Who is the Duke of Beerington?
Celebrating Um, the man in black behind Duke of Beerington, as the bar turns five this December.
A standard busy night at Duke of Beerington. / Image courtesy of Duke of Beerington
You get off the train at Thonglor and walk down Sukhumvit. You pass massage shops and Japanese restaurants and turn right into an alley you almost certainly didn’t know existed. The first thing you see is a canary-yellow apartment building advertising “room for rent” on a red banner. It looks like one of those off-the-books complexes where you can get a room for a night, a week, or as long as you want.
A metal container sits in front, housing a humble izakaya. There’s a line of Grab drivers sitting idle on their motorbikes between deliveries. There’s a sink by the steps where no one washes their hands.
Behind all of this you find the reason you’d come to this otherwise unremarkable alley.
Duke of Beerington shines like a beacon behind tall glass windows on the ground floor of SK Tower Apartments, across from a whiskey bar you can’t enter unless you’re Japanese.
The bar-slash-bottle shop has a spartan aesthetic. It’s small—maybe 15 or 16 square meters framed by plain white walls, a long, beech-colored wood table, a counter bar running the length of the window, and two double-swing fridges packed with the freshest, most interesting beers in town.
From his pulpit in the corner, Um Kriangkrai holds court over this minimalist kingdom of craft beer.
Between 11am and 2pm and 5pm and 11pm—six days a week, without fail1—you’ll find him here, dressed in black and listening to Britpop, acid jazz, or maybe funk. When he isn’t serving customers, he’s lording over his phone to organize orders or rearranging cans, like a general commanding troops.
It’s fair to say that Duke of Beerington isn’t what comes to mind when you think about destination drinking. Yet in its five years of existence, dating back to December 2018, this humble, semi-hidden bar with just three taps and two fridges has become the bar of choice for much of Bangkok’s beer crowd. The reason for this is simple.
It’s Um.
The man, the myth, the legend
In the murky early days of the pandemic, when Bangkok’s visionary leadership shuttered bars and banned alcohol, I started picking up cans from Duke of Beerington.
I’d shoot the business account a message on Facebook, and immediately someone—I didn’t know who at the time—would share product lists. If I asked for advice, the user on the other side of the screen would suggest a few beers I might enjoy based on what I had ordered previously.
He never missed. The service was unmatched.
Who was this guy?
When restrictions were lifted, I made a point of visiting the bar to get to know Um better. Often it was just me and the man in black until night fell. He’d let me scan the fridge quietly, a service I’ve always appreciated compared to Thailand’s standard overzealousness. I’d grab a beer and strike up a conversation. When I finished my drink, he would recommend another beer he thought I’d like.
That level of service, kindness, and thoughtfulness always set him apart in my book. Many others feel the same.
“Um is Duke of Beerington,” a friend, who goes by Craft Beer Maniac on social media, told me.
“He’ll tell you what he thinks is good and what isn’t—and why—and he’ll be honest about it. He knows his stuff. He’s easy to talk to. He’s a friend. He’s the reason you come here.”
That’s all true, but it isn’t the only thing that makes him—or his bar—special.
From photography to beer
Rain or shine, slow days or slammed, Um is always at the bar and always available online. There’s no other staff. It’s just him. And it’s been just him from the day the bar opened.
I’ve known Um for a few years now. It’s a remarkable feat to DIY a bar the way he has, and I always thought it was worth covering in-depth. Recently, I talked him into having a one-on-one with me to talk about it, and I realized that DIYing the bar was only the beginning of the story.
It took some reassurances to get Um to talk.
“I’m really uncomfortable talking about myself,” he told me right off the bat. “And I don’t like talking about my past very much. I’m not the type of guy who looks back.”
In my career, I’ve found that the most interesting people, and the most generous people, are often the most humble and hesitant to discuss themselves.2 Usually, they’re creative workers.
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Um used to be a photographer. Or that he lived abroad.
A fresh graduate armed with a degree in the arts, Um moved to London at 22. He thought he’d stay for a couple of months. Instead, he lived there for seven years.
“In the early 2000s, London was the best place to be,” he said. “The music and art scenes were amazing. I’d spent my free days going to small galleries. I picked up hundreds of magazines and thousands of postcards from exhibitions. I still have them stored away at my house.”
Eventually, Um returned to Thailand and started freelancing. “It didn’t suit me, though,” he said.3
After a couple of years of hustling, he took a job editing photos with a Swedish company. It was precisely that: A Job, something you do to generate income to exist on this mortal terrain. But in the early 2010s, the company sent him to Sweden for work, where he tried craft beers for the first time.
“That’s when I really discovered craft beer,” he said.
“When you’re young, you’re always looking for opportunities. Around then, I thought about opening my own import and distribution company, but the costs were too high to do it by myself. So I kept doing what I was doing.”
Eventually, though, life would lead him back to beer.
