Mahankahon is about to get experimental
Co-founder Avi Yashaya opens up about the beer brand’s new side project.
Classic taste, classic can. / Image courtesy of Mahanakhon
I first met Avi Yashaya in 2015. We were in a nondescript shophouse in Silom that had been converted into a club and event space called Whiteline (RIP). Avi was holding court over a room of homebrewers and hipsters—Thai kids in baseball caps and tropical shirts, expats in thrifted dresses and all-black wardrobes—selling cans of beer plucked out of 48-quart coolers for about THB 100 apiece.
I’ve got that car salesman in me, so eventually we got to talking. Avi, an expat from California, told me he helped to organize the party we were at, an underground beer fest called Brewtopia.
It was one of those supernova-like events that are so unique to Bangkok—a moment when every dream seems achievable, and even though you know what you’re experiencing will likely blow up in your face, you somehow feel indestructible.
The beer we were drinking was not great, but no one cared. It was thrilling. For every infected IPA you tried, you would get a stout that reminded you of why you liked beer in the first place. You could sense that things were changing, and Avi seemed to be the glue guy at the center of the action.
As anyone who knows Avi will tell you, he is kind and welcoming and makes a point of connecting with everyone around him. He always struck me as one of the few who was capable of uniting the city’s disparate personalities to celebrate homebrewing while it was still fresh, before people started to get in trouble for doing it.
For years after that night, I saw him everywhere. I don’t say that metaphorically.
I would run into him on the sidewalk in Lad Phrao while I was out on assignment. I’d bump into him in Silom after work. And, of course, I’d see him working at Let the Boy Die, one of the first Bangkok bars that championed homebrewing. (Let the Boy Die regularly invited homebrewers to bring their beers to the bar for others to try.)
“People don’t remember this, but I used to get beers from homebrewers like Happy New Beer and hand-deliver mixed-six packs,” says Avi.
The days of schlepping around the city with bottles of illicit beer have come and gone for him, of course. Now when I see Avi, he’s usually doing big-picture stuff.
Since 2016, Avi has worked with Tony Tumwattana, the founder of Mahanakhon. Together they have given the city something it lacked: quality, reliable, and widely available craft beer at affordable prices. Their pale ale (green can), white IPA (blue can), and hazy IPA (cream can with colorful accents) are ubiquitous in supermarkets. You can often find them in 7-Eleven, which is one helluva coup.
Their beers have won awards, and now they’re brewing at volumes that allow them to sell at very competitive prices (around THB 100 for a tall boy). But Avi tells me they want to get back to their roots. More Brewtopia, less 60,000-liter shipments.
Starting in October, Avi and Tony will be making smaller, 1,000- to 5,000-liter batches of experimental beers through a side project tentatively called the Ministry of Ales.
Avi and I recently caught up to talk about this project and a whole lot more. Read on for his thoughts on spreading love for the black IPA, why importing kegs and cans is harder than it seems for Thai brewers, and getting weird with beer again.
Mahankahon is known for its core beers. Why do you want to experiment?
With Mahanakhon, we have this vision of where beers should fit in terms of pricing and the environment. It’s really accessible, but it means there’s a lot of beers we don’t get to touch—the fun stuff—because we’re too busy trying to perfect a pale ale.
We also think craft beer is kind of at the beginning of its trajectory in Thailand, but it seems like we’re skipping a lot of steps. Beer is getting hoppier, more aggressive, more unique; the raw materials like hops are changing, so the flavors are changing. We’re applying an American approach to craft beer in Thailand, but the consumer could benefit from following a [steadier] trajectory, like we had in the States.
“Isn’t the whole point of this thing to experiment?”
What will you be brewing?
It’ll be more playful, more experimental. A lot more focus on beers I want to make: sour beers, low alcohol beers, super high alcohol beers, and more interesting variants. Not just a white IPA or a hazy. But you don’t want to blow out people’s palates. The beers should fit squarely into a session.
It’ll begin from homebrew recipes—anything that cuts beyond expectation that we think should be around but isn’t yet—and we’ll do it in limited capacity. It’s not going to be on retail shelves for THB 99. These will be draft-only releases. If we really want it to be canned, then it will be unpasteurized and delivered using cold chain to get people really fresh small volumes.
