My first Laotian beer update is not about the national brew but the new foreign arrival from Singapore.
Last month Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) announced that their domestic operations in the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic would be brewing Tiger Beer before the end of the year.
While Tiger has been available as a high-end, premium import in the country for over a decade APB decided that the market was now mature enough to support a brewery that competes with the excellent, but somewhat monopolistic, Beerlao.
APB prefers to brew domestically rather than rely on imports and now has operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and China as well as many other countries around the globe.