"Taiwan Beer" news and stories

Joshua M. Bernstein has written about brews, bars and booze for New York Magazine, Time Out New York, ForbesTraveler.com and The New York Times.

The average Asian beer is feather-light and forgettable, the equivalent of drinking seltzer doctored with food coloring and a splash of alcohol -- look no further than brews like Vietnam's 33 Export and Singapore's Tiger Beer. But every blue moon, a cookie-cutter lager can shake our belief in mass-produced suds. To wit, Taiwan Beer, brewed by the government-owned and totally totalitarian-sounding Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation.

"The beer is purer and more flavorful than many other Asian beers," says Anna Zhang, operations manager for art-filled Shanghai restaurant TMSK, which sells loads of Taiwan Beer.

We can hear microbrew lovers loudly tsk-ing their disapproval. However, hear us out: While Taiwan Beer may pale in comparison to, say, Full Sail's full-bodied Session Lager, it more than holds its own owing to a recipe incorporating locally grown Ponlai rice, which provides a semi-sweet component.

Officials in Taipei have ordered the makers Taiwan Beer to reexamine their quality control measures after the most recent in what seems to be a string of complaints. A Banqiao man recently found an aluminum wrapper and a rusty staple in one of his unopened bottles of Taiwan Beer. New Party Taipei City Councilor Li Ching-yuan recently told the Taipei Times that this is not the first time the popular brew has raised such complaints. Li cited several other instances in which bottle caps, cigarette butts, insects both live and dead, and, get this, a "condom-like" object have been found in bottles of Taiwan Beer. A directory at Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation, the brewery that produced roughly 280 million bottles of Taiwan Beer a year, apologized for the most recent incident and said that the factory would work on improving quality control.

Source