Finding a new path forward
It’s a strange time to be a creative worker. These days, many companies and clients want more work done for less, so there’s been a race to the bottom. Many full-time photographers, designers, and writers have lost their jobs or witnessed them evolve in ways that make them unrecognizable from when they began their careers.
About six years ago, Um was laid off when his company closed its Bangkok office. His company being Scandinavian, the severance he received gave him a long runway.
“I had enough money to survive for a year or two,” he told me, so he decided to pursue something new.
“Doing something with beer had always been in the back of my mind. Brewing beer, opening a bar—I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I did love the idea of a grab-and-go bottle shop.”
Before he started his own business, he took on a short-lived job at Let the Boy Die, one of the city’s original homebrew bars, where he learned the ropes of back-end operations. Then, a week before Christmas five years ago, he found a spot for rent next to Toby’s on Sukhumvit Soi 38 and went for it.
If you’ve been to Duke of Beerington’s current location, imagine something half its size: a 9-square-meter shack just big enough for a fridge or two. And it should be obvious there wasn’t air-conditioning, either.
“Some days, I’d be absolutely dying, it was so hot,” he said. “I had to put the fan on customers. It couldn’t be pointed at me.”
The original Duke of Beerington was about a kilometer off Sukhumvit, deep in residential Thonglor, giving it an “if you know, you know” vibe. By the time I knew, it had already moved to a new spot.
“Toby’s wanted the space back, so I spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood looking for a new location,” he explained. It wasn’t easy. Rent needed to be low, otherwise Um would have to raise prices—something that would threaten his already tenuous place in the market.
“[Duke of Beerington’s prices] are in between what you’d pay at a bar and a mom-and-pop shop. The margins are so low that if I drink one of the beers in my fridge, I have to sell five or six others to make up for it.”
Eventually, he found an old laundromat in the base of SK Tower. He left his name and number on the door, and within a month Duke of Beerington was up and running again.
The best service in Thailand
Um isn’t your run-of-the-mill bar host. He’s even-keeled and quiet. He says hello when you enter the bar, and if you ask for his advice, he’s happy to give it. Otherwise, he’ll let you look around in peace.
“I’ll lead people to beers they might enjoy, but I encourage customers not to listen to me,” he said with a laugh.
I believe Um doesn’t give himself enough credit. He has single-handedly cultivated a loyal following by simply being himself and providing the kind of sincere, noninterventionist service many customers seek.
I’m not alone. Um credits the Facebook group Everything Bangkok Beers for leading customers to him. On that group, you’ll find post after post extolling the virtues of both the bar and its owner. Once beer fans meet Um, they tend to become regulars. My good friend Albert likes to remind me when “it’s time to pay respect to the Duke.”4 Meaning, when we need to visit him again, because it’s been too long.
“This job has been great. I get to meet people I’d never have had a chance to talk to. Most of the regulars have become my friends,” Um said.
But the same qualities that make the bar such a great place to drink also make it hard to run. For one, those razor-thin margins.
“The costs keep going up, but the margins remain the same,” Um reminded me.
There’s also the lack of support—as much a personal choice as a financial decision.
“I feel like it wouldn’t be the same if someone else were here. The service might be good, but it wouldn’t be the same,” he said. “It’s just me working hard to keep it open.”
Beyond manning the bar, Um also arranges deliveries from about 10 importers and distributors. He has exacting taste, of course, which keeps the quality of the beer high. But quality comes from having built trust with suppliers—from being there to ensure the shipments are fresh and on time.
Dependability, however, comes with some less obvious costs. “I’ve listened to the same playlists thousands of times,” Um joked.
He also works until after midnight all week, leaving himself with a Monday off to go out to eat or watch movies at the cinema. It’s a grind. The more often you visit the bar, the more evident this becomes. Sometimes I get tired just watching Um work or talking about what time he gets home. Like so many others in Bangkok’s beer community, I respect him even more for it, too.
“I wouldn’t call myself a businessman. I’ve done nothing different since day one,” Um admitted to me.
I reminded him that not being a businessman may be in his best interests, and so is resisting change for the sake of change. Consistency, dependability, quality. Why do anything different when you already offer what people in Bangkok appreciate most?
As mentioned in the lede, the bar turns five this month. On December 18, to be precise. Um told me last month not to expect a party. “That’s not really my style,” he said. But do expect discounts on draft beers as a thank you for your support.
Regulars are no doubt aware of the milestone and will be dropping in all month, if not on December 18 itself.
If you aren’t a regular or *gasp* haven’t been to the bar yet, there’s no better time than the present to go have some beers, meet Um, and see why someone like me wanted so desperately to share some of his story with you.
Obviously excluding dry days and certain public holidays.
The ones who do like talking about themselves? Sociopaths.
As a freelancer myself, I can verify that it’s more of a grind than you, dear reader, might imagine. Between client demands, the pressure to network, and inconsistent pay cycles, it’s easy to find yourself feeling rudderless, beaten down, and not very creative.
At a minimum, once a month.
Great read - only just started using Substack, so have subbed :)