A long-delayed cross-border collaboration beer between Hanoi’s Overmorrow Brewing Company, Seoul’s Magpie Brewing Co. and MI Local Hops Korea has launched in Vietnam.
The Cancelled Flight Spiced Double Pale Ale, “a symbol of collaboration in defiance of barriers and borders”, was launched at Hanoi’s Gasoline Summer Beer Festival 2022 and will have a wider draft-only release in the coming two months.
The beer was first released in Korea as a joint collab between Saigon’s Pasteur Street Brewing Company, Overmorrow, Magpie & MI Local Hops in early 2021.
However, the launch in Vietnam was delayed due to the country’s COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions.
“This beer tells the story of all the great projects that all of us had planned at the beginning of 2020, and the feeling of waiting and uncertainty, the deadlines pushed back and scopes modified, that everyone went through over the following two and a half years,” shares Overmorrow’s Noah Tanabe.
While the Korean launch of Cancelled Flight was labelled as a Dry Hopped Ale by Magpie, the delayed launch on the Vietnam side had an unintended positive consequence transforming the nature of beer (though the beer did get a fresh dry hop just before it was kegged).
“We have a beer that only could have resulted from this strange delay, which caused us to babysit the kegs waiting for the right time for the release. We’re calling it a Double Pale Ale, which sounds a bit strange. But at 7.5% ABV, after the yeast had time to do its thing, it’s a bit too high proof to be a simple Pale Ale. And at 32 IBUs, as some of those bitter notes naturally faded away over the months, it’s not quite hoppy enough to be an IPA. So, Double Pale Ale it is.”
