Hanoi's humble beer glass and the memory of a nation - The Sunday Long Read

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

May 15, 2026

by

Parni Ray

in Original

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...