Mitr Brewery turns three
And life is better because of it.
Making it revolution in the early afternoon.
Last weekend, I made the hour-plus trek from downtown Bangkok to Pak Kret. Why would I do that to myself? To celebrate Mitr Brewery’s third anniversary, of course.
By late afternoon, the brewery was buzzing and the party was in full swing. The energy only picked up when night fell. Musicians played, flush-cheeked brewers took the mic to rail against alcohol restrictions, the best German sausage vendor in Thailand sold out in what I assume was record time, a lot of people had fun.
If you don’t love Guten Appetit, I don’t think we can be friends. / Photo courtesy of my guy, Albert B., man of the people, devourer of the meats.
More impressive than the turnout was the tap selection. There were 15 or 16 beers and meads on tap, ranging from tried-and-true hefeweizens to hazy IPAs, stouts, and even a blueberry sour. Most were collaboration beers brewed exclusively for the event, including one wheat beer made with a prominent beer and food blogger.
Wizard and Born to Beer’s sturdy, curiously named Harry IPA. Chit Beer and Eleventh Fort’s exceptional Hybrid IPL. Thong Pradit and Devanom’s hazy-adjacent Devpradit IPA. I don’t think I had a bad beer all day long. (And I tried a lot of the beers.)
As the crowds poured in, I thought back to the first time I visited Mitr. Not to oversell the point, but it wasn’t anything close to what I experienced last weekend.
It was the soggy depths of 2020’s rainy season, and I was very much at cruising altitude after having knocked back a few at Chit Beer, just across the river. I figured many other people would have had the same idea as I did: start at Chit Beer, get a little toasty, continue to Mitr and hope you don’t get rained out.
But the brewery was empty when I arrived. There were only a handful of beers on tap and no entertainment to speak of. Alongside a few of my friends, I sat outside, accounting for the sweat I lost with IPAs. We played Jenga and stared out at the overgrown field across the brewery, on the other side of a dead-end road.
Devanom’s Mozilla IPA. “For the people, not profit,” if Firefox is to be believed.
At the time, brewers were still in purgatory. As they fought an uphill battle against the authorities, it felt like this was the best we might ever get: a brewery seemingly limited in scope and scale by external forces. Like, “Sure, you guys can brew, but not how you want to, and we won’t be giving you any support, legislative or otherwise.”
Fortunately, it isn’t like that anymore. Bangkok’s beer scene has grown so fast, and so impressively, that it’s easy to forget how much of a struggle it has been to reach a point where there are about 10 legal breweries in or around Bangkok.
Mitr wasn’t the first microbrewery in Thailand, or even the first in this greater Bangkok area I’m alluding to*. But it was the first to find a creative workaround to the country’s brewing laws by forming a collective. That arrangement has enabled the former homebrewers in the collective to share costs, experiment, and improve.
In both numbers and quality, the beer I had last weekend was light years ahead of where it was in 2020. Judging by the brewery’s popularity, customers have noticed.
While chatting with three of Mitr’s co-founders—the folks behind Mickleheim and Lazy Fat Cat, a personal favorite brand name—I sensed a hard-earned pride in the anniversary party’s turnout, and more broadly in what they’ve been able to achieve. They deserve to soak it up. They did it all by themselves.
But their success despite the odds begs the question: how many years will pass before places like Mitr are allowed to take the next step in their evolution? With Thailand’s political shell game picking up speed again, it seems likely that the liberalized brewing laws many were banking on might not come to fruition. Not yet, at least.
Whatever happens next, however, it’s clear that places like Mitr will keep nudging the beer scene forward. That’s something we should all celebrate whenever we can.
*Many breweries are technically outside Bangkok’s borders. Pak Kret, for one, is in Nonthaburi. I realize that referring to Nonthaburi as Bangkok is not unlike saying “I’m from Chicago!” when you’re really from Arlington Heights. But whatever: I’m probably going to do it moving forward, because it makes writing about this stuff a lot easier.