I discovered Taiwan Beer while shopping for booze for the Chinese New Year’s party I recently threw. Hipsters hate anything that reeks of slick commercial packaging, and believe you me, Taiwan Beer has none of that. Feast your eyes on the utilitarian graphic design on the can:
Note the clean, large and readable sans-serif font for the English name, and the just-as-clean-and-even-larger Chinese name. The can also clearly (in real life, not in this blurry photo) tells the customer that:
- The product in the can actually is beer, and in English and French!
- The amount of alcohol by volume in the beer (4.7% — better than most American beers, not quite up there with Canadian beer)
- and most importantly, the name and address of the company that imported the beer
Finally, a beer that both hipsters and usability specialists can agree on!
I’m sure the Tsingtao Brewing Company refuses to recognize Taiwan Beer as a sovereign beverage.
Recommended reading
Don’t knock the packaging, copy it! The Maximum Entropy site has a page devoted to the Great Taiwan Beer Conspiracy, in which several other companies have ripped off the Taiwan Beer design. Gotta love the hilarious names for the knock-off beers too: the more generalized Asia Beer, Premium Beer, Superior Beer, Top One Beer, the honestly- (if bizarrely-) named Good Cornmeal Beer and my favourite, I Want Beer.
Of course, Taiwan is not the only Asian country with a beer with silly name. In the Philippines, we’ve got Beer Na Beer, which translates as “Very Beer”.
China should recognize Taiwanese sovereignty. After all, they meet the minimum requirements for being your own country, at least according to Frank Zappa, who once said:
You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
Taiwan Beer won the silver medal at the Brewing Industry International Awards 2002, held in the UK.
Would you believe that there’s a Taiwan Beer song? You can’t be a hipster unless it’s in your MP3 collection. It’s not the silly beer jingle you’d expect, but a Chinese garage band spectacular that starts off with a goofy boom-chuck rhythm but quickly turns into a good mosh pit tune that takes its inspiration from The Ramones. I’ve already listened to it half a dozen times.