Vietnam's drinkers are giving the world's top brewers beer goggles

(July 21): Ho Chi Minh called alcohol a poison peddled by French imperialists. Half a century later in the Vietnamese city that bears the revolutionary founder’s name, young women in short skirts haul cases of Tiger Beer and buckets of ice to wooden tables crowded with young men.

“Drinking beer is essential in Vietnam,” shouts Nguyen Nhat Truong, a 26-year-old researcher, over techno music. He and his friends are regulars at “123-Zo” — an outdoor eatery in suburban Ho Chi Minh City named after a regional refrain for “bottoms up!” Here glass-mugs of lager cost less than 50 cents. “We have a lot of free time and there isn’t a lot of other entertainment, so we drink beer.”

Vietnam, where a beer-swilling culture is stoking concern about binge-drinking, will be “the next key battleground for brewers,” market researcher Euromonitor International said in a report this month. The planned sale of the government’s majority stakes in the nation’s two largest domestic beer companies leaves “wide open” the door for foreign rivals, it said.

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