 Hello everybody, my name is Rob Day joined by the infamous Jack Handler. Hello. And this is another episode of Logger's The World and today we're heading to Singapore with our new friend John from Bruelander. John, why don't you introduce yourself. Hi everyone. My name is John. I, I'm born and bred in Singapore. I started home brewing sometime in 2008. You know, and after a trip back from the UK, selling a little bit beers. Beer in this part of the world tastes very similar, right, whether you're drinking brand ABC, XYZ, it's largely a mercher style, lagers group with a lot of rice and you know, like, you know, just very bland tasting beers. In the UK, I walked into a park, you know, I wasn't expecting too much and I ordered myself a beer, and I was like, had that beer, I call it still today like the beer awakening moment. I still remember the exact moment where I was like, Oh my God, I didn't realize beer could taste so flavorful. Right so so so flavorful like so different from everything that we drink in Asia. So I came back to Singapore. You know, and transmitting with a friend who just came from the state as well. And he just briefly mentioned that, you know, brewing beers at home is catching up in the US. So I thought, okay, you can brew beers at home and I, I Google and the next thing I knew was there was someone that selling boomer ingredients and equipment in Singapore very basic ones, and I didn't really put in any effort at all. I put the beer in the morning. I pitched the yeast and we drove into another town across across into Malaysia, actually, which is just across the river spent a weekend there came back, you know, the next week tasted it and it was beer, right. And it didn't taste very good actually but you know, you could tell that it tasted I mean you could tell it's beer. You know, once you get get caught in the home room, you know, you know, it's just addicted. So, and I mean living in Singapore is a very fast paced high stress environment. So, whenever I knew that was during that weekend I was like, so happy, right, because for me that's, that's my therapy. That's my 18 rounds, you know, 18 goals of golf walking, you know, the whole process of it was really therapeutic for me. This was in 2008 2009, right, and we didn't have a lot of imported craft beer. So it's kind of like, you know, if I would send you a Chinese or a Singaporean cookbook, and you just following the recipe, you wouldn't know whether it's, it could taste delicious but you wouldn't know whether it's supposed to taste like, you know, how it's meant to be like so back in those days. I was just brewing all these beers and I didn't know whether it was supposed to taste like that, you know, and so I started sent to some local home brew competition. There were obviously judges who knew a lot more than than myself back then about beer and you know just thinking, you know, it would be nice to have some feedback and I can improve beers. When the results came back, you know, I was surprised that I won some medals, right, so before that, like everyone comes to your house, drink for free, obviously they tell you obviously they tell you, they always tell you, you know, like all your friends will tell you I would pay for this, I would pay for this, right, then obviously since starting a brewery I lost all my friends because now they have to pay for it and then obviously that went on for many years because I didn't want to take my hobby and make it work, right, so it was until 2016 when I was leaving my previous job and I was about 34, 35 then and I thought to myself, look, if I don't do this now, I probably don't want to do this when I'm 40, right, because it takes so much energy out of you. So I thought, okay, why don't you know, like I put a small amount of money together. It's gypsy brew, sometimes I brew somewhere, I find a place that we can brew the beer somewhere, and let's see how far we go today. So we put together a small amount of money. I found a brewery in Cambodia, because in my previous job I traveled quite a bit within Southeast Asia, so I got to know someone who manages a brewery there that was not in a good shape. Basically they weren't selling a lot of their own beers, they had a lot of capacity, you know, and you know, it's just a chance meeting again, right, and I went to them and my proposition was that you know, we will pay for your facility fee, but we want to do the brewing ourselves. So they were like, whoa, great, you know, you're going to pay us money to do nothing. Like, when can you start, right, like he was saying, so you don't need me to buy mobs from you, no, I will buy my own mobs, I'll buy my own house. We'll do everything, we'll use your facility, we will obviously need some manpower during packaging and everything and just send it back to Singapore. And he was like, okay, so it worked great for everyone, like so, and for us as well. Because I get to say that, you know, even though we are contract growing somewhere else, but I could say that I fly there to brew the beers. And back then we, you know, since day one, we bought all our mobs ourselves, our shops ourselves, you know, and we really just use the facility and it was great. And thankfully, you know, the BSD, all right, you know, and it's been like, what, six, five, six years now. And if you've