Tou Thao, Jai Thor, Toyer Moua, and Nhiasing Moua don’t have the typical brewery start-up story. The friends from St. Paul, Minnesota weren’t starry-eyed homebrewers, or even working in the beer industry, when they made a plan to set out on their own. And the path they chose—purchasing a dated brew-it-yourself concept in a quiet neighborhood with no taproom, no distribution channels, and no established brands—isn’t one most industry consultants would have recommended.
It’s probably for the best that the four friends didn’t have to face the cautionary tales of craft beer market saturation. Had they heard that message, it’s possible they would have stopped well before they ever bought Vine Park Brewing Company on St. Paul’s historic West 7th Street.
Vine Park Brewing Company opened as a brew-your-own space in 1995, a timely concept in an era of burgeoning interest in homebrewing and variable craft beer quality. The facility welcomed people with little-to-no brewing experience to come in and create their own beer, from mash-in to bottling.
From 1991 to 1994, contract brands were the fastest-growing segment of the craft market. Any business-savvy person could simply start a beverage brand and deploy a major production facility, like Cold Spring Brewing Company in central Minnesota or Steinhaus Brewing Company in Paso Robles, California (responsible for many Trader Joe’s beer brands), to make it. In many cases, the quality wasn’t up to par, and the image of craft beer in the early ’90s was blemished as a result.
St. Paul saw its fair share of contract brands throughout the decade, some of which produced terrible beer. But dedicated beer lovers who had discovered hallmark craft breweries—like Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco or Goose Island Beer Company in Chicago—started making imitations in their homes and garages. As interest in homebrewing swelled, Vine Park served as a place where groups could learn to brew on a larger scale than they could at home.
Homebrewing is what led Thao, Thor, Moua, and Moua to Vine Park. “We started brewing in my garage. We bought a kit at Northern Brewer,” explains Thao, now president of the reformed Vine Park. Another product of the homebrew boom, Northern Brewer started as a supply shop in St. Paul in 1993, and is now the largest homebrewing store in the U.S. following investment by Anheuser-Busch InBev’s ZX Ventures Group in 2016 (AB InBev went on to sell it to Blackstreet Capital Holdings last year). Thao recalls that the beer tasted “just fine.” But the experience led them to brew batch after batch, until a neighbor mentioned the operation at Vine Park. The four friends soon became regulars at the brew-on-premise space.
Thao, plus Touyer Moua, director of finance, and Nhiasing Moua, VP of public relations, are engineers by trade. Jai Thor, operations manager, is the former owner of a sushi restaurant, and was the only member of the set with hospitality-industry experience. As the friends explored their entrepreneurial interests, they casually researched coffee shops, restaurants, and breweries, making note of the qualities they wanted to replicate at their own business.
After months of studying business ownership and swapping ideas, one thing suddenly became very clear to Thao. “We’re Hmong,” he says frankly. Coffee after coffee, beer after beer, the glaring lack of Hmong-operated businesses in the Twin Cities was like holding up a mirror and a window at the same time. Founding an explicitly Hmong craft brewery wouldn’t just be a way to stand apart as a business—it would also serve as an important point of connection with the Twin Cities’ large Hmong community.
The Hmong people are a distinct ethnic group native to Southern China, whose history goes back some 8,000 years. Increasingly oppressed by Chinese rulers in the 18th and 19th centuries, many Hmong took refuge in the highlands of Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Those who arrived in Laos faced opposition from the indigenous Laotian people in addition to taxation by the French, who colonized Laos soon after the Hmong immigration. Later, the Secret War in Laos during Nixon’s presidency ended thousands of lives, and laid the foundation for massive Hmong emigration from the region. Non-governmental refugee camps popped up to offer some small relief, and soon these camps were assisting with relocation.
Because many of these “voluntary agencies,” as they were called, were based in Minnesota, the relocations were orchestrated there. In November 1975, the first Hmong family to resettle in Minnesota arrived, and many others followed after the passage of the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980.
Today, minorities represent about 22% of the greater Twin Cities’ population, but minority-run businesses are lagging behind at only 7% of ownership. And while Hmong-owned businesses are on the rise, Hmong people living in the U.S. still have the highest rate of poverty among Asian Americans.
Despite the stereotypical view of Asian drinkers as preferring sake and wine, beer is a very significant part of Hmong culture in Asia and abroad. It plays an especially important role in cultural celebrations, like weddings and Hmong New Year, notes Dr. Lance Fang, a Hmong community leader and informal mentor to budding entrepreneurs. “We are a social people,” he explains, “and drinking beer is part of the social aspect of our gatherings.”
