Hanoi’s humble beer glass and the memory of a nation

AT first glance, the Bia hơi served in the Ba Dinh Sports Center is the same light draft lager served in every shop on every street in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi. Like everywhere else in the city, the beer comes from a state-owned company that has brewed it fresh daily since the ’60s and it is served in the same handmade, sturdy, blue-green glass cup–the Bia hơi cốc. But regulars at the sports center will tell you that the beer here is better, fresher, and unlike anywhere else in this city of nearly 9 million people. An angular Nguyễn Văn Long—in his 70’s, wispy white goatee, matching moustache, puffing out thick plumes of local cigar smoke—explained why. It’s because the beer is “blood-cut” he said in Vietnamese, gesturing to his cốc as he raised it one humid June afternoon. Bia hơi (pronounced “bee-ah hoy” and meaning “fresh beer”) is brewed without preservatives or added carbonation. The kegs in which it is stored aren’t pressurized, which means the beer has to be consumed within 24 hours of leaving the brewery. The finest Bia hơi, blood cut, is the kind tapped and poured as soon as it is brewed. The Ba Đình Sports Center has always gotten exactly that.This privilege harkens back to the subsidy era, the decade-long state nationalization period Vietnam entered following the defeat of American troops and fall of Saigon in 1975. It ended officially in 1986, with the Đổi Mới (“Renovation”) reforms that nudged Vietnam toward a market economy. But in some corners of Hanoi, government officials still have exclusive access to special shops selling goods at subsidized rates. Although the sports center refreshment shop is now open to all, most regulars are retired senior officials, like Long and the friends he sat surrounded by.Despite supposedly being a cut above the rest, the beer at the center is still served in a humble cốc (pronounced “coke,” with quick upward inflection). When a drinker tips up the glass to retrieve the last drops of Bia hơi, a capital H, for HABECO, the Hanoi Beer Alcohol and Beverage Joint Stock Corporation, is revealed pressed into the base.

It’s the tumbler’s only constant; each cốc is otherwise different. That tension between sameness and difference, held in the cốc, runs beyond the table. Much is shifting in Vietnam. Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, the country remains a symbol of resistance and self-reliance. But it’s no longer a war-ravaged nation struggling to get back on its feet. Today, it’s one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economies, a rising manufacturing power, often an alternative to China, a curious hybrid of communism and capitalism (officially “socialist-oriented market economy”) and significant enough for Donald Trump to slap a 46% tariff on its goods. Vietnam is on pace to host 25 million tourists in 2026, most commonly from China, though European visits are up 53% year-over-year. Amid these waves of profound transformation, the Bia hơi cốc has remained unchanged. Cheap and easy to acquire, the glasses continue to be made by hand with recycled glass in small village factories near Hanoi. Conceived in the midst of socialist austerity, it has persisted in the face of imported glassware, shifting design trends, changing tastes, economic reforms, and globalisation. China’s mass-produced crystal products now flood the Vietnamese market. But, no manufacturer, at home or abroad, has yet successfully replicated or replaced the low-priced, unprofitable, “unpretty,” cốc. So how has the cốc, a slow-to-make, simple in function and form, everyday object, defied the global design logic of perfection and endured for over fifty years?Some say it is because the cốc is simple: easy to make, easy to buy, easy to use. Others say it is because it is profound, more than a drinking glass, a vestige of an earlier Vietnam. Both seem to hold. What is clear is that the cốc complicates the idea of progress that has reshaped the modern world, and Vietnam, over the past five decades. Neither upgraded nor replaced, neither standardised nor scaled, its persistence points to how the unassuming forces of habit and utility can hold ground against betterment and efficiency. Understanding how the cốc survived requires looking beyond the glass itself, into the world that created it and the use that drives it.