seen, then graduated from being a gypsy brewer, and just hiring, flying, you know, every month to Cambodia. And now we, about two years ago, we started to brew in Singapore, which is another nightmare altogether. We took over the lease of our new brewery on 1st April 2020. And within two days, they announced complete lockdown and, oh man, it was a nightmare and we were burning rent. We have equipment that's on the sea, we have equipment stuck somewhere and we've got equipment that is delayed and it's just a whole nightmare. But thankfully, you know, we've crossed the line and we are making beers right now. Is it still therapy to you or is it stressful now? Oh, I mean, I mean, both. Yeah, good days, right? And there are days that you, you know, you get really excited about and there are days that you just feel like, why didn't I just keep it a hobby? That's a really interesting origin story. I think talking about your story and opening your place and launching Brewlander. I've spent a lot of time on your website that haven't tried the beers yet, I hope to, but the look and feel you're creating is a lot of fun. It's so vibrant. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. You've created what looks to be an incredible brewery that could rival many others here as well. With this project, with Brewlander, what are you looking to create? What makes Brewlander special? How do you define yourself as a brewery? The guiding principle and actually why the main push for me to give up a comfortable, you know, stable career and really jump into this was because I actually started to get quite involved into beer judging and reading out with home brew and the fellow home brew communities within Asia. So what happened is in my previous job, I traveled quite a bit within the region. And because of that, and I was one of the earliest Asian BJCP judges as well, I was quite involved with helping set up the Asian chapters within Asia. I actually helped propter a few of the earliest tasting examinations in Asia as well. So what was great was that as the result, you form a lot of close friendship and community. What makes this attractive is community, right? And every country that I visited, I started to see, wow, a change, right? Like, you know, I go to Hong Kong, I start to see bars, commercial bars. It's not just craft beer, centric bars, but you know, like just a mainstream pub will start to put a local craft beer on it. Then in Thailand, especially where it's illegal to brew craft, people were doing it illegally at home. And bars were buying it illegally and selling it illegally, you know, but you know, it's, you know, hopefully that's why we love Bangkok and then Thailand. And then when I come back to Singapore, it's like, you know, when I go to a bar, it's all just commercial options, right? It's just mind-blowing in the sense that, you know, like Singapore actually has much earlier history of, I wouldn't really say craft, but in fact that day was called micro brewery movement. There were a lot of people here that, a couple of them, the pioneers started like American brew pubs, you know, like barbecue ribs and you know, American IPA. Everyone would have the style of American IPA, red beer, golden ale, pilsner, right? So, you know, pretty standard stuff, delicious for its time, right? Because the other offerings were just commercial libraries, you know, but they operated more like a restaurant. Whereas for me, I'm a beer person, right? I love my beer. I have no interest in running a restaurant. And for me, it was like, why don't we have good quality local representation and no offence to anyone, right? Early in the day, basically, most of the beers that you try in neighboring countries were not that good by today's standards, right? But there was a support. There was a support there for putting on a local brand, a local craft brand. So I grew quite frustrated about the situation here. So it was like, you know what, stop complaining, why don't I do something about it, right? And I think that that's what we still want to try to do in Singapore, which is to expand people's talent, right? And coming back to myself as well, like, I want to create kind of like the first time I remember drinking that kind of beer that changed my complete perception of what beer is. Every time, you know, as idealistic as it might sound, right? Like, I would like that anyone who tries a brew blender for the first time would also think, like, oh my God, I didn't realize beer could taste so flavorful. You know, and to show that, you know, local breweries are, you know, as well equipped and as capable to brew as good a beer as anyone internationally. I had deeply about the beer and mostly wanting to put like good fresh local beers in as many places in Singapore as possible. So our direction was very different. And the next thing was then back in those days, nobody wanted to look at it. And everyone would like, I would knock on, you know, so many doors every day, I would say, go knock on five doors, do at least two, three tastings, cash the last bus and last train home. And every day you get rejected, but you know, you just keep moving on. And some of those earlier rejections were kind of comical in a sense, right? But at the same time, it tells you where the market was where people say it's like, oh, it's