Hong Kong Beer: Pints and Parties at Golden Snake

It’s late on a Saturday night and the Central Ferry Piers are winding down. The bar and snack stalls are shuttered; outlying islanders are stumbling towards the last scheduled ferries. Even the 7-Eleven in Pier 7 is closed. But the muffled sound of an electronic beat suggests the evening is not quite over. 

The source of the music is tucked inside Pier 8, underneath the Hong Kong Maritime Museum and around the corner from a booth selling tickets for harbour tours. And in this unvarnished space — really just a corridor — there is a bar with 10 taps of beer and seltzer, a set of folding tables and plastic stools, and a house DJ behind the decks.

This is Golden Snake, an odd bar with a strange name. Affiliated with Deadman Brewery and Oh Beer, it’s Hong Kong’ most unusual craft beer taproom — and a far cry from the other bars scattered around the ferry piers. “We want it to feel like a dai pai dong,” says co-owner Kaming Cheung, referring to Hong Kong’s famous outdoor restaurants. “But even more fun. And with music.”

It was all a dream

First things first: what’s up with the name? “I had a dream about owning a bar with that name,” says Cheung. In Chinese, it’s 金蛇軒 (gam1 se4 hin1), or Golden Snake Pavilion. It’s a decidedly old-fashioned sounding name — “It sounds like a teahouse,” admits Cheung — but it embodies the bar’s oddball, eccentric spirit. 

After dreaming of the bar with a teahouse name, Cheung ran it by his boss at Deadman, entrepreneur Sherman Chan, who liked the sound of it. So did Cheung’s partner at Oh Beer, Henry Leung, who works in the music industry as an artist manager. The two have been friends for more than two decades, since they were both in their 20s, and it was Cheung who got Leung into craft beer in the first place. 

“I used to like commercial beer, but Kaming gave me some craft beer and I was like, ‘Wow, tastes like Champagne,’” says Leung. 

By that point, Cheung had been working as a brewer for several years, first at Black Kite and the now-defunct Moonzen, then at Deadman, which he joined in 2021. “I do everything there,” he says: he is one of two brewers and he also handles marketing and sales. With that experience under his belt, Cheung and Leung decided to launch their own brand of beer as a side project: Oh Beer. They launched it in January 2020.

“We are bad guys,” says Cheung jokingly. “We like surfing, music, partying.” Running their own craft beer label seemed like a fun thing to do, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world and everyone was desperately looking for a hobby. 

Their beers are suitably experimental. Among them is a salted peach sour ale inspired by Hong Kong’s classic dried fruit snacks (涼果 loeng4 gwo2). Another is a sake beer made with koji from Japan — the fungus that gives sake its distinctive taste; “It tastes like flowers,” says Cheung. Oh Beer had early success with its CBD-infused beers, but after the non-psychoactive cannabinoid was banned by the Hong Kong government in 2023, they spent a year developing an IPA named Kush that tastes like pot. The exact mix of hops they use to achieve this taste is a closely-guarded secret. 

The goal, explains Cheung, is to make beers that are unexpected. “People like special things,” he says. “Otherwise, why not just go to 7-Eleven and buy Suntory?” 

London-based Hong Kong artist Isabelle O’Connor designed labels for each of the beers in her signature style: colourful, playful, surreal, slightly chaotic and decidedly mischievous. 

Not your usual Hong Kong bar

Those same adjectives could be used to describe Golden Snake. After hearing about Cheung’s dream, Sherman Chan decided to support the venture, using it as an opportunity to have a dedicated taproom for Deadman’s beers. 

In the spring of 2025, Cheung and Leung took over a craft beer bottle shop that had been operating in Pier 8 and turned it into a rudimentary bar. They wanted to offer something different to the expat-dominated bar scene in the rest of the ferry piers: “Chinatown-style in Hong Kong,” says Cheung with a wry grin. And not just that, but “Berlin-style,” too: he envisioned it as a spot for the kind of grimy, ad hoc DJ nights for which the German capital is renowned. 

The first year was challenging as the bar found its footing. But Clockenflap 2025 seemed to be a turning point: Golden Snake’s unofficial afterparty attracted 200 people. “We were open until four in the morning,” says Cheung.

How is business these days? “Okay la,” says Cheung. It’s busy on weekends, though quiet during the week. “But we have regulars.” 

Some of them come by to play darts. Others come for the affordable beer, which includes a HK$38 Kölsch that is quite possibly the lowest-priced pint of craft draught in Hong Kong. Still more come for the increasingly regular events, which recently included a set by high-profile British DJ Pete Cannon. This weekend is the Devil After Party, with local DJ crew Good Kid Bad Student performing on 6 June until 2am. In true Golden Snake style, the event’s poster includes a demonic cat. 

As Cheung asks rhetorically: “What’s the point if we can’t have fun?”