Many businesses start with a dream; you have to have a bold vision to drive the process. Hong Kong based brewery Gweilo started from an actual dream. When founder Ian Jebbitt was working in Hong Kong as a lawyer it was a nocturnal burst of inspiration which was the seed for his brewery. ‘One night I had a dream that I was handed a beer called Gweilo’, he says. The Cantonese word Gweilo being a playful name for a western foreigner. ‘I registered the name immediately.’ Not everyone thought he would see it through: ‘a colleague bet me that I would never do anything with it’, he says. Jebbitt won the bet. That was in 2014 and Gweilo is still going strong today with presence in not just Hong Kong, but the UK and Australia. 

The brewery started off as a side project which Ian worked on together with his wife, Emily, and friend Joseph Gould alongside their day jobs. But a brewery is no low maintenance project; after two years they had a critical decision to make: cease, sell or go all in. They went all in. Investors were found and they built a brewery. Before long Gweilo began supplying supermarkets and airline Cathay Pacific. 

BREWING IN HONG KONG

It started with a dream, but what about reality? Having been introduced to the challenges of brewing in Asia through the other articles in this issue, I was keen to get behind the scenes of running a brewery in Hong Kong. ‘It’s crazy’, says Ian. ‘You should never do it.’ He explains why. For a start, no brewing ingredients are from Hong Kong; you have to import everything. Then there is the rent. The cost per sq foot for real estate in Hong Kong is probably one of the most expensive in the world. Where in the UK a brewery might be looking at around £15K per year in rent, Gweilo pay £65K per month! ‘Rent in Hong Kong drives everything. The cost of a pint, 85% is rent’, he adds. And licensing is complex. In Hong Kong, as a brewery you’re licensed as a food factory. The thing is that you can’t operate as a tap room, as food factories can’t serve alcohol. Nothing is straight forward! To be fair, Jebbitt’s experience is that people in Hong Kong are very supportive if you are starting a business; there’s a real entrepreneurial spirit to the place. Though some of the well meaning advice has been a challenge in itself: ‘In Hong Kong you have to do everything by the book, the trick is what book are you following?’ says Jebbitt.

And then there’s the infrastructure. Or lack of. There are no facilities in place to manage a product like fresh beer. For starters, making their beer is restrictive. The brewery is based on the bottom floor of a nineteen storey building with no outdoor space, no CO2 tanks and no malt silos - they’re forced to handle single sacks of malts. (Understandably Jebbitt is particularly envious of the UK breweries where malt comes in at a push of a button!) There was also a chronic absence of cold chain logistics for beer, so they have had to use meat storage facilities. And at outlets like restaurants and bars cellars or cold rooms are non existent - with rents so high, owners need to squeeze in maximum table covers. A cold room is a luxury they can’t afford. Which isn’t good news in a climate where it’s 35oC for most of the year. Foamus maximus!

BEER EDUCATION

And if that wasn’t enough of a hurdle, one of the biggest challenges Gweilo faced in the beginning was that people hadn’t heard of craft beer. ‘People would say there’s something wrong with it - we would have to explain that it’s an IPA, it’s meant to taste like that.’ It’s understandable really: the majority of people in Hong Kong were used to commercial lagers like Carlsberg, Tsingtao and Heineken. A certain amount of education was required, and Ian and his small team even gave out free beer to help the cause. ‘When we first launched, our 4.5% bog standard Pale Ale was considered mind blowing’, he laughs. The release of beers like their Rainbow Sherbet Sour proves how far Gweilo have come.  

THE GWEILO BREWS

I asked Jebbitt how much influence they take from Asia when making their beers. ‘We take inspiration from the region’, he replies, ‘but we don’t make weird beers just because they’re Chinese. Some other breweries in Hong Kong really double down on making beers that must have a Chinese ingredient.’ So you won’t find any Osmanthus Tea Pale Ales coming out of the Gweilo brewery. Indeed, the mantra behind the Gweilo range is to brew accessible craft beer to suit the heat of Hong Kong. Which translates as very drinkable beers with an approachable ABV as the core range, and then they have a lot of fun with the limited editions. Last December, a Gweilo special in Hong Kong was a Ferrero Rocher Stout. A nod to the local joke that anyone travelling to mainland China from Hong Kong takes a huge suitcase of those well-loved golden orbs of chocolate with them. February’s special was a Hong Kong Egg Tart Stout.