Traditional Hmong weddings may involve hard liquor, as in many other cultures, but more often the beverage of choice is beer. At some weddings, the brothers of the bride will demand that the groom drink a full glass of beer, which is viewed as a form of mutual respect. That said, while beer is drunk in volume, low-ABV styles are generally preferred. Drunkenness is seen as culturally inappropriate, because the spirit is “out of control,” Fang says.
“The Hmong culture—we usually drink fast! One bottle we will finish in five minutes. If we have a group of friends together, we all have to toast each one. This beer will serve perfectly for the community, for that purpose.”
Multinational Lagers, like Heineken and Bud Light, were among the most popular choices among Thao’s friends and family members. But as he developed an interest in craft beer, he believed a Hmong-run brewery could mean something to his community.
In 2017, Thao and his partners began marketing their homebrew to friends and peers to gauge the response. The four founders took a Blonde Ale to the Hmong Soccer Tournament, part of St. Paul’s annual Hmong International Freedom Festival. “People absolutely loved it,” Thao says, and they asked for more. The encouraging response led the group to begin refining their recipe, from a basic, kit-based homebrew to something more intentionally designed.
Now armed with a promising business idea and a product to put their name on, Thao and his partners jokingly asked Vine Park’s owner Andy Grage when he would sell the place. To their surprise, Grage took them seriously, and made them an affordable offer on the 29-year-old business. With that, Vine Park became the first Hmong-owned brewery in the U.S.
But the plan wasn’t simple assimilation. Thao and his colleagues wanted to continue the brew-on-premise model while also introducing packaged beer designed to appeal to their friends and family members. The goal was to create beers that would feel familiar and accessible to Hmong immigrants and American-born generations alike.
The beers of Laos and the surrounding area are light in color and low in ABV, lending themselves to the style of session drinking that is common in Hmong circles. Beerlao, financially backed by Carlsberg, dominates 95% of the market share in Laos, Thao’s home country. By contrast, American craft beers don’t always appeal to Hmong drinkers in the Midwest. Many are simply too strong, or too heavy, to be enjoyed in a sessionable context.
Thao took his cues from friends and family, and sought a recipe more in keeping with the beers of their heritage. The Hmong tradition of daily drinking, plus the dominance of larger brands, meant that the first beer packaged by Vine Park had to fit in those same recognizable parameters, Thao explains. Following their Blonde Ale’s popularity at the Freedom Festival, the friends didn’t want to stray too far from that successful template.
In part as a nod to the rice cultivation of home, and also for levity on the palate, Thao tweaked the Blonde Ale’s grain bill to include rice, which also made it friendlier towards heavily spiced foods. After even more R&D, the most recent iteration of the recipe became a Lager for the sake of both taste and flavor stability, as Thao describes it.
“The Hmong culture—we usually drink fast! One bottle we will finish in five minutes. If we have a group of friends together, we all have to toast each one,” says Thor. “This beer will serve perfectly for the community, for that purpose.”
Prior to purchasing the brewery, the four business owners had to decide on a name for their rice beer. To underscore their identity, the group decided to take inspiration from a Hmong curse: Tiger bite. “Tiger bite” is a phrase uttered to enemies, a wish that a tiger would bite them. In Thao’s upbringing, though, it has a dual meaning. When spoken to those very close to you, it’s a phrase of affection and well-wishing—almost like the stage-luck phrase, “Break a leg.”
The beer was named 651 Tyga Bite. The prefix is the St. Paul Area code, capturing the dual identity of this immigrant-made beer. The Hmong phrase for tiger bite, “Tsov Tom” (pronounced “jaw-THAH”), is pictured on the label as a subheading. Rather than wishing either curse or affection, the phrase here serves as a homing device. “It’s a way to say, ‘We are Hmong,’” explains Thao.
“If I had to rank from zero to 10, with 10 being the most impactful, the impact of COVID, I would say 10. We are a very social community. On the weekends we have multiple events. With social distancing, none of those are happening. Event centers and restaurants are not selling beer.”
If Hmong culture hasn’t had prominence in American beer circles, then the product itself—Asian Rice Lager—hasn’t exactly been invited to the kegger, either. The most widely used system of beer classification and judging, the Beer Judging and Certification Program (BJCP), doesn’t contain a single category for any Asian style of beer in its most recent guidelines. The word “Asian” doesn’t appear anywhere in the 93-page document, nor do the names of any countries in the continent.
