A provincial brewery beside the Perfume River.

Huda is a Vietnamese lager created in Huế, the former imperial capital on the central coast, in 1990. Carlsberg Vietnam, which now makes it, lists the brand’s origin as Vietnam and its starting year as 1990, and English Wikipedia describes it as created that year by Hue Brewery. Tuổi Trẻ, reporting on the company in November 2011, also gave 1990 as the year Hue Brewery was founded.

The name records where the beer came from and whose equipment made it. Carlsberg Vietnam says “Huda” joins Huế and Đan Mạch, the Vietnamese word for Denmark, and that many beer names ending in “Da” were used to show a beer was produced with Danish technology and equipment. English Wikipedia says the original brewery was built beside the Perfume River, on Nguyễn Sinh Cung Street, with brewing technology and equipment supplied by Danbrew, a Carlsberg subsidiary.

The Danish link soon became an ownership one. Speaking to the Vietnam Investment Review for Huda’s 25th anniversary in October 2015, Carlsberg’s chairman, Flemming Besenbacher, said the group had come to Vietnam in 1993. Tuổi Trẻ reported in 2011 that Hue Brewery had formed a joint venture with Carlsberg in 1994, with the Vietnamese and Danish sides each contributing half the capital. English Wikipedia gives more detail on the Danish half: it says the joint venture of 1994 brought in both Carlsberg and IFU, the Danish state’s Industrialisation Fund for Developing Countries, and that Carlsberg bought IFU’s 15% stake in 2003, taking its own holding to 50%.

The other half belonged to the province of Thừa Thiên–Huế. Hue Brewery’s general director at the time, Nguyễn Mậu Chi, told Tuổi Trẻ in 2011 that the business needed heavy new investment the province could not match, which is why it chose to sell.

Carlsberg, then Phú Bài.

The sale closed the circle. On 30 November 2011 Tuổi Trẻ reported that the provincial People’s Committee had sold its entire 50% holding in Hue Brewery to the Carlsberg Group, and that the company had become wholly foreign-owned by Carlsberg. The paper noted that much of the value attributed to the deal lay in the Huda brand itself. Carlsberg has owned Hue Brewery outright since 2011, and Huda is now made and marketed by Carlsberg Vietnam, as the Vietnam Investment Review described it in 2015.

Production has since moved out of the old city. English Wikipedia says a second brewery in the Phú Bài Industrial Zone outside the city was completed in 2008. The trade ministry’s newspaper Báo Công Thương reported that on 19 August 2014 Hue Brewery moved all of its beer production lines from its original site on Nguyễn Sinh Cung Street to Phú Bài. In 2015, for Huda’s 25th anniversary, Carlsberg launched a brewery tour at Phú Bài, the Vietnam Investment Review reported.

Phú Bài has kept growing. On 26 August 2025 Carlsberg Vietnam held an inauguration ceremony for an expansion of the brewery with the People’s Committee of Huế City and the Danish embassy, according to a Carlsberg Group press release. The company says the expanded site serves its whole Vietnamese portfolio, from Tuborg, Carlsberg, 1664 Blanc and Somersby to the local brands Halida and Huda.

The brand stays rooted in the region. In a November 2020 interview with Tuổi Trẻ marking Huda’s 30 years, Carlsberg Vietnam’s general director, Nathaniel Moxom, pointed to its support for the Huế Festival and a clean-water programme for central Vietnam that the company began in 2019.

Lager and national identity.

The seven brands in this group are all lagers and beers from South and Southeast Asia: Angkor from Cambodia, 333, Huda and Larue from Vietnam, Bira 91 from India, Lion Lager from Sri Lanka and Myanmar Beer from Myanmar. Beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that grew up inside a single national brewery to labels that now belong to much larger international brewing groups, and a single brand can be poured everywhere from a street-side stall to a hotel bar.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a name, a label, a can and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, taken on foreign partners or moved its brewing far beyond the city where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its shareholders over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Dragon scales and a wave.

Huda presents itself as a regional brand first. Carlsberg Vietnam’s product page heads the beer with the line “Đậm tình miền Trung,” roughly “full of the warmth of central Vietnam,” and its 2025 press release calls Huda “the Pride of Central Vietnam.” English Wikipedia lists a wider range that includes Huda Gold, launched in 2013, and Huda Ice Twist, launched in 2023.

The current look took shape in 2017. The Vietnam Investment Review reported on 3 April 2017 that Carlsberg Vietnam had introduced a new design for Huda cans and bottles. According to that report, the neck and front labels drew on the architecture of Huế’s royal buildings, including a “window” motif representing the dragon-scale pattern of the Citadel, and the bottle used silver alongside the brand’s green. Carlsberg Vietnam’s chief executive, Tayfun Uner, called the new cans and bottles a milestone in the company’s strategy for central Vietnam.

A younger register followed in 2024. Marketech APAC reported on 11 July 2024 that Huda had worked with the creative agency MullenLowe Mishra on “Wave of Fun,” a campaign for Huda Ice Twist that the agency and brand drew from the wave in the Huda logo. Carlsberg Vietnam’s brand director for core beer, Dang Dinh Chinh, said the aim was to “uphold and refresh our brand legacy.”

For a design guide, Huda shows how a regional lager can draw on a single city’s architecture and name while being owned and brewed by a multinational. Compare Angkor, Cambodia’s Carlsberg-owned lager, and Beerlao, in which Carlsberg also holds a stake. For this guide we use a deep green, silver and a pale river mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Huda’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.