Where did the name “Ministry of Ales” come from?
I’m picturing every style [references] some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. It’s kind of a thematic thread you can have fun with.
“You’re losing so much expressiveness [when you overlook yeast]. It’s like listening to music you made through shitty headphones.”
When did you start brewing anyway?
When I was 20, just about the moment I realized you can buy all the ingredients and make your own beer if you’re under 21.
I think seven or eight years ago I started homebrewing here with some partners from Let the Boy Die. The cool thing is we had the best testing ground. I was able to brew almost every day because demand was high. I was brewing in my apartment—that was weird—and in my friend’s garage, Tony’s garage. It was a natural progression that Tony and I would do Mahanakhon together after that.
It was a fun, experimental, time and I want to get back to that.
You guys have a big footprint. How much is Mahanakhon doing in volume now?
With our white IPA, I think we do 60,000 liters at a time now. We distribute that in 7-Elevens. We ship it to Taiwan and just got an order for Japan, too. Doing one million liters annually is a near-future goal for us.
Why aren’t you doing much in kegs?
It’s just complicated. With draft, you need a certain minimum volume to make that format viable. Some months you might sell more [draft beer], and some months you might sell a lot less. But if the brewery doesn’t have pasteurization, and these kegs are just sitting in a cold warehouse, you’re going to rack up a bill fast. And if you don’t have a cold warehouse, then you have a lot of beer you can’t sell.
Eventually, we want to. Now, it’s too much volume for us to keg at the facility where we do our cans. They also only have flash pasteurization for steel kegs, but we need to use key kegs, so that means we have to do our draft beer somewhere else [that pasteurizes key kegs], at Heart of Darkness in Vietnam.
“People always ask, ‘Why don’t you have draft beer?’ I tell them I wish we did, but we’re working on it and getting closer.”
For Ministry of Ales, will you also be brewing at Heart of Darkness?
We’ll do most of them at Heart of Darkness, but we may look locally again at TSI [Thai Spirit Industry]. There’s a gentleman, Alan, who homebrewed for a while and now does yeast propagation. His beer was called TwoTen. We’ve used his yeast for a couple of our beers, like the hazy IPA when we brewed it at TSI. To work with Alan on some recipes at TSI locally would be pretty cool.
I remember you used to talk a lot about yeast and how it’s underappreciated.
Oh, yeah, there’s so much emphasis on hops. Obviously, with craft beers these days, it’s all leaning hoppy. Most of your flavor profiles will come from there. But yeast contributes so much that people take for granted. To me, it’s maddening because you’re losing so much expressiveness [when you overlook yeast]. It’s like listening to music you made through shitty headphones. There’s just so much more there.
What kind of beers do you think are underrepresented right now?
Along the color spectrum, there’s a lot of character that darker beers offer, and not necessarily stouts. With Mahanakhon, we try to make beer that suits Bangkok’s climate. It just doesn’t make sense for us to make a 13% imperial stout. But schwarzbier, dark lagers—there aren’t enough of those here.
How do you feel about the black IPA?
That’s going to be the first one when we kick off the new project. I already have my recipe. That was a style that, 15 years ago, got me into craft beer. It’s just really different from commercial beer. It’s an IPA, but there’s an aggressiveness to it. To try to make that approachable here would be a cool challenge.
Why do you want to do this project now?
It’s gotten to be a lot of office work for me lately. And that’s good—it’s a sign that you’re growing and need to be more responsible about shepherding this thing that people like. But I want to play around, and I don’t get that chance anymore.
You know, when you’re just dealing with problems every day, you get a little cynical about what you do and forget the joyful expression that made you want to start brewing. You make safe decisions. Everyone has their wheat beer, lager, and IPA. I mean, we make some by-the-book beers, too—approachable, understandable, easy to drink. But isn’t the whole point of this thing to experiment?
When beer is contained to people who love craft beer, you get fun results, but it’s almost like [brewers] become shy when they have to present a marketable product. People are taking a gamble when they spend THB 200 on your beer. So make it an interesting gamble.