18 of the total 34 BJCP categories comprise beer styles from Europe and the Commonwealth. Six categories are for American beer. Only one broad category—“International Lager”—exists as a catch-all for beers with more, shall we say, diversity. In 2015, when the styles were most recently updated, a category for historical beers was added. The nine subcategories were a small improvement, yet the majority of these remain European in origin. That’s despite the fact that beer has been made in the Middle East and China since about 7,000 BC, and that Asia has been the world’s largest beer-producing region since 2009, with China as the dominant country of production.
Asian Rice Lager recipes, many of which mimic Sapporo Premium or Asahi Super Dry, typically have a higher proportion of rice to barley. Whereas most American adjunct Lagers use about four parts of pale malt for every one part of rice, the typical Asian balance is five parts pale malt to four parts rice, though this proportion isn’t codified in any style guide. The yeasts also differ, with American-inspired recipes relying on American Lager yeast and Asian Rice Lagers often using Saflager W-34/70—famous for its high attenuation in malty German styles.
While California has the largest population of Hmong people outside of Asia, communities are spread among several large cities. Minnesota ranks second, and has a more concentrated Hmong-American population, with St. Paul alone home to 29,662 Hmong Americans as of the 2010 census, more than any other city in the U.S. Neighboring Wisconsin follows closely behind. Fang believes there are currently 80,000 to 90,000 Hmong people living in the greater Twin Cities metropolitan area. This untapped market of people, largely with an appreciation for beer and with no brands targeting them, is a source of excitement for Vine Park.
The Hmong population living in the U.S. is also young—the median age is 23 years, as compared to 38.2 years among the general U.S. population. As more Hmong Americans reach drinking age, Vine Park’s owners hope their target customer base will expand.
Since initiating distribution in September 2018, Vine Park can barely keep up with demand. 651 Tyga Bite is currently available in Minnesota and Wisconsin, with plans to arrive in California this year. Fang has encouraged Thao and his team to go big: “I continue to encourage the team, saying we need to go beyond just the Hmong. We need to go where necessary or possible [...] It’s a brand and it’s a business, as well.”
Fortunately, Vine Park’s small footprint isn’t hindering production volumes. That’s because 651 Tyga Bite is, ironically, contract-brewed at Stevens Point Brewery in Wisconsin. Stevens Point is generally respected in the business for producing quality beer for brands that aren’t able to meet demands in-house, such as Fulton Brewing Company in Minneapolis (prior to its 2014 expansion) and Hopewell Brewing Company in Chicago (when it first expanded into Lager-making).
Far from the dark days of ’90s-era contract brewing, modern contract relationships can work well for growing brands. Thao formerly worked with a less-experienced contract facility and re-directed 651 Tyga Bite to Stevens Point in early 2019, resulting in more consistent beer. “They’re very experienced,” he says.
Just this month, a new relationship promises to broaden the customer base, as Hohenstein’s, Inc. will begin distributing 651 Tyga Bite. Hohenstein’s traces its history to West St. Paul, and was one of the first distributors to embrace the craft beer wave of the 1990s. This move will add accounts beyond Vine Park’s current reach. In 2019, Vine Park produced about 800 barrels, which were distributed to 45 accounts in Minnesota and 30 in Wisconsin. Since partnering with Hohenstein’s, their goal is to reach 100 accounts in the next year, but “Hohenstein’s has a big reach, a lot of accounts,” notes Thor.
At the end of 2019, Thao, Thor, Moua, and Moua, were drawing up taproom plans for their small space. A taproom would transform the venue—which currently looks like a brewhouse combined with a high-school chemistry lab—into more of a bar with a DIY department. Thao explains that the plans were all falling into place, including floorplans and approval from the State of Minnesota. The brew-on-premise area, which is legally allowed to co-exist with a taproom, would continue.
Since COVID-19 restrictions on dining and gathering began in mid-March, however, their taproom fundraising party was postponed indefinitely. In addition to this delay, the pandemic has generally hit the Hmong community hard. This summer’s edition of the Hmong International Freedom Festival was canceled, and many businesses in the community have been pushed to the precipice of collapse. “If I had to rank from zero to 10, with 10 being the most impactful, the impact of COVID, I would say 10. We are a very social community. On the weekends we have multiple events. With social distancing, none of those are happening. Event centers and restaurants are not selling beer,” explains Fang.
One such event center is Unison Restaurant and Banquet in Maplewood, a short drive from downtown St. Paul. Co-owner Nu Moua saw a need for an event space that could house frequent gatherings and opened Unison in October 2019. While the poor timing was unforeseeable, the support from the community prior to and during the COVID-19 restrictions has been profound. “When we opened, there was a reaffirmation of the need for space,” says Moua.
