind of hops that I just don’t like.

Although it is the top seller, Chang (picture at the top of the post) is not the beer of choice for me. It is a hideous concoction of formaldehyde, light beer and ethanol (with an alcohol percentage ranging from 15 to 30 US Proof, according to a few verbal sources). Chang means ‘elephant’, and as the Thais say, ‘drink Chang today and tomorrow you will feel like you have an elephant inside your head’.

A runner up is Leo. As long as you drink it really cold, Leo can be a pleasant beer to accompany your spicy dinner. It is also dirt cheap.

In the end, I ended up drinking Heineken instead of the local variants more often than not. Final verdict: Thailand has some of the world’s best food but not a really great local beer to back it up.

Next installment of MFIFISEABR: Vietnam.

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