a local beer. You know, when I go to the hospital after drinking the beer, you know, it's safe to conceal. And then they would say like who made the beer? I said, oh, I'm the groomer, I'm the brewer, I brew the beer. And you look at me like, okay, I'm like, I don't know what was it, how many feet that is, but I'm 166 centimetres, right, or 1.67 metres. So not told by any means, right. And I'm pretty skinny, or used to be pretty skinny, right? So they were like, you are the brewer, you know, and they would say like, I thought brewers are like, they have a beer belly and everything, you know, I'm sure you're a brewer, you know, and we're just love, love that. But thankfully, when they tasted the beer, you know, they were like, oh, okay, the beer is great. Now let's start talking. And then when you tell them what the price is, then they'll be like, you know, some of them just want to, you know, just want to arm twist you and get your beers for as cheap as possible. Whereas for us, it's like, hey, you know what, you just did a tasting of my beer alongside an imported beer from a very well-known brewery in the U.S. And you just say that my beer is better because it's pressure and everything, then pay up mate, right. And then what they say is that their cost of production is still nothing compared to the AVIs and whoever. So we try to educate the market that way, but what we did from day one is to establish this is what you pay for quality. And we walk away from customers who just want to take the piss. Singapore is probably the second most expensive place in the world to drink beer and alcohol. Probably behind only Norway. So it's really expensive to drink in Singapore. But, you know, but for us, it's actually not a bad thing, right, because if someone walks into a commercial bar, he's going to pay about US dollars term, right. He's going to pay about 10 US dollars for a Heineken. At least, you know, and then you have another 20% on top of service charge and then in everything. So it's not cheap. It's about $12 a pint of Heineken equivalent like commercial larges and craft beer, you probably pay another $2. So, so it's not that they are making a loss on that they are already, you know, basically bars here charge three times what they pay a supplier. So if the bar, you know, if they're selling to them at $5 a pint, they will mark it up at least three times and sell it for at least 15, $16 a pint. So they are squeezing you not because they are making a loss on it. They're going to make a lot of money on it. Anyway, right, but then, you know, it's probably just them, you know, just the industry trying to get us. But we say, no, this is, this is, this is the price you have to pay for good local craft. And we had our ground. And, you know, early in the day, everyone's like, Oh, I cannot talk to drink blue lander. I can't pay for John's beer is so expensive. You know, and we joke about it, but we have a ground right and as a result shortly after that you can see, we will probably number 1718 on the list. Our kids that were before us. And shortly after that, right, we make it such that this is the price you pay where you could actually make it a sustainable business. And now we have to buy it all 3536 brands, where people now understand the quality of local beer. And the importance of supporting local business, small local breweries, small businesses, as well as this is the price you pay for quality, regardless of confidence, right, this quality is right. And, and as a result, right. You know, if you're proud to say that, you know, as a result, a lot of our peers now could put at least earn a leave, you know, a decent bridge in our salary where they could, they could not just say I'm giving up something for my passion but then I kind of thought to pay my mortgage I would rather pay rent or whatever, at least look at themselves and feel like, you know, I still love what I'm doing, you know, and still be able to sustain the financial commitments and family and all this stuff. So that's, that's why I'm quite happy to say that I helped establish which is this is what you pay for good local quality. It's really great to hear and you, you covered so many of the other questions I had around where craft beer fits into the market in Singapore and it's really interesting to the price difference is, is a big big big cultural difference between here and Singapore is there's a lot of cheap beer in the US. And, you know, hearing, you know, prices of Heineken in Singapore and then craft having to establish above that. It's, it's super interesting and I'm sure that drives a lot of your decision making what makes beers uniquely Singaporean, if you will, what flavors are you looking for. What are some cool things you're, you're digging into that that really help establish Singapore beer versus any of the imports or other details. Singapore has no agricultural industry right so it's very hard for us to say like oh we use local malls. You know, like, we have to buy our fish, our chicken from, from all our neighbors, you know, we're really tiny as an island, but we actually started a small project that COVID this, you know, to the spanner in that one. I always thought what could we say or how could we say that you know like we could make a beer that's uniquely Singapore obviously we could