The design of the humble Bia hơi cốc. BEER came to Vietnam with the French, and colonialism.Hommel brewery, the first in Hanoi, was established in 1890. Making beer was expensive, so supply was low and prices high: the drink was reserved mostly for colonial officials. Due to a shortage of materials like glass and metal there were no bottles or containers and the beer was instead kept in reusable kegs. That era ended in 1954, when the sandal-wearing, bicycle-riding Việt Minh “peasant army,” defeated the French at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. North Vietnam became the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Hommel Brewery became the official state brewery of Hanoi. This was where Bia hơi was eventually born. It took two more decades, and the ousting of yet another Goliath, the United States, for North and South Vietnam to be reunited under communist rule in 1976. As part of its postcolonial nation-building efforts, the new government decided that beer should be made widely accessible as a small but meaningful boost to public morale in the subsidy era. The answer was Bia hơi. But serving it proved complicated. Beer was available at the government-run beer stations and everyone in a queue was allotted a ticket for purchase. It was being served fresh, so bottles were impractical. Most people brought their own cups, making standardised portions impossible.Then the Vietnamese Central Cooperative Union of Handicrafts and Crafts, CCUHC, came up with a solution: a standard-sized glass designed specifically for a single serving of Bia hơi. One ticket equaled a single cốc of beer. Across Hanoi, beer was no longer measured by the keg, the server, or the buyer’s wares, but by the cốc. To order a beer was to receive a cốc.This holds true still even though the queues and ration tickets of the subsidy era have disappeared. But not at the Ba Đình sports center. Here at the refreshment area, a version of the old ticketing system still operates between 4 and 6 p.m., during which beer is served.

Just a 30-minute walk from the HABECO office, where the beer is produced, the sports center long received the earliest kegs of Bia hơi, thanks to its subsidy-era exclusive status. The tradition, Long and his friends insist, holds true even now. So a beer here is not only the freshest in the city, it is among the cheapest, at 5,000 VND or about 20 cents. And that is why, though they live in Hanoi’s Old Quarter–Phố cổ Hà Nội–where most tourists head to for their evening tipple, Long and his friends make their way to Ba Đình instead. They don’t bother with other beers. “Bia hơi is special,” they announced, ticking off its virtues: Its aforementioned affordability (“one of the cheapest beers in the world”), light enough at 3% ABV to spare you the headache or sluggishness the next morning (“which means you can drink every day”), and refreshing (“a good end to a hot day”). But above all, it is very Hanoi, much like them, Long said proudly. Community is a big part of drinking and drinking Bia hơi is no fun alone. This was why they come to the sports center every day. Years of showing up meant they knew the ins and outs of this place–what food was good on the menu, who to nod to for service, how to make a fresh jug of beer appear without anyone ever asking. So no staff members batted an eye when they pulled out a bottle of home-brewed, dark-colored, sim fruit-infused rice liquor with a heady smell.“Typically, you wouldn’t drink sim liquor from this,” Long said, indicating the cốc. Now the beer was gone, but the glass remained. But why not drink other things from the glass, if it is ever present?Answer: This is a Bia hơi cốc. It’s meant for Bia hơi.“The cốc is the beer,” Long explained. “The beer the cốc.”Hours later, after some cajoling, the octogenarian regulars agreed to do a popular drinking chant they had earlier waved off as childish.

Voices tumbled over one another: Anh em ơiiii, vực nào sâu thăm thẳm?—“Brothers, what abyss is deep?”Vực nào sâu bằng cái ly này!—“What abyss is deeper than this glass?”Hò zô ta nào!—“Haul it up!”Kéo cái ly này lên!—“Lift this glass high!” EVERY single Bia hơi cốc in Hanoi is handmade by local glass blowers in the village of Xôi Trì (pronounced “soy chee”), about an hour’s car ride from the city, traffic gods willing. Despite this nearness, the scene and air here are a world apart from the capital. Right next to the highway are rice fields–unending stretches of delicate green, spindly stalks standing in water in the summer heat. The air is thick with their moist, hot, earthy scent.Xôi Trì sits in Nam Dinh province, in the Red River Delta. Like most villages in the area, it depends on rice cultivation, but glassblowing has long endured as a parallel craft. In the 1980s and ’90s, nearly 85% of the villagers worked in glass workshops. They made everything–light bulbs, bottles, medicine tubes, all kinds of general glassware. But the rise of cheap, mass-produced glass from China wiped out the market for almost everything. Everything except the cốc. Today, only three families in the village still run glassblowing workshops, and all three make just one thing—the blistered blue-green Bia hơi cốc.Glassblowing is a family trade, said Phạm Ngọc Hinh, the self-described head of one of those families. His grandfather taught his father, his father taught him. Legend has it that grandpa Hình learned the trade as a worker at a Chinese glassblowing facility. Wary of revealing their trade secrets, his employers let him work only a single shift. But Hinh’s grandfather was a tough cookie, “he would hang around after work hours, climb over a wall to secretly watch every step, every day,” Hình cackled. Not only did he manage to master the craft in this manner, he also passed down a livelihood that would span generations. Hình started blowing glass at 16. He is now in his 70s.