RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
Perhaps you'd rather forget the movie and just go out for a beer. With that in mind, we have a tale now about a beer made in Laos. OK, Laos, beer, not an obvious connection. The Southeast Asian nation doesn't have a long history of making or exporting beer, but it does have a national brand and lofty goals. The company's brewmaster - a woman, by the way - wants to go global. NPR's Michael Sullivan reports from the Laotian capital.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN: Sivilay Lasachack is not your average brewmaster. For starters...
Ms. SIVILAY LASACHACK (Brewmaster, Lao Brewery Company): I don't like to drink.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. LASACHACK: I cannot drink a lot. I am brewmaster, but I cannot drink so much beer, because I don't prefer get drunk.
SULLIVAN: But she does like to make beer, and she's making plenty of it these days at the Beerlao brewery just outside Vientiane.
(Soundbite of brewery)
SULLIVAN: Laos is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia and one of the most sparsely populated, too. But the brewery here is state of the art, and it's running nonstop, producing Beerlao in bottles, kegs and cans.
There's a lot of beer being made here. How much beer can you make a day?
Ms. LASACHACK: Eighty thousand cases per day.
SULLIVAN: Eighty thousand cases of beer a day?
Ms. LASACHACK: Yes.
SULLIVAN: That's a lot of beer.
Ms. LASACHACK: Yes, is a lot of beer.
SULLIVAN: There's only 6 million Lao, but you drink a lot of beer.
Ms. LASACHACK: Yes, about 20 liters per person per year.
SULLIVAN: That's almost as much beer as Americans drink. But the Lao weren't always so fond of their beer. The brewery was actually started by the French, for the French, back when they were the colonial power here. Sivilay never much liked that idea. She remembers riding past the brewery one day as a teenager and thinking Lao should be running it, not the French. Once the communists took over, she got her chance when she was given a scholarship to study in the Eastern bloc with some of the world's best.
Ms. LASACHACK: I learned from Czech Republic in Prague at university. And also, I trained in Copenhagen, also brewmaster, and also in Germany, in Berlin also.
SULLIVAN: Six years later, she was back in Vientiane and set about changing the beer made at the factory now under state control. She quickly ditched the old French recipe - too bitter, she says - and replaced it with a new one that used more rice instead of expensive, hard-to-get imported grains.
Ms. LASACHACK: Beerlao is a little bit sweet when we use the rice. It's good thing for Lao person, because the Lao people, the customer, prefer that one.
SULLIVAN: Do they ever. Production has steadily increased from just 3 million liters a year to 200 million liters a year today. And it's not just the Lao drinking it but foreign tourists, too, many of whom have their first frosty Beerlao at one of the many restaurants that have sprouted up along the Mekong River in the capital.
Mr. AARON THURMEYER: It tastes similar to some of the beer in Canada that I like to drink, actually. It goes down really smooth...
SULLIVAN: It's a lot cheaper.
Mr. THURMEYER: It's cheap - cheap is nice, yeah. Since we've been in Lao, I haven't drank anything but. Seems to be the only way to go.
SULLIVAN: That's Aaron Thurmeyer from Calgary. His traveling companion, Sarah, says she's a fan, too, and would drink it at home if she could.
SARAH: I think I would buy it just for the simple fact that I drank it overseas and so, you kind of get...
Mr. THURMEYER: The nostalgia of it, yeah.
SARAH: A little bit, yeah. You kind of get a little bit of, you know, bring Lao home with you, sort of.
SULLIVAN: And that's exactly what Sivilay Lasachack and her team are counting on - a word-of-mouth campaign rather than a big advertising blitz they couldn't afford anyway - to create the kind of beer buzz Mexico's Corona enjoyed back in the '70s. Sivilay says her beer is better than Corona. and a beer that stacks up well in international competitions, where Beerlao has won several awards.
Ms. LASACHACK: We export now to France, to U.K., Japan, Australia and Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia. But the capacity is not so big.
SULLIVAN: Sivilay says only about 1 percent of production finds its way abroad, and she hopes to increase that to 10 percent in the next five years. She's not the only one who thinks the beer has a future outside Laos. Carlsberg recently acquired a 50-percent stake in the company, and has agreed to us its global distribution network to help grow the brand. Until then, Sivilay says, she's resigned to hearing more of the same at international competitions: Great beer, people say, but where's it from? And where is Laos, anyway? Michael Sullivan, NPR News.