use flavors that it's inspired by, you know, the food culture in Singapore has a crazy crazy. Yeah, you know food culture because you know it's a melting pot of so many different cultures here right you want Indian food you've got it Malay food you've got it Indonesian food you've got a Thai food you've got a Vietnamese food you've got a Chinese food you've got it. European, French, Italian, you know McDonald's doors. Like so everything right so and we are big, we are big food nation, people with cure and now we're just for for meal, like and also. So, I guess, a lot of us take inspiration in crafting obvious, either to pair with the diverse food culture that's in Singapore, or use special ingredients that we are very known for like, you know, like lemon grass or spices for example, and infuse it into the beer or add it into the brewing of the beer. But something that I did, and interestingly as well, like, because we are in the tropics, you know, a lot of the tropical fruits here is so much different from the mango that we plant here is totally different flavor versus the mango that you probably would get in the US or Europe. Yeah, so it makes a lot of difference in flavor. So four ingredients, right, four main ingredients, water, right, hops, malt and yeast. So I was thinking like we don't have hops in Singapore, we don't have malt, barley in Singapore. What about, you know, what about trying to, you know, have our own yeast culture or microbial culture, right, whether it's yeast or bacteria. or bacteria or whatever. And we went into an urban farm actually in Singapore and we actually, you know, try to isolate, you know, we brought like petri dishes and opagas and, you know, like work out there as well. And we're trying to capture foods from everything. We put some leaves, we put some fruits as well, you know, both salt and unsalted wood and try to get as much culture as we had. And we were only starting, starting out in that and then in a little bit. But I think it's, that's a project that we would love to continue. If we could find some really nice interesting niece or couches from Singapore, they would be so cool as well. Do you have a science background or who's, who's culture and all these. I don't have a science background, but I had quite a bit of practice during the days. You know, you mentioned that there's not a lot of local malt and hops when you are sourcing these ingredients are you looking more to the US or to Europe or where, where are you getting your malt and hops from us. We get most of our hops really today, I would say probably maybe 80% of it from of us. At one point we've been using quite a bit of New Zealand and Australian hops as well. And I think in 2018-19 harvest was really bad or 17-18-19 harvest was very bad. Then we get a bit of hops from Europe, or European hops, English hops from time to time as well. And obviously it's still some Australian hops as well. So a lot of my peers got into Trump brewing or home brewing because of American IPAs, American burials and you know like New World hops was amazing. And Cast Hills, Cast Hills, you know, is still probably one of my favorite styles of beer. Every time I'm in the UK, it's like the Pampers, Ben, the Hotel or Eddie, Eddie, you know, and just the malt. So just my preference is I really love the malt. So we order, we use mostly exclusively almost from the UK. And I've reviewed them for like five, six years now. And I visited the Morton Club was really lovely, you know, and to see floor-mortared, Mary's altar was wow, you know, this expedition, right? But one of the main reasons is because something about the roasted mobs from the UK, they just make the roasted mobs so differently. The way they kiln it is just so much more flavorful. And, you know, you get a lot more chocolate, a lot more coffee without actually adding chocolate or coffee in there versus, you know, some of the others that we tried from other countries. So that's just my preference. Yeast, mostly we use a lot of yeast from white labs. This is just so much easier to order from them. I think they've got it figured out how to send yeast to this part of the world. We get a bit of yeast from Imperial as well. It's a cost to overnight yeast to Singapore. So much. So now we've got things better control. We buy like nano pitch sizes, which is meant for like five barrel and then we propagate it ourselves. Our brew house 30 barrels or 30 hack. And, you know, so we buy like, you know, five barrels per and we propagate that through 30 barrels. Yeah, the pictures from the brewery look like you built a very modern, very high end brew house. So what was the motivation to build the way that you did? When I first started home brewing, my setup was so basic, like I bought a foreman cooler box, you know, and I DIY the shit out of it and build it from scratch, right? You know, and I bought a large stock pot that's meant to poke soup and all and just drill my own holes and Frankenstein the whole thing out, right? And whereas now you've got like what Brownmeister or Grandfather that's so convenient. Right. And, and you know, like back in the days, you know, this was my homework setup was so basic and so, you know, so caveman like, you know, in a sense right then you make small upgrades along the way. Oh, maybe it's time for me to buy a