Hong Kong Beer: Embracing the Unknown Lager

This is part of an ongoing series of articles exploring Hong Kong’s craft beer scene. 

There was a time when lagers were deeply unfashionable in the craft beer world. After all, lager was the fizzy brew you ordered at the pub when you didn’t want to think about what you were drinking; it was the forgettable accompaniment to an otherwise memorable meal at a dai pai dong. And it seemed as far from craft as you could get: lager accounts for 85 percent of the global beer market, and it’s the type of beer produced by most of the world’s top brands. Heineken, Stella, Asahi, Tsingtao. That’s lager. Right? 

Not exactly. Hiding behind the relatively interchangeable mass of industrial lagers is a whole spectrum of styles and flavours. Now the craft beer industry has finally caught on. Lagers don’t have to be boring; they can be as interesting, complex and innovative as any ale – but with the crispness that made the category so popular in the first place. 

Perry Lam fell in love with lagers when he was studying to become a brewer in Germany. “The more I learned about beer making, the more I found lagers just very intriguing and challenging as a brewer,” he says. This was in the middle of the 2010s, when Hong Kong’s craft brewing scene was just ramping up, with new ventures producing not only classic ales but Hong Kong-inspired beers made with tea, local fruits, Chinese herbs and other unusual ingredients. Lam had always intended to return home after his studies to open his own brewery, but his time in Germany, the birthplace of lager, convinced him to do something a bit more specific: open Hong Kong’s first — and so far only — lager-forward brewhouse.

The result is H.K. Lovecraft. For the past eight years, this Tsing Yi brewery has been producing a wide range of lagers while also helping other Hong Kong breweries make their own lagers. Lovecraft makes classic lagers like a German-style helles, but it is also keen to experiment: recent releases include a lychee lager, an osmanthus wheat lager and a dry-hopped Vienna lager made in collaboration with Manchester brewery Cloudwater.

If this sounds a bit bewildering, let’s back up a bit. Though just about any casual drinker is familiar with the terms ale and lager, a surprising number of people don’t actually know what they mean. The distinction is simple. Ales are fermented with ale yeast, which converts sugar to alcohol at warmer temperatures, producing esters that give beer fruity flavours and aromas. Lager yeast works more slowly, at colder temperatures, consuming more sugar before dropping away, resulting in beers that tend to be relatively dry and clear. 

Despite their widespread popularity — and dominance of the global beer market — lagers take much longer to produce than ales and tend to be more technically challenging. “If you mess something up, it’s very easy to detect. There’s nothing to hide behind like with ales,” says Lam. That’s one of the reasons they are not as commonly made by craft breweries, which are often working on small margins with limited capacity, meaning they don’t necessarily have the luxury of waiting several weeks for a lager to be properly conditioned, especially if the result might be flawed. “Most people just don’t have the time,” says Lam. “They need to get their beer out as soon as possible because of business pressure.”

Lager also faces a stigma. “Most people have a misconception of what a lager is,” says Lam. “They’re normally just thinking of one style of lager” – something light and yellow. “But with lager yeast and the lagering process, there’s so much you can do.” That’s true even with traditional styles of lager. Though the beer market may be dominated by pale lagers like Heineken and Carlsberg, there are also styles like schwarzbier, a German lager made with dark malts, giving it roasty, chocolatey flavours normally associated with stout; rauchbier, a lager made with smoked malt that earns it comparisons to a grilled sausage; and steam beer, a lager fermented at warmer temperatures, giving it ale-like qualities. 

But lager’s simplicity opens the door to innovation, too. In 1996, Italian brewer Agostino Arioli made a classic German pilsner but added large quantities of hops late in the brewing process, a technique called dry hopping. The result amplified the spicy, floral aromas of the European noble hops used in pilsner, giving it a decidedly contemporary feel. That foreshadowed later styles like the India Pale Lager or its more recent cousin, the Cold IPA, which takes advantage of a lager’s crispness to create a beer that is as smooth and easy-drinking as it is hoppy.

This is the kind of thing Lam wanted to do when he returned from Germany, but he knew it would be difficult. An ale can take as little as two weeks to produce; Lam’s most quickly produced beer is a hybrid lager-ale, which needs to be matured for six weeks before it is released. “It can be up to eight months for a doppelbock or a Baltic porter,” he says. That is a luxurious amount of time in a city like Hong Kong, where high rents require high turnover. 

Lam’s solution? “I decided to just have more tanks.” Though its brewing capacity is 20 hectolitres — about half that of Hong Kong’s largest craft brewery, Young Master — Lovecraft has 27 fermentation tanks, meaning it can have many small batches of beer on the go at the same time. “I think we have the most tanks in Hong Kong,” says Lam.

When he returned from his studies in Germany, Lam poured his own money — no partners, no investors — into designing his ideal brewery. “I thought about everything from a brewer’s perspective,” he says. “Brewing should not mean suffering. I rely a lot on automation because we’re a small team — four brewers — and it’s very hard work, and I didn’t want us to burn out after a year or two.” The brewhouse is air conditioned for workers’ comfort, a rarity even in sweltering Hong Kong.

On a warm, rainy day, the brewhouse is filled with the sweet smell of malted grain being boiled. Lam walks between the rows of tanks, recalling the first batch he made in 2017: a smoked version of a doppelbock, an extra-strong, extra-rich and extra-aged lager that was first brewed by Bavarian monks to break their fasts. “We started with the most hardcore beer because we wanted to push our machines to test them out,” says Lam, chuckling. 

He points out some of the various brews ageing in their tanks. There’s the helles — a classic easy drinker with roots in southern Germany — which Lam and his team brew about three times a month; it’s their best seller. There’s also a new lager made with locally harvested honey, which Lovecraft first introduced as a seasonal beer but was popular enough to become one of its year-round core beers. 

Brewing in Hong Kong means keeping up with an insatiable demand for new releases. “It’s just Hong Kong culture – people like something new,” says Lam. That helps earn the brewery attention, but it’s the unsung everyday lagers like the helles that actually pay the bills. “The helles just flows, but it’s often not talked about,” says Lam. “Hong Kong is a lager market, commercially. But for craft beer, people don’t always understand what makes us special. Some people still have a closed mind. The education has been very challenging.”

Adding to that is the overall challenge of selling craft beer in Hong Kong. The boom years of the mid-2010s are over; nearly half the craft breweries that opened have now closed, including trailblazers like Moonzen and Citibrew. Most of the small bottle shops that sold local craft beer have shuttered, too, and restaurant and bar sales are down as many craft beer fans have either emigrated or are now saving their time and money for trips to Japan and beyond. 

“The market is shifting and especially after Covid, spending power is a lot less,” says Lam. “Craft beer has been a mid- to high-end market but I want to push volume a bit more.” Lovecraft is one of a handful of local breweries whose beers can be reliably found at supermarkets like Wellcome and convenience stores like Circle K. 

That doesn’t mean Lam is dialing back the experimentation. Trying out new things is part of the philosophy behind the brewery; it’s in the name, which was inspired by fantasy writer HP Lovecraft, known for his esoteric, creepy horror stories. “We wanted to introduce that Lovecraftian concept of the fear of the unknown,” says Lam. “There are a lot of unknowns in craft beer.” And that’s true in particular about lagers. There’s nothing creepy about a rauchbier or a dunkel, but for many craft beer drinkers in Hong Kong, they’re a step into the unknown.