Hong Kong’s craft beer makers look overseas for new markets
- The city’s craft brewers have flourished, driven by banking and finance professionals seeking to transform their passion projects into successful businesses
- Innovation brought on in part by the need to win over Asian consumers has earned local brewers respect on the world stage
Stressed by high rents and a highly competitive domestic market, Hong Kong’s leading local brewers are now aggressively pursuing export markets around Asia, and in some cases to Europe and the US.
Patrick Gatherer, general manager of The Globe, one of Hong Kong’s best known bars for promoting craft beer, said local brewers have developed a level of reliability and quality suitable for bigger business aims.
“Some of them are breaking away from the pack,” said Gatherer.
Exact numbers on the nascent Hong Kong industry are hard to come by. The Hong Kong Craft Brew Association does not keep exact tallies and most brewers are reluctant to give production and sales figures.
There are as many as 35 brands and 18 breweries in Hong Kong. These start-up brewers are often former bankers, lawyers or other professionals who have turned passion projects into successful businesses.
Ian Jebbit, founder of Gweilo beer, now recognised as Hong Kong’s biggest local brewery, said he started exporting about a year ago. Jebbit, a former intellectual property lawyer in Hong Kong with DLA Piper, is determined to make Gweilo Beer a household name. “This is what I wanted from the outset. I home brewed with my dad when I was a kid. Later, I became a lawyer for one of the world’s biggest law firms. I gave that up, so this business has to work.”
Gweilo has ambitious plans for overseas. In 2018, Jebbit invested in new production equipment to the tune of US$5 million. “The new brewery was always about exporting,” he said.