pump, right, because carrying, you know, 30 liters of potwood, you know, up to the stove is not fun, you know, and thankfully I've not spilled any, any 80 degrees on myself or, you know, like, like, yeah. So along the way, you know, you keep thinking about, okay, what should I upgrade in my system, right? And I've got so many years, you know, of time to think, okay, I'm going to build a brewery, how will it be? So when I was building this brewery, it's like I've got so many years of planning in my mind like what this brewery would look like and how it would be. But on the flip side is that, and obviously I want to be able to brew and produce as, you know, like beers, any kind of beers, any styles of beers that I want. And I don't want it to be, you know, like, oh, we can't do that, why? Because the system can't do it. And we thought through that quite a lot. And the system is really very much customized for us. So, like, for example, like even we do a lot of late topic, right? So what we do this, what we did is between post cattle, we added a feeder exchanger that is not a plate exchanger so it doesn't clock even if there's hops in there. So we were able to say, chill the cattle down to, you know, like 80 degrees, 70 degrees, whatever you want, before you add your go-to hops in there, right? So you retain a lot of aroma and flavor without, you know, without isomerizing the hops, right? So we can add a lot of hops but not get that high a top utilization of bitterness from there. So we added stuff like that. Or even if we want to do cattle sour, you know, we could do it safely, no holes, holes, paid heat exchanger back to the cattle. Like everything can be done, you know, like, froze loop safety first and, you know, with maintaining, you know, the best sanitation as well. So, you know, a lot of time to think about all these things. And on top of that, it's about automation. Because hiring in Singapore is really difficult. Yeah. Very difficult here. It's like even right now we are trying to hire brewers and just so hard because we are generally a very tempered bunch of people. So working in a brewery, you know, where it's largely 35 to at least 35 degrees every day Celsius, right? It's, you know, it's humid, you know, there's no air condition, right? And you've got to work quite a bit with your hands. You're always working around and doing stuff, right? It's not the most comfortable of the environment, right? And, you know, and it's obviously the salaries are expensive here as well. So we have to design where we can make it as efficient as possible, right? And then utilize our manpower more efficiently or get them to do smarter jobs. You know, I don't need a guy to stand there to watch the cattle boy for 90 minutes or whatever. Brewery should be as little drama as possible. Right. And we're really just letting the technology really just do the heavy lifting for us. And I guess also for us is where we are at today. We know the excuse of we are trying something different this batch. We kind of always use that same, you know, the excuse anymore, right? So people expect the beer to taste within, you know, within a tolerance, right? Like it has to taste consistently within an acceptable tolerance and I think that's what we also want to do for our beer. So it's all these reasons where we invested quite heavily into this system. And then obviously, I just like kicking out all these systems and improving systems, you know, and optimizing efficiency. How can we shorten the brew day, right? You know, and everything for our guys. I have a lot of notes. So I have one more since you brought it up related to what we might do with this beer. One of the key things lacking agriculture, you said was pairing with food. So what are a couple of your favorite Singapore dishes? Wow. How much time you have. All right, like, okay, so one of the most popular ones is chicken rice. It's steamed chicken rice that is very popular in Singapore and Malaysia. We have chili seafood. In general, seafood is very popular here. So you've got black pepper crabs, chili crabs. I mean, so many, like curry, curry as well. We've got quite a good population of Indians here as well. You know, because Singapore was the British outpost hundreds, 20 years ago. So, you know, you've got Indians from India keep coming over as well. And you know, it's, you know, there's a lot of fantastic tasting inputs here as well. One of my favorite breakfast is roti. It's amazing that you, it's deep in, it's kind of like none. Okay. Yeah, so it's basically bread, right? A piece of bread and you dip it in curry and add it. It's amazing. But food in this area is usually very fatty, very oily. Right, that, you know, that makes it great for fantastic. It's very good, like a crisp, like washes down the grease, washes down the oil. It's just amazing. And it really helps because like we are almost four year around between 30 to 35 degrees. But it's hot or it's water. It's too far. It will be hot tomorrow's hotter. And it rains quite a bit here as well. So it helps having a nice ice cold beer here in the tropics. All right, well, I think we've got a lot of material to work with here and this was fascinating, super interesting talk with you. John, thanks for joining us today. I look forward to what we come up with here together and roast.