“‘Tiger bite’ is a phrase uttered to enemies, a wish that a tiger would bite them. In Thao’s upbringing, though, it has a dual meaning. When spoken to those very close to you, it’s a phrase of affection and well-wishing—almost like the stage-luck phrase, ‘Break a leg.’”
Unison was closed for dining for three months and reopened on June 13—not what the management had seen coming, considering that the banquet room had been booked every single Friday and Saturday night for all of 2020. Now the cancellations have spread through September. The impact of the closure has also touched Vine Park, because Unison is one of the biggest accounts for Tyga Bite. Moua estimates that Unison’s banquet catering and restaurant sell more Tyga Bite than any other beer. It accounts for 65-70% of their beer sales.
Moua explains that Unison intentionally supports the Vine Park brand, not only because they are a local small business, but because they are the only Hmong-owned brewery in the nation. He wants his patrons to become aware of Tyga Bite, and he prices the beer competitively with respect to Heineken, his second-best seller.
The stangnancy of events like weddings, graduations, and cultural gatherings has impacted the brewery’s sales at liquor stores, too. Prior to their partnership with Hohenstein’s, Vine Park had about 40 off-sale accounts in the Twin Cities alone. Party Time Liquor, located within blocks of Unison, noticed a significant drop in the sales of 651 Tyga Bite. Manager Brad Koppen was actually worried something had happened to the brewery. “It used to fly off the shelves. We have carried it since it first became popular.” He estimates that was sometime over a year ago. The decline corresponded roughly to the beginning of social distancing.
Thao sees the connection. “Due to the pandemic, people aren’t gathering anymore. Liquor store sales have slowed down.” Meanwhile, Tyga Bite has lost its social context. “I think the Hmong people drink more with others. Most of [our] drinking happens at weddings and big ceremonies, like New Year’s or graduation parties,” explains Thor. But with Minnesota restaurants like Unison opening with modified dining room service this week, Moua and other small business owners are planning to turn a corner.
The turmoil of being a small, immigrant-run business during state-mandated stay-at-home rules was already challenging enough. A second blow came with the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, followed by widespread civil unrest. “We cannot discuss anything without discussing this,” begins Fang. “What happened to George Floyd, it’s totally unnecessary. We denounce that.”
Now, weeks after the murder, uncertainty about the future, the collective trauma of the killing itself, and the political shockwaves reaching well beyond the historically Black Old Southside of Minneapolis are far from over. And as is always the case, the communities at the bottom suffer most. “We are already an underserved community, the Hmong people are poor. Things are now getting worse,” reflects Fang.
One of the arrested officers, who appears in the civilian cell phone video standing at Floyd’s head throughout the eight-minute-and-46-second restraint, is Hmong, and is also named Tou Thao. Former Minneapolis police officer Thao has been charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. The participation of a Hmong officer led to several public responses from Hmong community members to Floyd’s death, including Gaosong Heu, who told NPR that she was “ashamed, embarrassed about Tou Thao's complicit behavior in this murder.”
Many in the Hmong community, including community leaders, have been vocal about their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, citing the fact that the Black community has also supported them in the past. The Hmong are no strangers to police brutality, either, which has fueled their support for justice.
Thao’s goal isn’t to launch Hmong Rice Lagers into mainstream popularity, or to broadly improve the position of minority business owners. Instead, 651 Tyga Bite has naturally struck a chord with friends, neighbors, and the community because the beer tastes like home.
Building an immigrant-run business, especially a business geared toward one’s own community, is a cathartic way to ease what is often a profound homesickness. Thao was raised by rice farmers in Laos. His goal is to deliver what he thinks his friends and peers will enjoy, rather than insist on what they need. When Vine Park debuted a Pale Ale during recipe development, that nostalgia was lost. “A lot of the feedback from the Hmong community was that they preferred Lagers,” says Thor. The team received most of the feedback from the public via their Facebook page. “It was too strong,” adds Thao, smiling. They quickly nixed it.
The rise of 651 Tyga Bite highlights the promise of untapped markets, and the entrepreneurial spirit that still exists in craft beer’s quieter corners. “They are just young guys trying to live the American dream,” says Fang. As an unprecedented number of craft breweries elbow each other out of the way to reach tap lines, liquor store shelves, and ultimately, customers, Vine Park has invited new guests to the party, and has offered them a new, go-to beer.
Now, all they have to do is wait for the party to return.
Words by Paige DidoraIllustrations by Cooper Foczcz