 Will you find any Gweilo brews in the UK? Happily, yes; but they are not imported, instead they are brewed locally. ‘How can you be relevant if you ship beer across the world?’ he says. To do so Gweilo have partnered with UK breweries. In 2021 Gweilo joined forces with Vocation to bring their brews to the UK market. These days Brew York make Gweilo beers from their newly expanded site in the centre of York. Head to gweilobeer.co.uk - or if you’re lucky, a craft beer bar/shop - and you’ll find a taste of the exotic in their brews. The Totally Tropical Sour (6.5%) brings pineapple, guava and coconut to the party. A big beer with a kettle soured base. Neon Jungle IPA (5.5%) is hopped with Idaho 7 and Citra, with aromas of tangerine and pineapple making way for papaya and passion fruit flavours. The hazy base thickened with wheat and oats. You’ll also find a tasty Tropical Lager (4.2%) and the very first beer Gweilo launched in 2015: their Session IPA (4.5%). This one is intensely dry hopped with Simcoe and Citra Cryo, creating a bold nose of tropical fruits, citrus and pine. Balanced by a malty backbone. 

Ian’s favourite brew? ‘I’m a sucker for Stout’, he replies. ‘In fact we’ve just done a collab with Bang the Elephant in Nottingham. We went over to their brewery and made a 14% Imperial Stout with black sesame, white sesame, and chocolate, plus mixed flower honey from Lamma Island and dried mandarin peel. I love messing around with stuff like that.’

GWEILO AF

We chat a bit more about different beers, and how well Gweilo brews suit Asian food in particular. And then hit on a topic which many homebrewers can surely relate to: enjoying beer a bit too much! ‘It got to a point when we would have a drink most nights’, he says, ‘but we’ve got young kids and we felt we couldn’t do it anymore.’ So these days Ian and his wife tend to drink alcohol free or table-strength beers during the week, saving the higher ABVs for the weekend.  

It’s no surprise then that last year Gweilo introduced Lo Rider, an extremely drinkable alcohol free Pale Ale to the range. Brewed as a collab with Brew York, this is a light, citrussy AF (0.3%) brew with intense tropical fruit aromas thanks to the Cascade hops, followed by a crisp, refreshing bitterness. Choosing an alcohol free (AF) brew is so much more enjoyable these days thanks to great beers like this.

ALSO NEW FROM GWEILO

Keep an eye out for two more Gweilo beers going into Asda this May: a ginger beer with Szechuan pepper, lemongrass and chilli, plus their Neon Jungle IPA. You can already find their NFT Hazy Pale Ale in some branches now. Gweilo are also launching at Lucy Wong’s in London this March.

IAN’S TOP BREWING TIPS

Like most pro brewers, Ian started his brewing journey as a homebrewer. But not everyone can claim to have started at the age of six! Which was the age Ian started alongside his dad, using a Burko tea urn and cool box set-up. (He’s continuing the craft with his own son who is now six years old.) Over the years Ian has racked up a fair few brews; what are his top tips for a great beer?

Keep it clean: ‘Hygiene is everything. You can have the best recipe, the best ingredients, you can be the most passionate person but if you get bacteria in your beer you’re done for. Our head brewer Charlie Johnson frequently says “as a brewer 99% of your job is cleaning to a scientific level. The other 1% is brewing.”’

Nail the process: ‘Get really good at making a kit-based recipe with all the ingredients measured out. Nail that…and consistently nail making it every time so there are no off flavours or infections. And then never follow a recipe again.’ 

A BEER WITH... 

So, Ian, who would your dream drinking buddy be? What would you serve them and what would you talk about? 

‘Damon Hill. I’d drink a Gweilo beer that he chooses and I’d talk about when Michael Schumacher took him off in 1994 and cost him the world championship. It still hurts me! I’d love to know how he got over it. I’m a huge Formula 1 fan.’