Can he do it? Yes, he can. Rohit Dugar is the founder of pre-eminent Hong Kong craft brewery Young Master, a stalwart on the beer scene since its inception in 2013. Over the best part of a decade, the brand has stayed (mostly) in its lane by focusing hard on creating high-quality local brews, while pushing for innovation and collaboration within the city. There have been peaks and troughs – in addition to opening a slew of venues including Second Draft (closed but due for a highly anticipated comeback in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island this July), pizza parlour Alvy’s and a gastropub in Singapore’s Chinatown, Dugar was forced to shut Goon Goon, their taproom in Shenzhen, southern China, after less than a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19 has seen a reckoning for most food and beverage businesses, Young Master included. In 2020, Dugar saw the industry struggle with Hong Kong’s new reality of bar closures and social-distancing restrictions . He reached out to Jay Khan, the founder of award-winning agave spirits bar Coa in Central, to see how he could help. “We were all going through the same thing, but at least [Young Master] still had distribution channels and an online store, so we could still do something,” he recalls. He and Khan collaborated on Coa’s first canned cocktail, the La Paloma de Oaxaca – a version of the bar’s signature Oaxacan Paloma using the same Arquiteco tequila and Del Maguey mezcal used in-house, spun with a home-made grapefruit soda. “We could help them, and it gave us something new to do rather than just sit around and wait,” Dugar says of the initiative. It was this spontaneous crossover that sowed the seed for HigherThan, the new ready-to-drink (RTD, in industry speak) canned highball line that he launched this week. HigherThan’s design is a bold departure from the romanticism and nostalgia of the Young Master brand, and borrows from street style with a more vibrant, almost neon-like palette and loud typography. Dugar toyed with the idea of launching other kinds of RTD, such as hard seltzers , but ultimately landed on the more familiar concept of a highball – a drink popular in Hong Kong by way of Japanese drinking culture , thanks to the ubiquity of whisky highballs and similarly effervescent chu-hais (a combination of shochu, fruit juice and carbonated water). The simplicity of the highball paves the way for the Young Master team to be creative in terms of localising the flavour elements, in the same way they did for beers. The salted lime highball, for example, is an homage to one of the brewery’s iconic beers, the Cha Chaan Teng Sour – a mouth-puckering salted lime gose that delivers a lightning bolt of tanginess to the palate. For the Iron Goddess Tea Whisky highball, Dugar’s team sampled seven teas before settling on the King Grade tieguanyin . For those who have grown up quaffing a questionable mixture of whisky and bottled, sickly sweet green tea in Hong Kong karaoke rooms over the past decade, this promises to be a more sophisticated take on a classic. Jay Khan’s road to opening Coa, the Hong Kong bar topping Asia’s Best list “As a theme, we wanted to be representative of Asian craft, and drink is our medium to do that,” says Dugar . Initially, he had reservations about stepping into the cocktail sector, but he realised the existing culture within Hong Kong – where industry peers openly share ideas and cross-pollinate creative concepts – was far more conducive to his project than he had imagined. The freedom and flexibility within beermaking has a lot to do with the ability of the Young Master team to come up with so many off-the-cuff ideas and flavours , which naturally segues into their process of dreaming up combinations for HigherThan. Although HigherThan launches with only three flavours, there are already plans for a gin-based cocktail, and others centred around citrus, floral teas and Southeast Asian flavours. This is just the beginning, as this Hong Kong brand is realising what it really can do. “It’s like being able to speak a language, but then using it to then write prose,” Dugar explains. “I think the permutations are endless.”